CANF leader claims his late father's legacy but says he doesn't walk in his shadow

 BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO

 Clad in a baby-blue linen guayabera and navy dress slacks, Jorge Mas Santos sprints into the reception room of his MasTec corporate office smiling, and shakes hands with visitors, planting the traditional kiss on the cheek of a Cuban woman.

 The office walls are blanketed with portraits of his famous father, the late Jorge Mas Canosa, and mementos of his larger-than-life legacy. Like his father, Mas Santos is a natural leader, a shrewd businessman, a charismatic operator -- all skills that enabled him to become chairman, as his father had been, of the Cuban American National Foundation, the most powerful Cuban-exile organization in the nation.

 But the 38-year-old is also a hyphenated man whose ``American'' side is exerting a profound influence on the landscape of Cuban-exile politics in Miami and Washington.

 While he talks passionately as his father did about the lack of freedom in Cuba, and gestures like his father in his anti-Castro speeches, Mas Santos is aware that, in a post-Elián era, he must win over the American people to the exile cause and find ways to engage the younger generation of Cuban Americans.

 ``I don't walk in his footsteps,'' Mas Santos says. ``I don't feel I have to. . . . I try to extend his footsteps. I think that's my responsibility. I'm not walking in my father's shadow. I have my own shadow.''

 The duality in Mas Santos is like a second skin. Here's a man who is equally at ease soaking up ``the action'' in Little Havana's Versailles restaurant or at a black-tie
 dinner with U.S. senators in Washington; a man who enjoyed the perks of prep school but also learned early on the value of hard work, digging ditches to install phone cables while working his way up in his father's company.

 For Jorge Mas Santos, the controversy swirling around his leadership of CANF is very much in keeping with the clashing realities he has dealt with all his life: In sixth
 grade, he was too ``Cuban'' to be mainstream. Fast forward 20-some years and he's not Cuban enough to please some of his compatriots.

 Mas Santos' boldest move to modernize the 20-year-old lobby the late Jorge Mas Canosa founded -- his public endorsement of the Latin Grammys' coming to Miami even if it means musicians from the communist island will play here -- has alienated and angered a once-powerful sector of the foundation's old guard.

 One of his father's closest allies and a family friend, Ninoska Pérez Castellón, a prominent foundation director and exile radio talk-show host, resigned from CANF last week, the latest Mas Canosa follower to distance herself from his son. On her show Monday, she publicly blasted Mas Santos, accusing him of steering the organization away from his father's founding principles and ideology and accused him of being a dictatorial leader.

 While some inside and outside CANF praise Mas Santos for developing new strategies and trying to modernize the most influential lobby when it comes to U.S. policy toward Cuba, more resignations are expected from directors angry at him.

 Privately, one critic called him ``el nené de papá'' -- daddy's boy. Others say he's not Cuban enough and note that his closest friends call him George. They believe Mas Santos is not knowledgeable enough about Cuban affairs and doesn't have the insider edge and command of an audience his father had.

 ASSERTING INDEPENDENCE
 Mas Santos rejects criticism of his social, political tastes

 Mas Santos runs with the Armani crowd, critics say, and would rather be at Brickell's Capital Grille than in Little Havana.

 ``Mr. Mas Santos is a hell of a businessman but a very poor politician. He surrounds himself with people who know less than he, and people who seem to be influencing his decisions and are changing his father's straight-arrow course,'' says José Antonio Llama, a director who resigned in 1998, shortly after Mas Santos took over as CANF chairman.

 Mas Santos, a father of three, sees himself differently.

 ``I feel very comfortable in all worlds.''

 Like his father, Mas Santos may sit at the table at Mesa Redonda, the influential civic group of wealthy Hispanics, but his best friends, the people with whom he spends his private time, are a police officer he has known since high school and his wife, an elementary school teacher.

 He makes no apologies for straddling two worlds, two cultures: ``There's nothing wrong with running with an Armani crowd. I'm blessed to have the ability to do that, and I don't apologize for what I have or don't have.''

 If he's reeling from the fiery controversy sparked by his stewardship of CANF, Mas Santos hardly shows it during a two-hour interview the day after Pérez Castellón went public with her accusations.

 ``A tempest in a teapot,'' he dismissively labels the rift. ``Here today, gone in two weeks.''

