Local Cuban-Americans React To Death of Fidel Castro

Anne H. Oman
Reporter-at-Large
December 2, and 10,  2016

Hanging on the wall at Hola!, the Cuban coffee shop on North Second Street, is a framed black-and-white photographs of a group of young men in front of an airplane.

“That’s my uncle on the left,’ said owner Marisol Triana. “He originally came to the United States in Operation Peter Pan.”

When Fidel Castro first came to power in 1959, she explained, he began taking young boys away from their families and putting them in schools where they would be indoctrinated.

To avoid this, many parents sent their children to the U.S. under a program known as Operation Peter Pan. According to the Miami Herald, the program, spearheaded by a Catholic priest, brought more than 14,000 unaccompanied children here between 1960 and 1962. Among them was former U.S. Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL).

“My uncle went back to Cuba to fight at the Bay of Pigs,” said Ms. Triana. “He was captured, and put in a Cuban prison for three years. The man who captured him was his first cousin, who told him he had betrayed his country. Families were divided.”

Ms. Triana’s family fled Cuba for Miami in 1962.

“I was born in Miami, and raised in a Cuba-rich culture,” she told the Fernandina Observer in an interview while she served Cuban coffee and pastries to a stream of regular customers, many of them practicing their Spanish. “We were raised not as immigrants, but as exiles – we always thought we were going back. When my grandparents died, we found a suitcase in their closet, already packed. All it contained was a change of clothes for each of them, and a bottle of champagne. My grandparents have been on my mind a lot since we heard the news… I really don’t want to celebrate a death, but now there’s a Fidel-free world.”

Would she go to Cuba to visit?

“Not at this time,” she answered. “I’m waiting for a free Cuba – not just an open Cuba. My grandparents made a real smart decision, but it was hard. They didn’t speak the language. My grandfather had been a professor, but he drove cabs in Miami. And my grandmother worked in a factory that made fishing rods.”

The future of Cuba weighs heavily on the minds of Cuban-Americans, Ms. Triana said:”Often after a family dinner, we sit for hours and talk. Who should be in charge? Should we have stayed to fight?”

On the restaurant’s outdoor patio, Dr. Berta Arias nibbled on a croqueta and talked about the future – and past – of Cuba, and the jubilation at the news of Castro’s death among the expats in Miami.

“There’s one less dictator in the world – it’s a celebration of the beginning of a new era,” said Dr. Arias, who was born in Cuba but left in 1957 when her accountant father was offered a two-year contract in Chicago. The family was due to return in 1959, but “when Castro took over, my grandparents warned us not to return.”

Dr. Arias, a retired professor of Spanish who now works a novelist, stressed that “Cuba is a paradox, and so very complicated.” She has traveled back to Cuba twice – once in 2004 as the leader of a group of her students from Joliet Junior College, and again this past summer, to do research for a novel.

Her own family was middle-class, she explained, and opposed the dictatorship of Fulengcio Batista, who ruled Cuba with an iron hand from 1952 to 1959.

“It was a corrupt government, and the poor were really poor,” she said. “In the beginning, Castro was talking about making things more equitable. He was an educated person, from the University of Havana, and he talked about lifting up the poor, about social justice. So, at first he was celebrated by people who thought he would do away with Batista’s oppression. Even people with money had no problem with his social agenda. But then, he nationalized companies and closed newspapers. Freedom of speech went out the door. He very quickly declared himself a Communist, and he ran the country into the ground… He destroyed the country my grandparents had.”

Did he do some good things?

“There’s an emphasis on a well-educated populace,” Dr. Arias said. “You have to stay in school through high school, so there’s a high literacy rate. But, in education, people are channeled, forced to go into areas that the country needs. It’s also a leading country in medical research – tons of money goes into cancer and Alzheimer’s research.”

But, she said, not everyone benefits equally.

“Castro’s circle gets boutique medicine, but that’s not available to everyone,“ she said.

This elite group is referred to as “ninos de mama,” or “mama’s darlings.”

“They are the ones with good teeth, who can get into night clubs and hotels, and go to Costa Rica for vacations.

There’s no more middle class – it’s been replaced by a large military class. They have access to good care, but often have to wait for it. And, for the poor, there are clinics. But it’s hard to get antibiotics – or even aspirin. And there’s free dental work, which means if your tooth hurts, you get it extracted – no crowns or root canals. When I was there last summer, I saw many people in their fifties and sixties with missing teeth. The talk about health benefits is overblown.”

Dr. Arias does not believe the recent normalization of US-Cuba relations has helped everyday Cubans.

“There’s some free enterprise, but very limited,” she said, referring to the paladares, “or home kitchens,” which are allowed to serve home cooked food to tourists. “But every business, every single gas station even is owned by the government. And Castro was brilliant in setting up controls on freedom. Every street in Havana has a block captain. When I was there with my students in 2004, if we talked to people on the street, a police person would show up and tell the person to stop pestering us.” Dr. Arias sees the end of Fidel Castro as “the beginning of something else, but what that something is is so complicated… I don’t think that as Americans we should be interfering in how they live. But we should try to make sure that the benefits from normalization trickle down to the people.”

Vivian Saladrigas, who divides her time between Miami and Amelia Island, said she went to a Miami restaurant Saturday night “to celebrate the passing of that Satan.”

Ms. Saladrigas was born in Cuba but left when she was a year old to join her parents in Mexico. Her father, a senator, had fled earlier, pursued by Castro’s troops. After a year in Mexico, the family moved to Miami.

“My father was a lawyer, but said ‘what can I do to support my family?’. He worked as a gas station attendant and my mom sold vacuum cleaners in a department store. They were go-getters. They came with nothing, but they worked hard,” she recalled. “My mom wanted us to grow up as Americans, speaking English, so we moved to Miami Shores, where the majority of children were Americans.”

Ms. Saladrigas said she would love to go back “to see where I was born, but I won’t – out of respect. I won’t spend money in that country.”

As for Castro, Ms. Saladrigas said “he did nothing good – he preached something that was not going to happen. He took advantage of the poor and ignorant. He offered them the world. And he lived very well.”

The news stories showing people lining up to mourn Castro are misleading, said Ms. Saladrigas.

“They are put on busses,” she said. “If they don’t go, they lose their jobs. They have no rights – there are no human rights in Cuba. Why do people risk their lives and their children’s lives to go 90 miles on a raft?”

Although there are only a handful of Cuban Americans currently living on Amelia Island, the area’s relations with Cuba go back to the 1890s. According to an article in the Florida Historical Quarterly, Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti came to Fernandina and stayed at the Florida House Inn (a plaque in front of the hotel commemorates his stay). Marti met with local businessman Nathaniel Borden, who helped the revolutionaries by chartering yachts for them and storing arms in his warehouse. After Cuba gained independence through the Spanish-American War, Borden retained strong ties with that country, prospered from trade and acted as Honorary Cuban Consul. In 1908, he built the Villa Las Palmas for his 17-year-old bride. As the bride’s parents disapproved of the match, the two eloped to Cuba.

Editor’s Note: Anne H. Oman relocated to Fernandina Beach from Washington, D.C. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Star, The Washington Times, Family Circle and other publications.