Once drowned out, they seek to change island through contact

By ALFREDO CORCHADO / The Dallas Morning News

Second in a series

MIAMI – Waging war against Cuba was the easy part for Antonio Zamora, whose aggressive lobbying over the years has helped keep the island nation isolated.
Ending his campaign has been agonizing.

When Mr. Zamora, a respected Miami-based lawyer and Cuban-born American, began to see engagement, not isolation, as the key to changing Cuba, lifelong
friends abandoned him, he says, including those who had joined him in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Mr. Zamora says he recently stormed out of a meeting with U.S. officials who were holding fast to the 42-year-old policy of isolating Cuba, which President Bush
and hard-line exiles have vowed to keep in place.

"They're simply out of touch," he said. "They don't care to listen because this isn't about truth or security anymore."

Mr. Zamora is not the only one frustrated by the U.S. policy. Drowned out for generations by more hard-liners, moderate Cuban-Americans are now being heard.
They say they hope their role will help tip the scales toward a policy of engagement with Cuba.

They join a business and congressional drive aimed at lifting the U.S. trade embargo and bringing closer the day when
Americans can legally visit the forbidden island. The effort represents a pendulum swing in Miami, where the view of
Cuban-American conservatives had prevailed, with some extremists resorting to assassinations, car bombings, vandalism,
picketing and blackballing.

The newly active moderates are questioning the policies of their elders and former allies, though they insist they're not
apologists for Cuban President Fidel Castro. They are merely pragmatic, they say, convinced the U.S. embargo of Cuba
hasn't worked and won't.

"There is a growing realization among Cuban-Americans that they will be left out in the cold if they don't read the writing
on the wall and fail to move to the center ... a center that's advocating a piecemeal dismantling of the embargo," said
Damian J. Fernandez, a professor of international studies at Florida International University. He is also author of the
book, Cuba and the Politics of Passion.

The movement, he said, is "away from the politics of passion and [toward] engaging in a language of reconciliation."

The movement includes longtime advocates of engagement with Cuba, such as Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, 67, who has long
fought for free elections. He remains vocal even as his eyesight and his health fail him, largely due to the 22 years he spent
in a Cuban jail.

It also includes some former hard-liners who are moving to the center as more American lawmakers and business people
support engagement with Cuba.

Others, like Mr. Zamora, say they see the potential benefit of reaching out to Cubans on the island on matters of mutual interest. This group includes lawyers working
to address the issue of properties lost after the 1959 revolution, artists relying on culture to bridge the gap and Cuban-American historians meeting with their
counterparts to begin the process of rewriting history.

The movement also includes business people such as real estate developer Carlos Justo, who travels frequently to the island and eyes the real estate market with
anticipation.

"My God, it's incredible," he says. "Cuba has the potential of becoming the most expensive real estate market in the world." But first, he says, there must be peace
and reconciliation.

Any such reconciliation, says Alfredo Duran, 61, another Bay of Pigs veteran, must begin and end within the "Cuban nation." He is working behind the scenes with
U.S. lawmakers, as well as hard-liners and moderates to try to create a relatively smooth transition to Western-style democracy.

"This struggle isn't about the United States and Cuba," Mr. Duran said. "This is about Cubans. We have to isolate the extremes and focus on the moderates. We
have to wean ourselves from American intervention in our affairs and resolve the problems between ourselves."

Criticized as naïve

Critics dismiss such talk as misguided, naïve and idealistic – "whale huggers," as Joe Garcia put it. He is executive director of the Cuban American National
Foundation, a powerful anti-Castro organization that has heavily influenced U.S. policy.

The organization splintered after some key hard-liners denounced a new generation of the foundation's top leadership – including Mr. Garcia and chairman Jorge
Mas Santos – as too moderate. More than a dozen directors bolted to form two groups, the hard-line Cuban Liberty Council and the more moderate Cuba Study
Group. Those remaining in the foundation appear to be trying to find a new voice.

Although reticent on the subject of loosening the embargo, they are focusing on attracting younger Cuban-Americans and connecting with dissidents on the island.
That is a sharp departure from the days when their former chairman, the late Jorge Mas Canosa, Mr. Santos' father, dismissed the dissidents as "Castro puppets."

Over the past 16 months, the foundation has shipped to Cuba more than $1 million in computers, transistor radios, pens, pencils and paper – even running a soup
kitchen in an undisclosed countryside location, Mr. Garcia said.

"We want to test and foment a civil society," he said.

The search for accommodation is not new among Cuban-Americans. In the mid-1970s, Cuban-born American lawyer Bernardo Benes led quiet high-level talks
with the Castro regime under the auspices of the Carter administration.

But their efforts have never been so open or widespread. Next year, hundreds of Cuban-Americans are planning to visit Cuba at the invitation of Mr. Castro for a
conference, "The Nation and Immigration."

And recently, an estimated 300 Cuban-Americans from across the country flew to Washington, D.C., for a "Cuba Summit" aimed
at denouncing the U.S. embargo. Mia Leonin, a soft-spoken 35-year-old Miami teacher, boldly announced the campaign called
"Yo Si Voy" [I Will Go)] to pave the way for unfettered travel to the island.

"Enough of the high-minded rhetoric," shouted Ms. Leonin, under a scorching sun and surrounded by a bipartisan group of U.S.
lawmakers pushing to lift the travel ban on Cuba. "We're here to tell Americans that we represent a new generation, a new voice."

Driving factors

The impetus for change is driven by several factors, from "baseball diplomacy" – games between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team – to the
1999-2000 story of Elián González, the 5-year-old Cuban refugee who became a rallying point for those defending the hard line against Cuba as well as those urging
change. The boy was returned to his father in Cuba, which outraged hard-liners.