 His gait upbeat, he walks visitors to his casually elegant office, which is filled with vivid Cuban art and pictures of his wife, Aleyda, and their children -- Jorge, 8, Gabriella, 5, Michael, 1 1/2.

 A commanding Luis Vega oil painting of clouds shaped as the island of Cuba over a landscape of the bay at Santiago de Cuba, titled Sueño (Dream), takes up a wall. Royal palm landscapes by Gil García adorn another corner.

 Mas Canosa's office, across from Mas Santos', remains as the exile leader left it: modestly furnished, devoid of frills or artwork. The reception area of the top-floor
 corporate offices are a tribute to Cuba and Mas Canosa, who is pictured with U.S. and world leaders. The American flag flown over West Point after his death sits on a ledge before a wall-size painting of a famous street in the family's hometown of Santiago de Cuba.

 The man at the center of the high-profile controversy stirring Miami's exile circles was born at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach in 1963, the first of Irma and Jorge Mas Canosa's three sons. His mother calls him ``el hijo del amor,'' the son of love, because Jorge Jr. was born 10 months after she left Cuba alone in 1962 to marry Mas Canosa, her sweetheart since she turned 15.

 ``He was a peaceful and loving child,'' says Irma Mas Canosa. ``A model child.''

 THE EARLY YEARS
 A modest childhood in Miami
 gives way to teenage affluence

 Mas Santos spent his early years in a modest Miami apartment, a townhouse in The Roads, then in a little house in the neighborhood of Le Jeune Road and Flagler
 Street. His father made a living delivering milk, and in Mas Santos' earliest memories, his father is wearing the milkman's uniform.

 Until the fifth grade, Mas Santos attended St. Michael's School, where most of his classmates were, like him, the children of Cuban refugees. But when he moved to
 Kendall's Epiphany for middle school, Mas Santos was only one of two Cuban children in class.

 ``I went to a party for the kids in sixth grade, and the fact I was Cuban and spoke Spanish was shocking to some people. That was the first time I realized that I was
 different, that I was a Cuban,'' he recalls. ``It was the first time I realized consciously that there were two cultures. It was a shock to me. I'll never forget it.''

 By the time he attended Columbus, an all-boys prep school, his father had become a successful businessman with his own company, Church & Tower, the main
 cable-laying contractor for the phone company, had launched CANF and become a prominent exile leader. And Mas Santos lived the life of the typical well-to-do
 Cuban-American teenager in a school where boys loved to jump the fence to visit the girls next door at St. Brendan's "and when you had a car, you went  to Lourdes [Academy, another all-girls campus] after school.''

 His was a happy youth of basketball and baseball Khoury League games at Suniland Park, of Dolphins games in the company of papi, of family trips to Europe and
 mandatory stay-at-home-with-family ``sacred Sundays'' that often turned into home-court basketball games between father and sons.

 But in this utopian suburbia, there was a constantly looming presence: Cuba and Castro.

 Mas Canosa was ``not a part-time patriot,'' says his widow. He brought the cause home. U.S. senators, former political prisoners and CANF directors were constant visitors.

 Privately for the family, the fight for a free Cuba was more than a political cause. It was personal and painful.

 After Irma left Cuba, she was never able to see her parents again; they died on the island before they could leave. It took 32 years for Irma's only brother to reunite with her in Miami. On Mas Canosa's side, there was a brother in prison.

 ``My son grew up aware of my suffering,'' Irma Mas Canosa says. ``There is nothing more painful than the separation of the family, and my son grew up in that atmosphere of the pain of Cuba.''

 Like his brothers, Mas Santos also grew up aware of the danger and controversy surrounding their high-profile activist father, who was often the target of media scrutiny and criticism, and death threats.

 Mas Canosa did not involve his sons in the foundation, but from the time Mas Santos was 13, his father put him to work in his company -- not in a comfortable office job but among the rank and file, digging the ground to install cable.

 ``My mother would get very upset because my hands would bleed from digging,'' Mas Santos says. ``He wanted us to learn the business from the bottom up. I appreciate it now, but I didn't appreciate it then.''

 All three sons would eventually follow the same professional path, and all now have leadership roles in the company.

