Immigrants drift back to Miami in their twilight years

BY DANIEL de VISE

Brothers Luis and John Aguilar were born in Cuba and will die in Miami. The 90-mile journey took them half a lifetime.

Like thousands of other men and women with education and training who fled Cuba at the dawn of the Castro regime, the Aguilars went where the jobs were. Luis reached Miami by way of New York and Washington, D.C., John via Puerto Rico, Louisiana, Canada and Iowa.

Their working days behind them, the Aguilar brothers followed their hearts back to Miami.

''Do you know what we call Miami? The cemetery of the elephants,'' said John Aguilar, now 83. ``Like in the Tarzan movies. We Cubans come to die all the way to Miami.''

Steadily, Cuban-born Americans are finding their way back to South Florida. In 1970, half of all Cuban Americans older than 60 living in the United States called Florida home. In 2000, nearly three-quarters were living here, according to the U.S. Census.

Cubans are defying the rules of immigrant America.

Throughout the past century, waves of immigrants disembarked, clustered in one city, found their footing and then dispersed across the land.

Cubans, in contrast, ''started out dispersed, and now they're concentrating,'' said Lisandro Perez, director of the International Migration Initiative at Florida International University.

EMPLOYED ELSEWHERE

The Cuban Refugee Resettlement Program, active throughout the 1960s and '70s, ushered 300,000 exiles to places like Des Moines, Iowa, and Trenton, N.J. There, far from the overfed Miami job market, they found employment as doctors, lawyers and professors.

''The way for these people to move upwards, to restart their lives, was to relocate,'' said Antonio Jorge, another FIU Cuba scholar. ``The Miami market was much smaller back then than it is now. You had medical doctors cleaning floors and just doing any work they could to make money.''

Efren Cordova, now 80, spent just three weeks in Miami at the end of 1960. He was on his way to a teaching job in Puerto Rico. He saw it again in 1964, en route to another teaching job at Cornell.

Two decades later, at the end of a career in labor relations spent mostly in Switzerland, Cordova returned to Miami.

''I enjoy the weather,'' said Cordova, now living in Key Biscayne. ``I enjoy the fact that we have here around one million Cubans who are like me, who have the same philosophy, the same ideals. I have many friends here. Most of my classmates from the University of Havana came to live here. When they retired, they, too, came to Miami.''

His neighbor at the Commodore West condominium towers is Luis Aguilar, a man with a parallel past.

BECAME TEACHERS

Luis and John Aguilar were born in the early 1920s in Manzanillo. John studied law at the University of Havana and became a labor lawyer. Luis says he studied alongside Castro at Belen, the famed Jesuit high school in Havana, then became an anti-Fulgencio Batista writer at a Havana newspaper.

When Castro toppled Batista, he closed the paper and put Aguilar on a hit list.

The brothers left Cuba in September 1960.

John took a job with a Puerto Rican insurance company, then taught at the Interamerican University, then studied law at Louisiana State University. After a teaching stint in New Brunswick, Canada, he spent the balance of his career at the Drake University law school in Iowa. He retired to Miami in 1984.

''All Cubans, in the future, want to go to Miami,'' he said. ``Because we love Miami. They may not find work here, they may find work somewhere else, but they want to come here.''

Luis lived briefly in Miami, running guns to an anti-Castro group, Movimiento de Recuperacion Revolucionario.

He wrote job letters to 125 colleges and universities, finally landing work at Columbia University, then at Georgetown, where he spent 30 years as a beloved professor of Latin American history. Bill Clinton was a pupil, and mentions Aguilar in his new memoir. Aguilar retired in 1992.

'My parents said, `Where now?' '' recalled Luis Aguilar Jr., a screenwriter, one of three children. ``Costa Rica came up. Spain came up. And I said that Key Biscayne would be the best place. We had a lot of friends in Miami.''

Luis Aguilar served as opinion editor for El Nuevo Herald, sister publication to The Herald, in the early 1990s, and remains an occasional columnist.

TREND CONTINUES

Census data show a three-decade trend of elderly Cubans returning to their home-in-exile, searching for familiar names and faces in an unfamiliar land.

More than 10,000 Cuban-born Americans older than 60 relocated to Florida between 1985 and 1990, when the trend peaked. Nearly 7,000 relocated between 1995 and 2000, the most recent data available.

Another factor contributing to the trend is aging Cubans migrating from their homeland to Florida.

Both groups of Cubans are driving a gradual rise in the concentration of the Cuban-American population in South Florida. The share of all Cuban-Americans living in Miami-Dade County rose from 40 percent in 1970 to 53 percent in 2000, according to the Census.

The concentration is even greater among the first-generation immigrants, those born in Cuba: 59 percent lived in Miami-Dade as of 2002, according to census estimates.

This runs against conventional wisdom, which dictates that Miami, with its ever-increasing ethnic diversity, is becoming less Cuban.

Jose Delatorre, dean of the FIU graduate business school, returned to Miami in 2002 after three decades spent in Pennsylvania, Boston, Paris, Washington and Los Angeles.

He now finds that he has more in common with fellow Cubans who have spent time roaming the globe: ``They're more worldly, and their views are not so much colored by the exile experience.''

ELDERS DWINDLING

In Miami, as many of the first generation of exiles die off in larger numbers, this has brought a visible decline in the once-thriving peñas, groups of elder Cuban intellectuals who met regularly at such now-defunct Iberian Calle Ocho eateries as Malaga and Centro Vasco.

The peñas have been a central feature of life for Cubans who retired to Miami.

''For me,'' said Aguilar, a longtime peña member, ``everything was Cuba. Even after so many years.''

Neither Efren Cordova nor the Aguilar brothers have heard much from their peñas in recent months.

But they intend to remain in Miami, believing it's as close as they'll get to their homeland.

Herald Database Editor Tim Henderson contributed to this report.