Cuba under the Hammer

Adecade after the ‘fall of communism’, the universal triumph of capitalism—widely taken for granted as an accomplished fact—has yet to become a literal reality. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European regimes has so far not been followed by the sudden demise of China, Vietnam, North Korea or Cuba. The conventional view would be that this is still only a matter of time. Meanwhile, these societies have not disappeared, and their different experiences call for analytic attention. Among them, the record of post-revolutionary Cuba is distinct. Unlike the PRC, Cuba has not embraced the stock market or Titanic, or benefited, like Vietnam, from Japanese loans and investment. Nor, like the DRPK till this year, has it gone into deep hibernation. The traumatic shock to its economy, with the erasure of the Soviet bloc, was greater than that to East Germany or North Korea, yet it has got through the decade without mass unemployment or famine. This is not to say that the ‘special period in time of peace’—the official euphemism for the state of life-and-death emergency declared by Fidel Castro in 1991—has not left deep wounds in Cuban society, from which ultimate recovery is as uncertain as ever. But to understand the situation of the island today, it is essential to look north, at the imperial power that has waged unremitting hostilities against it for forty years. The fate of the revolution will be determined as much by developments in the United States as in Cuba itself. Already, the frontiers between the two have been reconfigured in a striking new pattern. After a long period in which Cuba drifted to the margins of international interest, the psycho-drama of one custody case has suddenly riveted world attention back onto it. The Elián González affair, which mesmerized US media for half a year, offers a timely prism for looking at the realities of the relationship across the Florida Straits.

On 25 November last year an American fisherman found a six-year-old boy, Elián González, floating on a tyre off the coast of Florida. His mother had taken him with her lover on a raft from Cuba, which had capsized, with twelve people onboard, in high seas. Elián’s father, Juan Miguel, separated from the mother, had been unaware of her flight. He was reached by the staff of the hospital in Miami to which Elián was taken; the boy had given them his name and telephone number. Juan Miguel asked that his son be sent back to Cuba. Instead, the hospital authorities allowed Elián to be carried off by Lázaro González, a great uncle he had never previously met. Almost immediately the boy was adopted as a symbol by a powerful section of the exile community in Florida. As early as November 30, posters demanding that Elián be given asylum in the United States appeared at the WTO conference in Seattle. In early December, a Florida court entrusted Elián to the great uncle, who refused to return the boy to his father on the grounds that it would be persecution to send Elián back to a Communist tyranny. It was later revealed that the Cuban-American judge who made the custody award had political and business links to Lázaro. Elián was taken on highly publicized tours of Disneyland, photographed draped in the US flag, and an appeal lodged in his name for asylum in the United States.

Juan Miguel’s request for the return of his son to Cuba had meanwhile been passed to the Immigration and Naturalization Service which, in accordance with its standard procedures, was prepared to award him custody so long as he could prove paternity and that he was not likely to be an abusive parent. A representantive of the Service met Juan Miguel on 16 December and in early January the INS ruled that he was the father, and a good parent, and that Elián should be sent back to Cuba. But Lázaro, equipped with the Florida court’s decision, now had possession of Elián and refused to arrange for his return. He did not claim Juan Miguel was a bad father, simply that it would be better for Elián to grow up as a free citizen in a free country. In Miami, the boy was converted into a miraculous icon of political salvation. In Cuba, the detention of Elián aroused widespread incredulity and anger: how could the US authorities countenance the kidnapping of the boy by distant relatives he had never met? There were mass demonstrations of protest.

In February, Elián’s two grandmothers—both appealing for his return—were granted visas to visit the United States and meet him, in conditions of tight security, for just over an hour. One of them carried a mobile phone which rang while they were with Elián. This was pre-arranged to allow his father to speak with the boy, but the phone was swiftly confiscated. When the grandmothers returned to Cuba, they were greeted by demonstrations even larger than those of January. Declaring that he would come to the US as soon he could bring his son back to Cuba, Juan Miguel argued that it was the duty of the US government to hand back Elián without forcing him to enter into a lengthy legal process on foreign soil. But in March he had to acquire a new US lawyer—a former State Department planner and Clinton counsel—who secured American visas for Juan Miguel, his new wife Nersey and their infant son, Hianny. After a session with Fidel Castro, this photogenic trio—the father cradling his younger son in his arms—arrived in Washington on April 7. There, Juan Miguel delivered a brief dignified address, thanking those Americans who had supported his case, and looking forward to a reunion with Elián. At this point, US media coverage of the affair went into high gear. Juan Miguel, a well-dressed and athletic member of the Cuban Communist Party working in the tourism complex, was the subject of profiles in Newsweek and Time that made it clear he had been very close to his son, who slept at his father’s house more often than his mother’s. A growing span of American opinion came round to the view that Elián should be allowed to go home. But the exile community in Miami, and its allies in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, clamorously rejected any idea that he could be returned to a Communist tyranny.

