On the evening before her husband’s departure for Washington, she repeated her warning: ‘Steve, have nothing to do with anything Cuban. Leave Castro alone. Stick to your work here at home,’ and he agreed: ‘I’m as wary of Máximo as you are,’ and on that promise they went to sleep.
Early next day, a very hot morning in September, Kate drove Steve to the always-crowded Miami airport, where he caught an Eastern flight to Washington, and after a hurried lunch reported to the White House, where guards inspected him and his briefcase with special care. The President did not take part in the meeting, but he did spend several minutes greeting the participants, and to Calderon he said: ‘Yes! Now I remember. You chaired that big dinner in Miami, and I hope we can count on your cooperation again.’ With that he vanished, calling back over his shoulder: ‘See you when you’re through.’
The discussion involved only six people, two from State, two from the National Security Council, plus a junior member of the President’s staff on political matters and Steve. His intuition had been correct, the subject was Cuba. Said the senior man from State: ‘We’ve heard persistent rumors from our friends in Latin America that Castro is keen to receive some gesture from us—economic loans, promise to relax policies. You name it, we don’t know.’
‘But have we received such hints from him?’ Steve asked, and one of the NSC men said: ‘Vague rumors. Nothing substantive.’
The man from State resumed: ‘Putting it all together, we’ve concluded it might be proper to send him a quiet signal—nothing flashy, nothing to get in the evening news, just a sign to let him know we’re in the same ballpark. He’s a great baseball fan, you know,’ he chuckled at the aptness of his phrase.
‘What did you have in mind?’ Steve asked, and one of the NSC men took over: ‘Like Tom said, nothing spectacular,’ and he opened a folder containing a sheaf of papers. ‘Says here that you’re a cousin of Roberto Calderón Amadór, one of Castro’s advisers, and curiously, that you’re also his brother-in-law.’
‘Right on both counts. His grandfather and mine were brothers, and we married twin sisters.’
‘Let me verify this,’ and he checked his papers: ‘Your wife, Caterina, is the twin sister of his wife, Plácida. Were you by chance married on the same day?’
‘Two years apart. I was attracted to Kate because Plácida was so attractive. Great wife, each of them.’
‘So if you were just to mosey down to Cuba … to meet your cousin … so your wives could renew childhood associations …’
‘It would look quite normal, wouldn’t it?’ the State Department man broke in.
‘Yes, except that as you probably know, Roberto and I haven’t seen each other since Kate and I left Cuba in ’59. Why would I have this sudden outburst of interest?’
‘That’s where your wives come in. Sentiment. Old ties of a pair of twins. What could be more natural?’ The men spent some time congratulating themselves on having found a perfect cover, but when one of the NSC people used it in conversation later, the head man from State cautioned: ‘Do not use that word. This is a cover for nothing. In fact, Dr. Calderon will be doing nothing, nothing at all.’
‘He’s right!’ the second State man added. ‘The word cover would be totally misleading,’ and the NSC man asked rather testily: ‘What, then?’ The man from State elaborated: ‘Don’t even use excuse for visiting. Perhaps it’s best if you just say reason for visiting.’
‘And your reason for going,’ chimed in the second NSC man, ‘is to quietly, almost accidentally, let your influential cousin know that when you worked for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 campaign, blah-blah-blah, that if the time was ever going to be ripe for a softening of attitudes toward Cuba, blah-blah-blah, well, it could be right now.’
Again the man from the State broke in: ‘And if, as would seem highly probable, you could get your cousin to introduce you to Castro … Well, it would be advantageous for us if you would be able to meet the man.’
‘What would I say to him?’ Steve asked, whereupon the blah-blah man from the NSC jumped in with a warning: ‘Nothing definitive, because you know nothing definitive. Keep the conversation casual and say that from conversations you’ve had with Reagan’s men in Washington, you gleaned the distinct impression that if there ever was a time, blah-blah-blah. Just that, nothing more, and add that would be undoubtedly true: “Of course, nothing may come of the mood, and I may be overstressing it, blah-blah-blah.” But let it be known that you personally think there might be a good deal in it.’
‘Could there be?’ Steve asked, and now the young man from the President’s office, obviously opposed to this meeting and the proposals coming from it, felt compelled to come in, and he did so with cold force: ‘Understand, Dr. Calderon, there is no change of policy or attitude in the White House. We still see Fidel Castro as a communist menace and we deplore his involvement in Nicaragua. If you should meet him, you’re obligated to make that clear.’
‘They’re largely my views, too,’ Steve said, but the man from State said quietly: ‘Of course, we wouldn’t be meeting with you if things at headquarters hadn’t changed somewhat, isn’t that right, Terrence?’ and the President’s man said: ‘Naturally. But I didn’t want Dr. Calderon to go to Cuba with any Sunday-school impressions. Castro is still the enemy.’ The man from State had the last word: ‘If your signal gets through, don’t be surprised if a couple of months from now your cousin Roberto comes to Miami so that his wife can visit yours and so that he can slip you a countersignal.’
Steve, aware that these men were playing hardball and that collegial agreement had not been reached among them, felt he had to speak: ‘You’re aware, of course, that for a Miami Cuban to have anything to do with either Castro or Cuba is dangerous? Tempers run high in Miami.’
Three of the men considered this an overstatement and said so, but the two NSC men had had ample confirmation of Steve’s point, and one conceded: ‘Dangerous, yes, but not fatal. Besides, there would be no reason for anyone in Miami to know that you were going.’
Steve’s legitimate fears were not dissipated by this easy assurance, since the man giving it did not know Miami, but when, at the close of the meeting, the President reappeared to ask: ‘Well, is it all set?’ Steve felt impelled to say: ‘On track,’ and the last ten minutes were devoted to hard-nose decisions about the logistics of his trip and a reminder that his commission was extremely limited: ‘You’re to make contact with your cousin. Nothing more. But if he can work it for you to see Castro, grab the opportunity … but don’t seem too eager.’
• • •
On the flight home Steve reflected on his curious relationship with the United States, of which he was now a citizen, and particularly on his ambivalent position in Miami, capital of the Cuban immigration into the country. Within the first few weeks of Castro’s takeover of the island, he had foreseen with considerable accuracy what must happen in Cuba, that the drift toward communism would be inescapable and irreversible. And he had also realized that in such a country, there would be no place for him; his tendencies were too strongly imbedded in freedom and democracy.
He and Kate had been among the first to leave Cuba, far ahead of the mass emigrations of 1961, and they had never regretted their early decision, for as Kate had said at the time: ‘Everyone in Cuba knows that your branch of the Calderons was always in favor of joining Cuba to the United States—since the 1880s to be accurate—so maybe we better go there, now, while we can still get out!’
From the moment they landed at Key West, both Calderons had been satisfied with their choice, and even in the dark days when Steve could not become qualified as an American doctor, they had remained steadfast in their loyalty; they had been the first married couple in the initial group of immigrants to win American citizenship and had never once, not even in moments of understandable nostalgia, considered returning to Cuba. They never wasted time or imagination dreaming of the day when Castro died and all the Cubans in Miami would be free to flood back
to the island; for them, Cuba was a historical fact, an island on which their ancestors had prospered for nearly five hundred years and on which they themselves had known great happiness, but it was part of the past now. It was a memory, not a magnet.
Two little prepositions, Steve mused. Maybe they summarize everything. Down there I always said: ‘I live on the island of Cuba.’ But up here I say: ‘I live in the United States.’ I’ve traded a colorful little island for a great continent, and when you make a switch of that dimension, your mind expands to meet the challenges of a bigger arena.
But he had never sought to deny his Cuban ancestry as some émigrés did, and in 1972 he had helped in the movement to make Miami’s Dade County officially bilingual. But in 1980 outraged Anglo citizens, feeling themselves pushed against the wall by the flood of Cubans, launched a counterattack and made English the official language of the county, and ‘to hell with that Spanish jazz,’ as one proponent shouted.
Steve, unable to accept what he viewed as a grievous step backward, led a new fight to establish Miami as a bilingual city, and on the night his resolution passed by a large majority, making Miami conduct its business in both English and Spanish, he appointed a committee to suggest Spanish names for streets in the Little Havana area. The valiant way in which he fought to promote Hispanic interests made him a hero to the Cubans, even though he did lose a later fight to restore Dade County bilingualism.
He had endeared himself to the Anglos by stating in a press conference on the night English was voted back to preeminence: ‘The public has spoken. Let’s accept the decision in the spirit of good fellowship and learn English as fast as possible.’ But then he added, with a wink into the television cameras: ‘Of course, anyone in this city who does speak Spanish will be at a tremendous advantage, because we all know that Miami is destined to become a Hispanic city.’
He also displayed his knack for civic leadership when the blacks of Miami voiced their dismay at seeing the types of jobs they had traditionally held—janitors, night watchmen, warehousemen, helpers in stores—monopolized by better-educated Cuban immigrants, leaving the city’s blacks unemployed and unemployable. When black leaders met with government officials to plead for fairer treatment, Calderon listened as one older man complained: ‘We blacks have been here in Florida for more than four hundred years, and in that time we reached certain agreements with the whites. Now, if we want to keep the jobs we’ve always had, we have to learn Spanish, and at our age we can’t do that. Your people have stolen our city from us.’
Alert to the dangers this impasse presented, Steve had immediately hired two black aides at his clinic, despite the fact that Hispanics could do the job better; even if the black aides proved superior, they would be almost fifty-percent worthless, since they would not be able to speak with the clinic patients, a majority of whom were Hispanic. He also spoke in public about the necessity of protecting black employment, and he persuaded a group of well-to-do Cuban professionals and businessmen to finance a night school at which blacks could learn Spanish, but this charitable idea was scrapped when black leaders protested: ‘See, it proves what we said. Miami is becoming a Spanish city, with no place for the black worker unless he learns their language.’ And then came the perpetual complaint: ‘And we’ve been here more than four hundred years.’
