By Vanessa Bauza
And Madeline Baro Diaz STAFF WRITERS

From Havana homes to the streets of Hialeah, President Bush's new initiatives to hasten a political transition in Cuba brought a range of reactions -- from applause for tougher travel restrictions to pessimistic suggestions that the measures will become only the latest in four decades of failed sanctions and diplomatic isolation.

One of the most significant changes, a drastic reduction in Cuban-Americans' ability to travel to the island -- from one trip each year to one every three years -- struck an emotional chord in South Florida, underscoring political divisions between more moderate émigrés, who regularly travel to the island, and longtime political exiles, who think more-restricted travel would help bring an end to President Fidel Castro's rule.

In Cuba, news of the measures proposed by Bush's Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba trickled slowly to opposition leaders hours after they were announced in Washington. For some in Havana, the initiatives seemed the political rumblings of U.S. leaders far removed from their ongoing struggles.

Outcome questioned

Former political prisoner Vladimiro Roca was unconvinced that further limiting the flow of dollars to Cuba would do much to change Castro's hold on power.

"I am a practical person. If in more than 40 years [the embargo] hasn't brought results, it won't bring them now," said Roca, whose father was one of the founders of the Cuban Communist Party.

Dissident Manuel Cuesta Morua, who heads a coalition of moderate opposition groups and is a frequent critic of U.S. policies, supported increased funding to improve Miami-based Radio and TV Marti broadcasts, which are often blocked by the Cuban government. However, he said, he was opposed to the idea of a commission "which from the United States tries to define how and when a transition will happen."

Independent journalist Maria Elena Alpizar Arioso, who attended a media briefing Thursday afternoon at the U.S. Interests Section, supported the tougher measures, though she knew they would be unpopular with some Cubans.

"I feel that no one who leaves [Cuba] because of this regime should return to bring money," said Alpizar Arioso, who has two sons in Venezuela whom she hasn't seen in 21 years. "I told them not to come here, not even to see my cadaver, while Fidel Castro is here."

There was no immediate reaction from the Cuban government on Thursday, but the commission's recommendations were not likely to take Havana officials by surprise. They expected election-year politics in Florida's Cuban-American community to bring heightened anti-Cuba rhetoric. Castro has gone so far as saying the United States is planning to assassinate him and invade Cuba.

In South Florida, the new measures created a predictable split in the Cuban community. Exiles who left the island for political reasons in the early 1960s and advocate severe sanctions supported the initiatives. More recent émigrés of the 1980s and '90s, who left the island for a better economic future and still see themselves as a lifeline to relatives in Cuba, were more critical.

Florida state Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, was one of 13 Republican legislators who fired off a letter to Bush last year warning he could lose political support in South Florida if he didn't enact tougher Cuba policies. On Thursday he praised the commission report, especially the travel restrictions for Cuban Americans, as "a dramatic and bold initiative to hasten the dictatorship's demise."

"That represents hundreds of millions of dollars in hard currency denied to the Cuban regime," Rivera said.

Similarly, radio talk show host Ninoska Pérez Castellón of the Cuban Liberty Council supported the reduction in the amount of money Cuban-Americans can spend on the island from $164 to $50 per day. Perez, like many Cuban-Americans, is upset that some newly-arrived émigrés end up returning to visit the island within a year or two of leaving and sometimes celebrate weddings or birthday parties on the island.
 
 

"That's the kind of thing that has to stop," Pérez said. "We want to see an end to the [Cuban government] system."

`I help my sisters eat'

But others, like Caridad Suarez, who left Cuba 15 years ago and has visited her sisters on the island twice in the past four years, were disappointed.

"When you go [to Cuba], you take little things, clothes, and it helps them get by," said Suarez of Hialeah. "I don't help the [Cuban] government. I help my sisters eat."

The restrictions will not be popular with many Cubans living in the United States, Suarez predicted.

"It's going to be chaos," she said. "There are people who have their children [in Cuba] or their parents."

The new restrictions limit the definition of family so Cuban-Americans can only visit immediate relatives, such as grandparents, grandchildren, siblings and spouses.

Silvia Wilhelm, executive director of Puentes Cubanos, a Miami-based organization that promotes exchanges with Cubans, said she makes regular visits to her second cousins in Cuba and sends them money.

"The quality of life for these people in Cuba is very linked to me visiting them and me sending them remittances," Wilhelm said. "By this new decree they're not even family members of mine that I can visit."

Wilhelm, who opposes the U.S. trade embargo on the island, said the new initiatives will hurt ordinary Cubans, not their government.

"It will determine, in some cases, the people who will survive or perish. In the name of democracy, might I add."

Vanessa Bauza can be reached at vmbauza1@ yahoo.com. Madeline Baro Diaz can be reached at mbaro@sun-sentinel.com.

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