Early in the morning of Easter Saturday, April 22, the stand-off between the INS and the Florida courts was broken, when Federal Marshals entered Lázaro’s home in Miami at gun-point, removed Elián from a cupboard in which he had been hidden, and bore him away to an air-base near Washington, where his father was allowed to rejoin him. The reaction of the Cuban-American community in Florida was massive and immediate. A general strike brought Little Havana to a halt on April 25, with demonstrations denouncing Attorney-General Reno’s forcible abduction of Elián. High levels of emotional mobilization were kept up in the succeeding weeks. But now latent antagonisms between the Cuban-American and Anglo—not to speak of Black—communities in Florida were coming to the surface, while national opinion in the US swung behind the Justice Department. For the next two months, while Lázaro’s lawyers pressed appeals through the US courts, Juan Miguel and Elián were held in or near Washington, joined by four of the boy’s classmates and his teacher from Cuba, to help him catch up with his schooling. Finally, after weeks of saturation coverage exceeding even the Diana fixation in the US media, the Supreme Court dismissed Lázaro’s case and, on June 29th, father and son were allowed to fly in a chartered plane back to Cuba—a departure transmitted to the American public in hours of live television coverage.

Suddenly throwing into high resolution a field of forces that is normally more shadowy, the Oprah Winfrey-style incident—understandably arousing warm emotions—also calls for a cool look at the realities of the triangular relationship between Washington, Miami and Havana. Critical to these is the unique nature of the Cuban community within the United States. All revolutions have produced colonies of exiles abroad, from Saint-Germain to Koblenz, Harbin to Dharmasala. None, however, has produced a counter-revolutionary concentration of such wealth and power as Miami. The Cuban emigration to the US numbers 1.37 million—scarcely 4 per cent of the total Hispanic population in the States. But with an average household income of over $40,000 a year, it has the equivalent of a GDP of about $14 billion—over half the size of the Cuban economy itself, whose GDP is currently calculated at $23 billion—with a tenth of the population.footnote¹ Economically, this may be the most successful immigrant group in US history, with assets accumulated over four decades which dwarf those of any previous immigration of comparable scale. The foundations of this fortune were laid by pre-revolutionary investments in the US by the Cuban rich, by the high level of middle-class professional qualifications of the first post-revolutionary wave of exiles (some 215,000) and—last but not least—substantial clandestine subsidies from the CIA to businesses set up by the new anti-communist arrivals. But entrepreneurial dynamism was also assisted by intense ideological mobilization, as exiles lent money to one another on easy terms, developed cooperative business networks, and used ethnic solidarity to bypass unionization.footnote² The regional setting was, furthermore, highly favourable for the two-thirds of the community concentrated in Florida, where the Reagan boom yielded one of the highest growth rates of any state in the Union. The result is a flourishing landscape of small and medium businesses, with a layer of very big wealth in real estate, banking and construction. By the nineties, Miami had crossed Koblenz with Klondike.

The spectacular rise of the Cuban economy in Florida helped the exile community, in turn, to preserve its cultural identity in a way that no other immigrant group has done in recent memory. Far from readily assimilating to all-American—ie: Anglo—norms, the Cuban population in Miami not only continued to speak Spanish, but made it the dominant language in Miami, as it became the largest electoral bloc and eventually took control of the city itself. The Cuban ascendancy has, to all intents and purposes, made Miami a major Latin American metropolis more than an urban area of North America. Naturally, the growth of this exotic enclave was far from welcome to local white power-holders in Southern Florida—the Miami Herald for many years giving voice to resentment of the upstarts. In 1980, a backlash referendum blocked bi-lingual education in the city. It was at this point that the economic power of the Cuban community was transformed into a political force on a national scale. It was a Democratic President—Kennedy—who had organized and armed Cuban exiles for a reconquest of their homeland. But after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, and the stand-off of the Missile Crisis, US support for active counter-revolution was limited to connivance at low-level sabotage, and efforts to assassinate Fidel. The election of Reagan marked a new approach. In 1980, the Cuban-American Foundation (CANF) was set up with the help of the new Administration, under the leadership of the millionaire developer and construction tycoon, Jorge Mas Canosa, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs.