With restored US-Cuba ties, a long trip home for Miami Cubans

With restored US-Cuba ties, a long trip home for Miami Cubans
Many expected Cuban-Americans to rise up in anger at the restoring of
relations. That hasn't happened. Instead, a yearning has taken hold
among both younger generations and older exiles to know the Cuba of today.
By Ariel Zirulnick

Raul Moas's family has a 1982 bottle of Dom Pérignon sitting in the back
of their fridge to pop the day Fidel Castro dies.

Like many Cuban exiles in Miami, they have fraught stories from the
island. One grandfather was arrested and charged with
counterrevolutionary activities in 1961. He fled to the United States,
and it took six years before his wife and child could join him.

The revolution created deep divisions through the family of Mr. Moas's
other grandfather, a Castro opponent who left his pro-revolution mother
and siblings behind in the 1960s. He never saw his mother again.

Recommended: How much do you know about Cuba? Take our quiz!

But in August 2006, when news broke that Mr. Castro was ill and had
handed power to his brother Raúl, the then-college freshman watched the
TV coverage with unease. As Miami Cubans celebrated on-screen, parading
an effigy of Castro in a coffin, Moas thought, "That doesn't represent me."

"That was the first time I truly felt I couldn't identify with my
community," says the executive director of Roots of Hope, an
organization that supports Cuban youth on the island.

Today Moas has plenty of company. The mass outcry from the
Cuban-American community that many expected when President Obama
announced the normalization of relations in December hasn't really
materialized. The shift in thinking can be seen in Moas's own family:
While his more hard-line family members haven't been unequivocal in
their support of his media appearances, they haven't condemned him either.

The American flag now flies over the US Embassy in Havana, and the US
and Cuba are moving toward an opening of relations for the first time in
more than 50 years. Watching the events of the past eight months has
been head-spinning for a community organized around a conflict that
seemed completely calcified.

"I thought I had thought a lot about Cuba" before Dec. 17, says Richard
Blanco, a writer and poet born to Cuban exiles who read at both Mr.
Obama's second inauguration and the reopening of the US Embassy in
Havana in August.

"It took me a while to wrap my head around everything that is happening.
I can only imagine my parents' or grandparents' generation," he says.
"One of the reasons I realized I was having a hard time is that
everyone, everyone [has built their] lives around this paradigm, this
idea ... whether you were for or against the embargo.... We had all
lived our lives around the idea that nothing was ever going to change."

And with that change, a new emotion is taking hold – a yearning to know
the Cuba of today.

Polls have shown for years that the younger generations of Cubans in the
US don't share the visceral pain and anger of the early exiles. But the
past few months also have made clear that many early exiles don't harbor
that rage anymore either.

Fiery grandparents are becoming tired and nostalgic, realizing that they
may never see Cuba if they insist on waiting for the Castro brothers'
demise. Their children are freer to say they were never that angry in
the first place.

At the funerals of exiles who originally swore they would never set foot
in their homeland before the Castros were buried, Moas says you often
hear family members murmuring, "So good he went to Cuba one last time."

"That shift comes from facing your own mortality. You do want to see
your homeland one last time," Moas says. "You do want to see where you
were baptized, married, where your kids were born."

A POST-DEC. 17 WORLD

Since 1962, there has been one immutable fact for the Cuban community in
the US: The US embargo would be there as long as the Castros were.

But on Dec. 17, 2014, the Obama administration shocked them – and much
of the US. The past eight months have chipped away at that constant with
a series of monumental moments: Obama's handshake with Raúl Castro, the
reopening of the embassies in August, and Cuba's removal from the list
of state sponsors of terrorism.

The challenge for younger generations is to move the community past
long-held grudges without seeming to dismiss early exiles' pain over
losing so abruptly the life they loved. They've long covered it up with
anger, Mr. Blanco says.

"There's more to what's said than just political stance. It's more than
just rhetoric. It comes from a deep emotional place," he says. "It's
easier to be angry. It's easier to hold on to anger and to hold on to
really negative emotions than to face loss and pain. It's easier to
scream than it is to cry."

For Cuba Now, an advocacy group that has pushed for a reevaluation of US
policies on Cuba, the lack of mass outcry has been vindicating, says
executive director Ric Herrero, whose own family went from Cuba to
Puerto Rico in the 1960s and then on to the US in the 1980s.

"We knew we weren't the only ones. We knew the community had been coming
around," he says, calling the day of the announcement "a coming-out
party of sorts."

The false dichotomy politicians had given Cubans in the US – support the
embargo or support the Castros – has been smashed, he says.

"After Dec. 17, it was no longer taboo to come out and speak your mind
and say you're a supporter of this approach," Mr. Herrero says. "There
is a general acceptance within the community that we're at a point from
which there is no turning back."

The change is most evident in conversations around dinner tables,
increasingly peppered with planning for visits back to the island. The
younger generations are navigating an emotional minefield as they broach
the possibility. Their elders' fixation on material losses like ornate
chandeliers disguises a deeper sadness.

"There's pain in my grandparents' generation for what was lost, beyond
the material. What was lost was a sense of identity, a sense of dignity,
a sense of belonging," says Moas, whose organization also helps organize
trips to Cuba. "Talking about traveling to Cuba for some families would
almost be like surrendering."

He estimates that about 90 percent of the people who travel to Cuba
through his organization are Millennials. They are slowly being joined
by parents and grandparents, acting as unofficial tour guides.

Giancarlo Sopo, a public relations consultant in Miami, says his first
visit to Cuba as an adult, after the loosening of travel restrictions,
was a "paradigm-shifting experience."

