By April Witt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday , April 16, 2000 ; A01
MIAMI, April 15 –– Marcia Fernandez's parents packed a tiny suitcase
with three changes of clothes and put her on a plane
out of Cuba alone at age 9, so determined were they for her to escape
Fidel Castro's communist revolution that they were
willing to risk never again seeing their only child.
Standing at the barricades here with other Cuban Americans this week,
Fernandez, now a physical therapist, was frustrated to
exhaustion trying to explain to Miamians who have not lived her exile
why 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez must not go home.
"I feel very impotent," she lamented even as this city's powerful Cuban
American community continued to help Elian's relatives
thwart the federal government's effort to reunite the boy with his
father. "It's like I am talking to walls. Why doesn't anyone want
to understand what we are saying?"
Some anti-Castro protesters vow political retribution against Miamians
who do not support their cause, and community leaders
say the custody battle is widening divides in a community long marked
by racial and ethnic fragmentation and fractiousness.
"People will pay for this," said Ramon Suarez-Del Campo, a Cuban American
businessman, writer and activist who joined the
wall of demonstrators outside the modest home of Elian's Little Havana
relatives. "When black politicians come to Cuban
politicians asking for favors or some help in the future, they are
going to say, 'Where were you for Elian?' "
A majority of Americans favor reuniting Elian with his father, who says
he wants to take his son home to Cuba. In Miami-Dade
County, polarization on the issue is stark. Ninety-two percent of blacks
and 76 percent of non-Hispanic whites say the boy
should be returned to Cuba, while 83 percent of Cuban Americans say
he should remain here and 55 percent of other
Hispanics agree with them, according to a recent poll by the Miami
Herald.
"There is a 10-mile fissure in this community and it's getting wider,"
said civic activist Dan Ricker, a businessman who went to
Little Havana this week to observe the demonstrations.
Florida International University Prof. Antonio Jorge, who served many
years on Miami community relations boards trying to
foster racial and ethnic cooperation, said the Elian saga shows how
thoroughly those efforts have failed.
"The Elian case is direct evidence that we don't understand each other,"
said Jorge, who is Cuban American. "It will affect the
quality of life in this community for years to come."
"However this turns out now, the end product will be more polarization,"
he said. "If the child goes back to Cuba, Cuban
Americans will resent it and they will resent other groups for not
helping. If the child stays, other groups will say that the Cubans
in their infinite arrogance have succeeded in manipulating the system
through undue political influence.
"I'm afraid what will happen next is people will try to get their pound of flesh."
Bishop Victor Curry, president of the NAACP in Miami-Dade County and
one of the most influential black leaders in South
Florida, said today that African Americans and Haitian immigrants already
are so excluded from power in Cuban-dominated
Miami that there is little that the Cuban Americans can do to punish
them for disagreeing over Elian.
"If we look at the history of Cubans being in power, they have not done
anything for black people," Curry said. "So if that's
their threat, it's idle. We have not advanced under Cuban leadership
in Miami. We have had more problems with Cubans in
power than we did under whites."
"The reason we are not supporting them on Elian is we believe they are
wrong," said Curry, a Baptist minister and popular
radio commentator. "The boy needs to be with his father. I am a father.
I can imagine how I'd react if someone took one of my
children and said they wouldn't give him back to me because they don't
like Bill Clinton.
"That baby is being held hostage."
The Rev. Thomas Wenski, an auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese
of Miami, said divisions are now so
pronounced they remind him of an anthropological term--systemic misunderstanding--that
he came upon recently in a briefing
book on Jewish-Palestinian relations in the Middle East. "It means
that your framework is so different from my framework that
it cannot be corrected by providing more information," Wenski said.
However Elian's sad journey ends, "there is going to be a lot of need
for reconciliation here among people," the bishop said.
"My hope is that a lot of polarization is emotional. And emotions eventually
will subside."
For now, the voices of Cuban Americans at the barricades are alternately
bitter, sad, angry or dismayed. Demonstrators cannot
fathom why the nation and the city that welcomed them--gave them freedom
to flourish in an exile that seems gilded to poor,
less influential groups in Miami--now want to snatch away the little
boy who symbolizes all their hurts and hopes.
"This is not a battle only to keep a child," said Remedios Diaz Oliver,
president of All American Containers Inc. in Miami. "It's
a battle for all Cubans in Miami to let Americans know what is happening
in Cuba. We are asking the world to look at our
tragedy."
Curry said many non-Cubans in Miami are weary of exile tales of suffering
and are eager for the administration to end the
impasse. "I think a whole lot of people are just sick of them," Curry
said. "I'm upset with the president and attorney general for
not doing what they are supposed to do. If these were African Americans
or Haitians telling the attorney general, 'No, you are
going to have to come by force,' it would be a bloodbath around there."
Ana Maria Lamar, an elegantly attired housewife, prays every day that
God will give her the wisdom to explain to people who
have not lived in Cuba under a communist regime what kind of life Elian
would live there. She likened repression in Cuba to
slavery or the Holocaust and cannot understand why African Americans
and Jews are not joining her protest.
"The number one issue here is the question of freedom," Lamar said Friday
as she kept vigil through a torrential rain outside the
house of Elian's great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, where Elian staying.
"Even if our Jewish neighbors are not here, I'm sure the
souls of children murdered in the Holocaust are with us. They are all
around us now."
For Fernandez, the physical therapist, there is no doubt Elian must
remain in the United States no matter what her non-Cuban
coworkers or neighbors think. To ask whether it is better for a child
to be with his father than to live in a democratic country
would be to question the wrenching decision her parents made long ago
to send her away from Cuba alone. Unthinkable.
And so she struggles to explain. "We've tried and tried for years to
explain what we're all about, and still people right here in
our own community can't grasp it," said Fernandez, who eventually was
reunited with her parents in the United States. As she
spoke, a throng of demonstrators behind her chanted rhythmically.
"Viva Cuba Libre!" they chanted. Long live free Cuba. "Viva Cuba Libre!"
© 2000 The Washington Post Company