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To locals, power change in Cuba means very little
(by Mark J. Bonamo - February 29, 2008)
Benito Rivero, the man who some call the “unofficial Cuban ambassador to Hackensack,” slyly smiled when asked about the recent change at the top in his native land. Whether it’s Fidel Castro in charge in Cuba or his brother Raul, for Rivero, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“What’s happening in Cuba? Absolutely nothing,” said Rivero, the owner of Casual Habana Café on Main Street, in reaction to Fidel Castro’s announcement on Feb. 19 that he would resign as president of Cuba after 49 years in control of the island nation 90 miles from Key West, Fla. The 81-year-old Castro’s decision to step down, followed on Feb. 24 by 76-year-old brother Raul’s installment as Cuba’s new president, left Rivero both not surprised and unimpressed.
“It’s basically all the old faces who have been there from the beginning,” he said, a reference back to Castro’s rise to power in Jan. 1959. “The youngest person in the leadership group is in their 60s. I heard Raul on the news saying that he was going to consult his brother on everything. So we can expect nothing different and more of the same.”
Rivero’s words were largely echoed by a local ethnic community that hopes for democratic reforms in Cuba, but who mostly shrugged when asked about the chances for real change in their homeland. For the Cuban-Americans of Bergen County, the song remains the same about Cuba’s potential post-Communist future. They hope for a high note, but still don’t know the final chord will play out.
A dash of hope, with a dose of reality
Anyone who has ever sampled the national cuisine knows that food plays a central role in Cuban life. Baseball, the American-born sport, is perhaps even more deeply ingrained in the Cuban soul.
Blanca Acuna knows both intimately. The manager of Habana Latin Restaurant on Main Street in Ridgefield Park, Acuna, 38, occasionally likes to show off a framed Spanish-language newspaper article recounting the baseball diamond feats of her maternal grandfather, Ramon Bragana. Bragana was a star pitcher on one of the greatest teams in the history of Cuban professional baseball, the Leones de La Habana.
According to Acuna, when Babe Ruth once faced Bragana in an off-season game specifically to hit against her grandfather, Bragana responded by hitting him with a pitch. When Castro hit the streets of Havana with his rebel army almost 50 years ago, many of Acuna’s family hit the road, with Acuna ultimately landing in Bergen County.
At her Ridgefield Park restaurant, Acuna was unsure if she would ever see her grandfather’s homeland again.
“Fidel was always the star in Cuba, and Raul was always in the back. Now he’s up front,” she said. “It might be better with Raul. Fidel is harder, although a lot of people think that Raul is worse. I think that it might become easier to visit Cuba now. Raul knows that change is coming. Maybe the change to democracy will come in 10 years.”
Then again, Acuna slipped into Spanish to express a thought lingering in the minds of many Cuba watchers, especially those who long to return.
“Yo se lo que es Cuba. Mia familia sabe lo que es Cuba. No es lo mismo. Estamos pensando como antes. Pero ya cambio. La gente que se quedo en Cuba ellos han pasado el trabajo, esperando por la libertad, esperando por un cambio.”
“I know what Cuba is. My family knows what Cuba is,” she said. “It’s not the same. We’re thinking like before. But things have changed. The people that stayed in Cuba, they’re the ones who had to do the work, waiting for liberty, waiting for change.”
N.J.’s Cuban-American U.S. Senator speaks out
U.S. Senator Robert Menendez’s parents came from Cuba in the early 1950’s and raised their son in Union City. He is the first Hispanic to represent New Jersey in the Senate, and as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been an outspoken critic of the Castro regime.
In a statement released after the Cuban National Assembly named Raul Castro as the country’s new leader, Menendez noted that “the first name of the dictator may have changed, but the iron-fisted rule has not.”
“The question now is whether or not the Cuban people will take this moment to push for the basic human right of liberty,” Menendez continued. “We in the United States must further nurture the human rights activists, political dissidents and independent-minded journalists who have the capability to stoke the movement toward freedom. Just as we did during the fall of the Iron Curtain with dissidents from Lech Walesa to Vaclav Havel to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, we can do it again now with opposition leaders like Martha Beatriz Roque and Oscar Elías Biscet in Cuba.”
Buried in N.J., hoping for Cuba
Buttoned up in his white chef’s smock in his Hackensack restaurant, Rivero alluded to the recent political changes in Eastern Europe when he let loose regarding Cuba’s immediate future.
“We’ve had 50 years of these people,” he said. “I don’t necessarily think that all of a sudden we are having a change of course. But look what happened after Pope John Paul II went back to Poland for the first time after he became Pope. About 10 years later, the Communists were gone.”
The previous Pope also visited Cuba in 1998, a day when Fidel Castro shed his standard military fatigues for a sedate business suit. Ten years later, Rivero doesn’t know what it will take for Cuba to shed the Castro brothers. Born in his Cuban hometown of Placetas, Rivero, 37, and his family landed in Florida during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, then made their way to New Jersey. His family was part of a major demographic shift that led to a Cuban-American population of close to 34,000 in Hudson County and more than 9,000 in Bergen County according to the 2000 U.S. census.
Growing up first in Union City, then Newark, Rivero remembers Cuban-Americans in the neighborhood wearing T-shirts saying “the horse falls” 20 years ago, hoping for Fidel Castro’s downfall. So far, the Castro brothers and his ruling circle have managed to buck those who wanted to remove them from in power. The work of the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency, the efforts of brothers President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, alleged Mafia assassination attempts and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, led by Cuban exiles with U.S. backing, all failed.
“Until a see a concrete change, I’ll probably stay incredulous,” said Rivero. “My entire life I’ve always heard ‘This can’t go on any longer.’ But it does. However, hope is the last thing to go.”
Rivero has three uncles, an aunt, and many first cousins still in Cuba. Before he returned to the kitchen, he paused to remember his grandfather Estaban Medina, who came from Cuba in his late 70s and died in New Jersey at the age of 92 just over 16 years ago. Medina now sleeps forever in America, still dreaming of Cuba.
“My grandfather died here always wishing to see a free Cuba,” he said. “That’s a story that you hear over and over again. I will never go back until there is change. But I would hate not to see freedom in Cuba in my lifetime. It would be a real burden that I would take to my grave.”
E-mail: bonamo@northjersey.com
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