The Elián saga helped persuade the Cuban American National Foundation, concerned that it might have alienated some Americans, to tweak its message.
Hard-liners, said Mr. Fernandez, the professor, had been painted as extremists, "out of touch with the rest of the country."

The foundation has since paid $1 million to consultants to help it reconnect with Americans.

"We're learning to listen, to explain and to speak without sounding angry," said Mr. Garcia. Just a few years ago, opposition to Washington's policy was led by no
more than a handful of political liberals.

Today, the anti-Castro lobby is facing a loose coalition of agribusiness and heartland farmers, once viewed as natural allies of the anti-communist exiles; liberal and
conservative lawmakers; and state officials who want to trade with Cuba.

The House last summer voted 262-167 to lift the travel ban on Cuba, and similar legislation is awaiting a vote in the Senate. President Bush has vowed a veto.

Texas and California have passed state resolutions opposing the embargo, and half a dozen other states are pondering similar moves.

"We have hijacked U.S. policy from Capitol Hill to kitchen tables across America," said Cynthia Thomas. She is a Dallasite who led the Texas resolution campaign
and is a member of Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba, the organization that in part sponsored the summit in Washington.

She and others argue that the 42-year-old policy of economic and political isolation of Cuba has failed morally and economically.

Recently, farmers representing states from Texas to Minnesota organized a food expo in Cuba. And since Hurricane Michelle a year ago, American farmers have
shipped more than $100 million worth of food products, including corn, eggs, rice, wheat, soybeans and chicken to Cuba.

"We'll open markets," said Bob Stallman a rice farmer and cattleman from Columbus, Texas, and president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. "And we'll
open minds."

Shifting demographics

To better understand the shifting views in Miami, one need only witness the demographics.

Since the 1994 migration accords that allowed more than 20,000 Cubans annually to immigrate to the United States, about 250,000 Cubans, including rafters, have
come to America, many of them to Miami.

Many of the newcomers are young people like Cynthia Barrera, who have family and friends on the island.

Ms. Barrera, 29, arrived in 2000 and is completing a doctorate in international relations at the University of Miami. Monthly, she wires $100 to relatives on the
island. "They're family," Ms. Barrera said, "not enemies. Here, they talk about Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, and there are 11 million other Cubans on the island who are worse
off than Fidel."

It's a message she delivers almost daily on her new radio talk show, a local platform for the moderates' message.

The presence of people such as Ms. Barrera is gradually eroding the influence of longtime Castro foes who, like Mr. Castro, 76, are succumbing to age.

Still holding on

But the hard-liners' message and economic clout remain strong.

Since 1979, Cuban-Americans have donated more than $8 million to lawmakers as part of a lobbying effort to keep the embargo in place, according to the
Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

In one recent weekend they held fund-raisers for Czech President Vaclav Havel and two powerful U.S. allies – Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida and Robert
Torricelli of New Jersey, before he quit his race. This year, Mr. Torricelli and conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., once considered the congressional backbone
of the embargo, are leaving their posts.

Said Mr. Garcia, "We're losing the pillar of the right and pillar of the left. But we still have the White House, so we'll be fine."

And the hard-liners are taking other action. Recently, for instance, they hired a consultant and threw their own conference, next door to the two-day Cuba summit
held by moderates.

During both conferences, the Bush administration issued its latest charge against Cuba, to mixed reviews.

Addressing the hard-line exiles first, Daniel W. Fisk, the assistant secretary of state for Western hemispheric affairs, accused Cuba of deliberately subverting
American efforts to fight terrorism by providing Washington monthy with erroneous tips and other false information about potential threats.

"Ironically and tragically, as the Cuban regime was piously noting its horror over the [Sept. 11] attacks and its willingness to provide medical support to us, it was
seeking to misdirect the investigation," said Mr. Fisk, as the room erupted in applause.

A few minutes later, when Mr. Fisk made the same assertions next door, the pro-engagement crowd responded with giggles. Some reminded skeptics of the Bush
administration's allegations made in May, just days before former President Jimmy Carter's trip to Havana, that Cuba had the ability to develop biological weapons.

Further, they noted, this was the same Mr. Fisk who in 2000, before his political appointment, wrote a paper for the conservative Heritage Foundation, in which he
listed the merits of engagement, including lifting the travel ban, and questioned whether the embargo had run its course.

Interviewed later, Mr. Fisk called his 2000 paper "a mistake," explaining that, if anything, he was "guilty of being open-minded and thinking out loud."

In the closet

Days after the Washington conference, Ms. Leonin, the Miami teacher, sat at a Coral Gables coffee shop to brainstorm with colleagues about their next step.

The meeting quickly turned into a therapy session. Some said they feared a backlash. Others worried about their parents' rage. One confessed that his parents and
sibling only approved of his trip to Washington after he promised "I wouldn't show my face on TV."

Another asked that she remain anonymous, explaining that she fears jeopardizing her career as a lawyer in Miami.

"I'm not ready to come out of the closet," she said.

Mr. Duran, the Bay of Pigs veteran, says he knows the concerns all too well. He, too, once kept to himself, fearful of a backlash for speaking out in favor of
engagement.

But Mr. Duran, noting the push by farmers and businesses and the rise of moderates, is convinced the embargo's end and renewed relations with Cuba are closer
than ever, maybe another year, maybe two.

The end is so near, he says, that he can already imagine its impact on a segment of a community that for 43 years believed in little else besides getting rid of Mr.
Castro.

"It's going to be a tidal shock, an earthquake," he said. "It'll be like a Catholic being told that Jesus Christ was a myth."