Not their fathers' Cuban-American politics*** "We do not need the 101st Airborne in Havana," Mr. Mas tells a group of the best and brightest young Cuban-Americans who've gathered for drinks and crudités. "We have to change the debate, talk about the violations of human rights, the need for elections, the enslaving of the Cuban people. That's what we need to show the world, that's a compelling argument that cannot be debated." With Cuban-American relations more strained than at any time since the missile crisis 40 years ago, Mr. Mas Santos's words are particularly salient. But what makes them still more striking - and revealing - is that Mas Santos's father was Jorge Mas Canosa, powerful founder of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), which over the last 20 years has shaped the hard-line US policy toward Cuba as well as more than one presidential election in Florida.
Now, as the Bush administration prepares its response to Fidel Castro's recent crackdown on dissidents and emigrants, it's confronted by a new dilemma: Cuban-Americans, a key political constituency, are split between the traditional hard-liners and a new generation of moderates like Mas Santos, who has taken over the chairmanship of the CANF. The old guard is lobbying to have the US cut off the funds - more than a billion dollars annually - that Cuban-Americans send to their families on the Caribbean island, and to ban all travel there. The moderates, made up of younger Cuban-Americans and newer migrants from the island, object to both those aims, and would prefer the administration to champion human rights and free speech - and indict Castro as a war criminal.***
The Poet and the Despot ***RAUL RIVERO, Cuba's foremost independent journalist and one of its best poets, knew for years that he could be arrested at any moment by Fidel Castro's police, simply because he dared to report and write freely about his country. But he refused to be intimidated. "Nobody, no law, can make me take on the mentality of a gangster or other criminal simply because I report the arrest of a dissident or bring to light the prices of the basic alimentary products for survival in Cuba or edit a note saying that it seems like a disaster to me that more than 20,000 Cubans leave their homeland each year for exile in the United States," he wrote in 1999. "Nobody can make me feel like a criminal, an enemy target or a turncoat. . . . I am merely a man who writes. One who writes in the country where I was born."***