Florida's Zeal Against Castro Is Losing Heat - New York Times

Florida's Zeal Against Castro Is Losing Heat - New York Times: "July 6, 2005

Florida's Zeal Against Castro Is Losing Heat

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, July 5 - Fidel Castro is not dead, but he has haunted Miami for nearly 50 years. This is a city where newscasters still scrutinize Mr. Castro's health and workers conduct emergency drills to prepare for the chaos expected upon his demise. Spy shops still flourish here, and a store on Calle Ocho does brisk business in reprints of the Havana phone book from 1959, the year he seized power.
But if Mr. Castro's grip on Cuban Miami remains strong, the fixation is expressed differently these days. The monolithic stridency that once defined the exile community has faded. There is less consensus on how to fight Mr. Castro and even, as Cuban-Americans grow more politically and economically diverse, less intensity of purpose. Some call it shrewd pragmatism, others call it fatigue.
In May, Luis Posada Carriles, a militant anti-Castro fighter from the cold war era, was arrested here on charges of entering the country illegally and was imprisoned in El Paso, where he awaits federal trial. Barely anyone in Miami protested, even though many Cuban-Americans consider Mr. Posada, 77, to be a hero who deserves asylum.
A month earlier, two milestones - the 25th anniversary of the Mariel boatlift, which brought 125,000 Cubans to the United States and transformed Miami, and the fifth anniversary of the seizure of Eli�n Gonz�lez - passed almost quietly.
When a Miami Herald columnist went to Cuba in June and filed dispatches critical of Mr. Posada, who is suspected in a deadly airline bombing and other violent attacks, indignant letters to the editor were the only protest. In the past, Cuban-Americans boycotted The Herald and smeared feces on its vending boxes to protest what they considered pro-Castro coverage.
This city where raucous demonstrations by exiles were once as regular as summer storms has seen few lately. One theory is that the people whose life's mission was to defeat Mr. Castro and return to the island one day - those who fled here in the early years of his taking power - have grown old and weary.
'We are all exhausted from so much struggle,' said Ram�n Saul S�nchez, leader of the Democracy Movement, an exile organization that once ran flotillas to the waters off Cuba to protest human-rights abuses. Mr. S�nchez, 50, also belonged to Alpha 66, an exile paramilitary group that trained in the Everglades, mostly in the 1960's and 70's, for an armed invasion of Cuba, and later protested around the clock outside Eli�n Gonz�lez's house. Now, he said, he prefers less attention-grabbing tactics, quietly supporting dissidents on the island from an office above a Laundromat.
The subtler approach is gaining favor. Cuban-Americans have grown more politically aware since the Eli�n Gonz�lez episode, many say, when their fervor to thwart the Clinton administration and the boy's return to his father in Cuba drew national contempt. Americans who had paid little attention to the policy debate over Cuba tended to support sending Eli�n home, polls showed, and were put off by images of exiles blocking traffic and flying American flags upside down in protest.
'Eli�n Gonz�lez was a great lesson, a brutal lesson,' said Joe Garcia, the former executive director of the Cuban-American National Foundation, a once belligerent but now more measured exile group. 'It woke us up.'
Mayor Manny Diaz, a Cuban-American whose political career took off after he served as a lawyer for Eli�n's Miami relatives, said he decided afterward it was more important to heal the wounds in Miami than to criticize the Castro government. Mr. Diaz did not mention Cuba in his State of the City speech this spring - an absence the local alternative newspaper called 'downright revolutionary.' In fact, Mr. Diaz said he had never used Mr. Castro's name to rouse support."