By Vanessa Bauzá
HAVANA BUREAU

SAGUA LA GRANDE, Cuba · Mel Martinez was a teenager in 1961, carrying anti-communist leaflets to school in his three-ring binder and hiding them in a large dictionary for other students to find.

At a time when young men were rounded up on suspicion of inciting counterrevolution, the boy who would become the nation's first Cuban-American senator was an early convert to the cause of reversing Cuba's socialist transformation. Today, he recalls the period as a time filled with peril.

Tensions in his western Cuban hometown grew as priests were expelled and Catholic schools closed. One night during a basketball game, machine-gun-toting militiamen in the stands noticed Martinez wearing a religious medallion that had fallen outside his jersey.

"They started chanting, `Kill the Catholic,'" Martinez, 58, recalled. "My parents were really frightened at that experience. I remember going into their bedroom [later] and closing the door. … They told me it was time to leave."

At age 15, Martinez left his family -- parents, brother and baby sister -- and homeland behind in 1962 as part of a covert Catholic program, known as Operation Pedro Pan, that spirited 14,000 unaccompanied children out of Cuba and placed them in foster homes in the United States. His younger brother, Rafael, followed several months later and his parents and sister joined them four years after that.

Although Martinez spoke only a few words of English when he arrived in Florida, he rose to become a successful Orlando lawyer, Orange County mayor -- the county's highest elected office -- secretary of Housing and Urban Development and, in November, U.S. senator.

Despite his clout and ties to Washington's power elite, Martinez's story parallels the experiences of thousands of Cuban exiles. His family is divided by geography and politics. His father and sister have passed away, but his mother -- who now lives in Orlando, where his brother also lives -- sends money to relatives on the island.

He is remembered by those who stayed behind. He longs to visit when Cuba's political system changes.

"My last memory is standing in front of my grandmother's house, saying goodbye to my dad," he said. "It was one of those guy moments when everyone is supposed to be brave, but no one is."

During the past 40 years, his grandparents' Sagua home -- a second-floor apartment on Marti Street with a view of the town square -- has housed several government agencies and fallen victim to the ravages of need and neglect.

Tenants have pried tiles from the walls and floors and partitioned spacious rooms with pressed particleboard. They built pigpens from scraps of metal in the former kitchen and erected crude bathrooms in the middle of some rooms. Walls are cracked and blackened from years of kerosene smoke from a makeshift stove.

Three families now share the apartment. They have a vague idea of their home's previous owners and seem pleased to have even a tenuous link to the Sagüero-turned-senator. One woman proudly shows off a newspaper article about Martinez from the Miami-based Diario Las Americas she has saved under her mattress.

Another tenant, Anilin Ruiz, who has lived in the apartment for almost a decade, said she is hoping to move to Florida where her mother lives and would like to meet Martinez.

"Maybe someday when I leave I can tell him I lived in his house," Ruiz, 32, said.

Sagua La Grande is tucked off a country road that winds through sugar cane fields and parched cattle pastures. Like many rural Cuban towns, it is a place where time seems to have stood still.

Bicycles and horse-drawn carriages outnumber cars and trucks. Neighbors spend languid weekends exchanging gossip in the town square. Vendors sell fried pork rinds, roasted peanuts in paper cones and watery beer for a few cents.

In Havana, Cuba's government-run media have derided Martinez's relationships with exile community leaders, labeling him a "close friend of Miami's mafia capos." But in Sagua La Grande, the Cuban government's rhetoric is diluted by friendships that predate Fidel Castro's revolution.

Martinez's father is still remembered as a respected veterinarian. His grandfather owned a soda bottling company and once served as interim mayor.

Martinez's cousins in central Cuba say many townspeople have followed his career from afar. In fact, they are often approached with requests for favors from the senator like money, medications and, especially, coveted U.S. immigration visas.

"Many people want a visa and they tell me about it on the street," cousin Alina Ruiz, 60, said.

Magaly Coba, 69, who has hung photos of Martinez and his family on her home's wooden walls, tries to shield her famous cousin from neighbors' requests and appeals.

"They want to write to him," she said. "They ask me if I have his address. I tell them I don't."

Coba and Ruiz are intensely proud of Martinez, but like many divided Cuban families they avoid talk of politics. They seem uncomfortable discussing his role in shaping the Bush administration's Cuba policy and tightening sanctions on the U.S. embargo on trade and travel to Cuba that restricts family visits to the island by Cuban-Americans.

"Those are his politics. If that's what he likes, those are his ideas," Coba said. "Even though he is criticized here, I feel proud of him. He is self-made."

Martinez is a pro-embargo voice in a Senate that has voted to ease travel restrictions in recent years. Last month he helped launch a bipartisan congressional caucus aimed at promoting a transition in Cuba and supporting sanctions like the travel ban and Radio and TV Marti transmissions.

Coba and Ruiz visited Martinez in Washington three years ago after receiving visas, and he keeps in touch with an elderly aunt and uncle in central Cuba.

But under the rules set by President Bush's Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, to which Martinez contributed, his cousins, aunt and uncle in central Cuba are no longer considered his immediate relatives. The rule change announced last year, sparked controversy among moderate Cuban Americans. It allows only grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses and children to receive remittances and visits from their families in the United States.

Martinez acknowledged he would "prefer a definition of family that was more inclusive," but defended efforts to limit cash to the Cuban government, including restricting Cuban-Americans' visits to the island to once every three years.

"At a very tender age I was apart from my mother and my dad for four years. It didn't kill me," he said. "The idea is to absorb some pain for a greater good."

His mother occasionally sends money to her siblings.

"The way I have reconciled it, and it's not easy, it's conflictive, a person ought to help their family," he said. "We send them what they need from time to time ... It's just family trying to help family."

The Martinezes were a prominent family, though not among the town's wealthiest. Summers were spent at a nearby beach house. Shopping trips to Havana, 180 miles west, were planned weeks in advance.

Today, the single-story home Martinez's father built on the outskirts of town has been converted into a meeting place for the Pioneers, a government-affiliated youth group. Children, who are the same age Martinez was when he lived there, recite the group's slogan: "Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che."

Two blocks away, Rodolfo Reyes, a former neighbor, said he is proud of Martinez. Like others, he said he occasionally listens to him on Miami-based radio stations.

"I'm happy he got somewhere," Reyes, 70, said. "He left here with nothing."

Orelvis Perez, 34, summed up opposing opinions of Martinez. Like many issues in Cuba, it depends on one's political perspective, he said.

"Some people view him well. They see him as hope for the people, as a source of pride," Perez said. "Others see him as a shame. He is a Cuban in a Congress which has nothing to do with the Cuban people."

Vanessa Bauzá can be reached at vmbauza1@yahoo.com

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