 Mas Santos, who runs MasTec as chairman, is credited with taking the million-dollar company his father built and turning it into a $1.4 billion firm traded on Wall Street. Church & Tower is now a subsidiary of MasTec. He's also the founder and chairman of Neff Rental, an equipment rental company.

 As is the tradition in many Cuban homes, Mas Santos lived at home until the day he married. He considered going away to college at Dartmouth, but after he visited the ``beautiful Victorian campus'' in New Hampshire and experienced ``a deafening silence,'' he felt it was ``a very big, hostile change for a Cuban kid from Miami.''

 Instead, he enrolled at the University of Miami, graduating with a bachelor's in business administration in 1984 and a master's the following year.

 All the while, he continued to work in the family business -- and to navigate two cultures.

 ``I never felt I'm a cubanito or I'm an americanito. I always moved in the two worlds. Not one or the other,'' he says.

 His interest in Cuban affairs was always there, Mas Santos says, but he heeded his father's wishes that he focus on the business so Mas Canosa could devote himself
 full time to Cuba.

 That all changed with Mas Canosa's death from cancer in late 1997, leaving the premier exile organization floundering and pundits writing its obituary.

 ``I felt a tremendous responsibility to continue my father's work,'' Mas Santos says.

 Eight months after Mas Canosa's death, Mas Santos was elected vice chairman by foundation directors. A year later, at the foundation's annual meeting, he was elected chairman by a unanimous vote of the directors present. The internal struggles began, insiders say, after Mas Santos started running the organization, not as a figurehead but by pushing his own vision and strategies.

 ``Some people thought after Jorge Mas Canosa died that they would call the shots,'' said CANF legal counsel George Fowler III. ``After Jorge Mas Santos took over, they thought he would be someone they could manipulate -- and he's not someone to be manipulated.''

 Mas Santos is keenly aware of the irony of his predicament -- trying to pave a new road for the exile struggle and facing virulent opposition as his father once did. In fact, he says, it illustrates that his leadership does not run contrary to his father's philosophy.

 When Mas Canosa founded CANF in 1981, shifting the free-Cuba fight away from the armed struggle and into the political arena in Washington and around the world, many militants in the exile community harshly criticized him.

 ``I see a lot of parallels,'' Mas Santos says, ``and I recall vividly the meetings in the living room of my house, starting a new organization, a different vision for the
 Cuban-exile community, a vision that through the free exchange and debate of ideas, through a new way of using diplomacy, not an armed struggle, [would free] Cuba peacefully.''

 Mas Canosa ``was criticized for abandoning the supposed struggle,'' his son says. ``My father denounced what was happening down here, which was the terrorism, the bombings. That was not the solution for Cuba nor an example for us to set to the world.''

 VISION OF THE FUTURE
 CANF leader says rebuilding
 of Cuba must come into focus

 Today, he says, he is using the same set of criteria.

 ``It's 20 years later, and we have a new grown-up generation who also believes in freedom and democracy. We have had the privilege of being raised in a country that has that as its basic values, and it's extremely important, and at the same time very challenging, that we motivate young generations to get involved in the struggle for freedom for Cuba, or more importantly, one of the biggest challenges ahead of us, which is reconstruction.''

 For Mas Santos, the CANF issue is simply one of natural evolution:

 ``Institutions evolve and strategies evolve and change based on the times. You can't adopt a strategy that may have been applicable in 1960 or 1980 today. From the perspective of the Cuban American National Foundation, we have a responsibility to elevate the profile of the Cuban exile community, to show the world what we really want for Cuba because the propaganda machine of the Castro regime has had an impact in giving us a negative image for many years. . . . We are here to show the world that what we want for Cuba is what a large part of the world enjoys today -- free and transparent elections for Cubans to decide their own destiny, their own political future.''

 Pressed on whether anyone in his family has raised doubts that maybe Mas Canosa would not want him taking the foundation on this more moderate course, Mas Santos responds in English and Spanish.

 Mas Canosa would have ``resolved these internal controversies'' much more quickly, he says, acknowledging some irritation.

 ``Papi would push the envelope further . . . but I walk a little bit on eggshells with these people. My father se las hubiera cepillado hace tiempo (would have fired them long ago). . . . In that situation, he would have flushed it out a year and a half ago. Flushed out. Done. Period. El no hubiera tolerado eso. It would have not happened. Ya. Done.''

                                    © 2001