His grandfather, a psychiatrist in the Navy of pre-revolutionary
dictator Fulgencio Batista, died in 1959 as a political prisoner of the
revolution. His father was so opposed to the Castro regime that he
signed up to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was sent to
Cuba as part of an intelligence team and tasked with seizing control of
a key radio station in Havana.

His father, who died when Giancarlo was in high school, was "a man of
his generation," Mr. Sopo says – a "very hard-line, anti-Castro guy."

But for Sopo, being Cuban-American meant spending 10 days this summer in
the suburban Havana home where four generations of his family on the
island still live.

While there, he visited La Cabaña, the fortress in Havana where his
grandfather was held as a political prisoner.

More poignant, he says, was crowding around the dinner table with all
the generations and the afternoon he sat on the porch with his
great-aunt, bonding over their mutual love of jazz.

He shows an iPhone video he recorded for his mother that day, swiveling
the camera to take it all in. He urges his great-aunt, the family
matriarch, to deliver a message to his mother. "I hope to see you before
I die," she says to the camera.

"It's tough to ignore something like this. It's so raw. It's so human,"
he says. "How can you refuse to go to the island and embrace someone you
love?"

That message brought Sopo and his mother back to Havana only six weeks
later.

Guided by her vivid memories, they explored her old neighborhood. She
pointed to benches on which she chatted with girlfriends and to a tree
gifted to Cuba from overseas that she and her friends used to wish on.
One wished to move to the US; she lives here now.

Little had changed in the family home. The terrace where she had long
conversations with her grandparents remains, and she served dinner for
the whole family at the same table where her grandmother used to do the
same.

Despite having visited previously, she gasped at the derelict buildings
and potholed roads during a car tour around Havana. She said the street
she grew up on "looked like a bomb had gone off," Sopo recalls.

What most surprised her was the affable reception at customs upon her
arrival.

"I guess they must have handed them a new script," she said to her son
wryly.

But for many of those who come back, it will be hard to see beyond the
voids where lush parks, stained-glass windows, and social clubs once
stood. Dissatisfaction with the Obama administration's moves is
widespread even among those contemplating returns, and the opinion that
the US gave too much away is common.

"It seems the American government is giving in and giving back and
feeding into everything and anything the Cuban government wants. It's
not a quid pro quo. I think it's going only [Cuba's] way," says Aida
Roisman, a Miami resident who came to the US in 1962 as a preteen
through Operation Pedro Pan. That operation resettled an estimated
14,000 unaccompanied Cuban youths in the US between 1960 and 1962 ahead
of their parents.

Her husband, Joe, an exile who spent several years in Israel before
settling in the US, concurs.

"The US government hasn't done anything about civil liberties, freedom
of expression," he says. "What the average American doesn't understand
is there is the Cuba for the tourists with five-star hotels and lobster
and there is the Cuba of the Cubans and they make 50 pesos a month and
they have to rely on money sent by relatives [in] the US to survive."

Still, they're considering their US-born sons' request to go back as a
family.

"They want to learn more of the legacy that they come from. They want to
know the country in the sense of the school and the synagogue and the
places that we lived and visited and were part of," Ms. Roisman says. "I
don't want to go back just to leave American dollars in a communist
regime, but I would like to go back to revisit – although what I would
see now would, more likely than not, not resemble any of what I
experienced or lived or knew 50-plus years ago."

TWO CUBAN COMMUNITIES

The hard-liners still exist, and they still have an outsize voice in the
conversation, says Fernand Amandi of Bendixen & Amandi International,
which has polled the Cuban community in the US for decades and recently
did the first independent poll in Cuba.

He divides the Cuban-American community in two: those born in Cuba who
came to the US in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s, and those who came
during the 1980 mass migration known as the Mariel Boatlift or who were
born in the US.

The former are the ones the rest of the US knows best – strident
anti-communists who firmly shut the door on their homeland. They've long
had a strong political voice, but they only make up about 40 percent of
the population today, according to Mr. Amandi – and the passage of time
is going to continue to chip away at their numbers.

Another 35 percent are Cuban-born exiles who stayed and lived under
Castro, coming here amid the boatlift, the raft crisis of the 1990s, or
even more recently. These exiles still have ties to the island and know
the human cost of the embargo.

Blanco's cousin came to the US 15 years ago. On July 26, the anniversary
of the revolution, the cousin called him up, chortling over local TV
coverage of exiles tearing up the national flag. "Nobody here even knows
what July 26 stands for!" he says.

The other 25 percent are US-born Cubans, for whom the desperate flight
from the island is merely part of family history.

"It's not that they don't care about Cuba. They take pride in their
heritage. Even they are anti-Castro ... but they just don't have the
intensity of passion on the issue because it's divorced from their
tangible reality," says Amandi. "It's very different when you have to
leave your homeland. That's a searing, transformative life experience."

A flash poll conducted by Amandi's firm the night of the December
announcement found 48 percent against restoring relations, 44 percent in
favor. By March, that had shifted to 51 percent in favor.

"On Dec. 16, half of this city would have said 'I don't want to go to
Cuba,' " Moas says. "On Dec. 18, that same half was asking itself, 'Is
it our time? Is it right to do this?' "

And as the community wraps its head around the tremendous changes,
Amandi only sees that number growing.

"What you realize when you go to Cuba," Sopo says, "is that there is
much more to that country than a pair of brothers."

Source: With restored US-Cuba ties, a long trip home for Miami Cubans -
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