ACLU leader urges use of law as lever

 PAUL BRINKLEY-ROGERS

 Long before Lida Rodriguez-Taseff's intellect won her a commanding view from the 34th floor offices of a prestigious Miami law firm, there was her life as a child growing up dirt poor in Bogotá's Barrio Quiroga.

 Wearing a pink pantsuit made by her grandmother Norma, she came to the United States at age 7 to join her mother, who was working in a New York garment factory. She was just a little girl, but she already knew what she wanted out of life: to be a fiscal -- a prosecutor -- a notion planted in her mind by her grandmother, who saw something in the tough-minded child that no one else saw.

 Rodriguez-Taseff has been served well by her steely qualities and finely honed sense of fair play, born out of both the fight to survive in Colombia and her struggle to learn English and American ways as a deeply religious immigrant child in Hialeah. In June, the 34-year-old woman was named president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

 Rodriguez-Taseff had been a forthright spokesperson for the ACLU and had not exactly been a friend of Cuban-American political activists. She backed the right of Juan Miguel González to regain custody of his son Elián, advocating her position on Spanish TV and radio for the ACLU. She defended the ACLU's challenge of Miami-Dade's policy banning county money from going to groups that did business with Cuba. She had supported promoter Debbie Ohanian's right to bring the Cuban salsa group Los Van Van to Miami in 1999, a visit that resulted in stormy protests.

 Yet Rodriguez-Taseff was the person whom representatives of the exile community telephoned on Aug. 15 to ask for help in their fight to find a place to protest the
 presence of any Cuban musicians at the Latin Grammys.

 The call came from Emilio Izquierdo Jr., a limo driver and Cuban exile activist, whom Rodriguez-Taseff had debated to a standstill last year in a TeleMiami TV show. He had argued in favor of the county's anti-Cuba policy, and she had attacked it as unconstitutional.

 Izquierdo had been emotional, Rodriguez-Taseff remembers, when the conversation turned to the upcoming Los Van Van appearance.

 ``Emilio said, `You don't understand what this means to us. They shouldn't come here. You don't know how we feel.'

 ``I said, `I don't care about about your feelings, and the Constitution also doesn't care about your feelings. Your personal feelings should not be allowed to silence
 someone else.' That was the crux of the issue, and he had no comeback.''

 But she treated him with respect when he poured out his heart after she referred to ``the Cuban government.'' Izquierdo told her: ``It is not Cuba's regime. It is Castro's regime.''

 She told him, ``You are absolutely right. It is my mistake. I appreciate you telling me this.'' Then she gave him her card and told him to call if he needed help.

 Izquierdo says, ``She was a lady with a great personality and she understood me. I started to respect her, and she respected me.'' His trust in her, he said, was repaid when, after the ACLU took up the exile cause, she visited La Casa del Preso -- House of Prisoners -- in Little Havana to meet the members of his group.

 ``My intellectual reaction,'' she said, ``was they have a great message and it is all about packaging, but they haven't figured out how to get that message out. I saw them in the light of someone who has been criticized (a bottle was thrown at her at the Los Van Van protests). I saw them as imperfect, maybe intolerant.

 MATURATION

 ``But they were part of a maturing exile community. These were good guys. Had they thrown bottles? Probably. They said sometimes there are provocateurs but I don't have to believe that to respect them, or to understand the rightness of their cause -- even when one said the Grammys shouldn't be here.

 ``I told them, firmly, `No. They have a right to be here.'

 ``Aha! That made them think. And then there was a sea change. They went from thinking that in order to get what they want they need to silence others, to seeing that if they wrap themselves in their rights they will be heard and they will gain power. It was a real educational campaign.''

 Rodriguez-Taseff may be a formidable antagonist in boardroom disputes over contracts in her work as a partner at Duane, Morris & Heckscher, but she has not forgotten what it is to be dispossessed, to be the underdog.

 ``My heritage is as both a Colombian and as the daughter of an immigrant mother with a grade school education,'' she said. ``We are poor people. My mother had four children and she wanted to be in a place where they could have economic and social opportunities. Colombia has a caste system. If you are poor, you die poor.''

 Barrio Quiroga was a place without much hope. According to Bishop Victor Manuel Cruz Blanco of Colombia's Anglican Catholic Church, which runs a mission in her birthplace, it is an ``old . . . poor barrio'' of 750,000 people and desperately needs help.

 Fabiola Rodriguez got to New York in 1970. She worked two and three jobs to make it possible for her children to join her 3 1/2 years later. She decided the educational opportunities were better in Miami where more Spanish was spoken, and the family moved to an apartment on 12th Avenue in Hialeah.

 Rodriguez-Taseff's mother told her, ``You will go to college, college, college -- la universidad!'' She majored in economics and political science at the University of Miami and graduated from New York University Law School in 1992.

 Rodriguez-Taseff had teachers who cared when she was a child.

 But at Hialeah's James H. Bright Elementary School she got another lesson: If she was going to amount to anything, she had to be assertive.

 ``We would go to lunch in alphabetical order,'' she said. The girl in front of her spoke English and told the cooks that Lida did not eat dessert, taking the treat herself.

 ``One teacher asked me in Spanish, `Don't you like dessert, Lida?' I told her I did, but they never gave me any.'' The teacher investigated and put things right.

 ``But what I got for speaking up was a beating up. That girl broke my glasses. I learned a great lesson about speaking up for yourself, and the notion of blind entitlement.

 ``It is a lesson I go back to when people I deal with on rights issues take other people's rights,'' she said. ``They take them and assume that they can. It was my first real bout with injustice.''

 CAUSE WITH MERIT

 The Cuban community's cause this month had merit from the start, she said, even though her clients did not prevail, because the situation was already collapsing when Izquierdo called her.

 She said she did some quick checking and was astonished to learn that exile requests were being ignored by police and arena administrators.

 ``You create a `security zone' to effectively exclude the First Amendment and free speech,'' she said of the desire of officials to keep protesters far away.

 ``They did it without consulting anyone. They assumed they could.''

                                    © 2001