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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
What do you make of the exile leadership's decision not to support Payá?
Well, in fact some of the leadership did support him, and it really shows the split that I talk about in the last chapter of "Cuba Confidential": how serious this is going to get. The fact that you now have the [Cuban American National] Foundation supporting Payá and the polls show that 70 percent of Cubans in Miami support him, but then you have Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen [South Florida's Republican representatives, both of them Cuban exiles] saying he's illegitimate because he's part of the whole Castro government deal.
I don't know if you know this, but they were pressuring the administration to disavow Payá and actually criticize him when he went down to Miami on May 20 last year. But Bush didn't do that; he in fact embraced [the project], which stunned me. He gave a thunderous anti-Castro speech down there, but he embraced the Proyecto Varela. This must be what they call a knife in the heart -- un puñal en el corazón, as they like to say dramatically -- for Lincoln and Ileana. And you can see that this is a big problem. Even the famously cowardly publisher of the Miami Herald has embraced Proyecto Varela.
Remember that the Varela Project is Catholic based. So you have a lot of the tradition of Augustine and a lot of the Jesuit liberation theology in this. And of course, that's a great way to deal with Castro because it's hard for him to get a handle on that one. It's very brilliant. And I really think that Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana, they shot themselves in the foot this time.
The problem with Lincoln and Ileana is this: They are both mentored by their fathers -- two men who are deeply embittered hard-liners who basically will not be happy unless Fidel is hanging by his heels à la Mussolini in Calle Ocho. That is their bottom line. It's about vengeance, which is why I wanted that subtitle on my book -- "Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana." It's all about vengeance. It's not about, let's get this over with, let's get this moving, let's get a good solution, let's get as much as we can. It's about, we must achieve some level of vengeance here.
And Fidel, as you point out, is the same way.
Absolutely. Because they're all coming out of this machista ethic. That's the whole tragedy of the Cuban debate: Cubans leave Cuba but they take Fidel Castro with them. The politics of denunciation, which were to a large extent created in the revolution with CDRs [Committees for the Defense of the Revolution] and snitching and such, was exported to Miami. You have the same process. You have the big three radio stations doing the same thing, denouncing people to keep them straight, functioning as Big Brother of Miami.
One of the reasons that vengeance is the response you get from so many older hard-liner Cubans is that Fidel Castro has a way of emasculating people. His policies, particularly in a machista culture like Cuba's, make people feel emasculated and humiliated. That's why they want a pound of flesh afterwards.
If you stay in Cuba a long time and hang out with Cuban friends, you see that what they go through on a daily basis is humiliation: to have to beg for this, to beg for that. You try to get in this hotel or that one -- it's a humiliating cycle and it's never really been explained, even though they do not have the privations of, say, Guatemala or the atrocities we saw in Chile or Argentina even.
Castro has kind of institutionalized begging. Even though you don't have the death squads and the disappearances and the torture, when you make people feel like they're beggars, that's where you get that kind of rage. I wish I had spent a bit more time writing about that.
The level of rage in Miami, however, seems to be diminishing. Polls show that an increasingly high percentage of Cuban-Americans, for example, no longer support the U.S. embargo. And as you mentioned, there's been a split in opinion over Payá. When did this shift get its start?
You cannot underestimate how things unraveled after Jorge Mas [Canosa, the head of the Cuban American National Foundation] died. You basically had Mas holding things together with the force of his personality. Of course, he had a huge amount of charisma and no one crossed him. From the minute he died, it's been a free-for-all.
I actually think that Jorge Mas never would have gambled on Elián González. He would have right away sized that one up and walked away from it. Trying to tell the American public that a father should have his son taken away because he lives in Cuba is not really winnable. I don't think Mas would have done this out of any virtue or anything. I think he would have looked at it and said, what would it take to take the kid away from the father? And he'd say, we're not going there.
I think that Jorge Mas Santos, the son, doesn't get nearly as much credit as he should. It takes no courage, no bravery, to rail against Fidel Castro in Miami. That takes nothing. But it takes a lot of guts to say, let's try this a different way. Jorge Mas Santos has been willing to do that, even in the shadow of his father. People forget that he fought very hard to bring the Latin Grammys and all that it meant to Miami.