Airplanes flying from Washington, D.C., to Florida customarily cut across Virginia to a spot near Wilmington, North Carolina, where they head into the Atlantic on a straight line over water to Miami, but Dr. Calderon didn’t notice the beautiful view because he was lost in deep thought. He had great sympathy for the Miami blacks. Their world seemed to him to be shifting under their feet and they were having real trouble adjusting. But he had no sympathy for the Anglos who crybabied about the Cuban invasion. They had done damned little with their city while they monopolized it, in his opinion, and nine-tenths of the good things that had made Miami a metropolis in the last decades were due to his fellow Cubans.
He had contempt for those English-speaking citizens of the city who moved northward toward Palm Beach to escape the Cubans—‘Hispanic Panic’ it was called—and it betrayed the fact that these fleeing Anglos feared they might not be able to cope with the Spanish city Miami was destined to become: Nor do they like the idea that we’re also now a Catholic city, and a Republican one to boot. In fact, they don’t like anything about us and our new ways. And he shook his head in disgust when he recalled the offensive bumper sticker that appeared so frequently: ‘Will the last American leaving Miami please bring the flag?’
But then, hands folded across his seat belt, he reflected on how ambivalent he had become regarding some Cuban newcomers. He believed that the first flood of Cubans in 1959 and ’61 brought some of the finest immigrants ever to reach America. For any nation to have received in a short time two groups of such admirable human material was a boon which rarely happens: Not one of our group unemployed. Not one with children lacking an education. And not one so far as I know without savings in the bank. He chuckled: And not one voting anything but straight Republican. We became self-respecting American citizens overnight, and it’s ridiculous for the Anglos to reject us, because we’re just like them.
Then he groaned. He couldn’t blame the Anglos for despising those Mariel boatlift gangsters who came in 1980, when Castro emptied the Cuban jails and shipped north some 125,000 criminals. They’ve set Cuban progress in Miami back a dozen years. He stared bleakly down at the gray ocean, visualizing that second flood of Cuban immigrants—the drug smugglers and holdup artists, the car thieves and embezzlers … and the uneducated.
Reluctantly he admitted an ugly question which had been festering for some time: Is the real reason we despise the Mariel boatlift people because they’re primarily black and we don’t want the United States to discover that hordes of Cubans in this generation are black, not white like our first group of arrivals? It was a nagging problem, this race discrimination that had plagued Cuba for the last four hundred years; people who ran the hotels that tourists frequented in the good old days were white or nearly so. Also the people who governed, the diplomats who graced Paris and Washington, the millionaire sugar planters, all white. But the mass of people out in the fields, the mountains, the ones who did the work and threatened to become the majority, they were black, descendants of the slaves the sugar barons had imported from Africa. Cuba, he mused, top third white, bottom third black, middle third mixed. He grimaced: I never liked the blacks in Cuba and I don’t like them here. They’re rascals, and no wonder American citizens have begun to fear all Cubans. From reading newspaper accounts of Mariel crimes, you’d think the principal contribution we Cubans brought with us to Miami was public corruption, Spanish style.
Wincing, he thought of several recent headline cases. A big group of police officers, all white Hispanics, formed a cabal to commit a chain of horrendous crimes for money. Two Mariel Cubans operating an aluminum-siding firm did such a wretched job for an Anglo client that he demanded a rebate, which so angered the aluminum men that they stormed into the man’s home, beat him up, then drove their car straight at the man’s wife, crushing her left leg so badly that it had to be amputated. On and on went a litany of criminal behavior so offensive that he appreciated why Anglos had come to resent even well-behaved Cubans. To counteract such negative impressions, he had, with the help of other Cuban leaders, established an informal club called Dos Patrias, the name, Two Homelands, referring to the emotional home which the Cubans had left behind and the legal one to which they were committed for the rest of their lives. It was a club without rules, regular meetings or set membership, just a group of intelligent men who studied how their community was developing and who sought to keep it on the right track. All who attended were Hispanics, ninety-five-percent Cuban, and most were as enlightened as Calderon. They recognized two basics: Miami was destined to become a Hispanic city; and it would be a more vital society if the Anglos who built it could be persuaded to remain instead of running away to
the wealthy settlements in the north. Most Patrias had developed pragmatic solutions to the problem: ‘If the rednecks who can’t stand hearing a person speak Spanish get scared, encourage them to move out and to hell with ’em. Little lost. But we must do everything reasonable to keep the sensible ones, because them we need.’
Patrias assumed responsibility for seeing that Miami remained a city in which Anglos could feel at home, and Steve said at the close of one meeting: ‘I see a city that’ll be maybe three-fourths Hispanic, one-fourth black and Anglo, and to make good Anglos feel at ease in such a place isn’t going to be easy.’
Then Steve shivered, recalling the deplorable visit he’d recently had from the Hazlitts, and he wondered if the battle had not already been lost. Norman Hazlitt was the kind of man who graced any community in which he worked: unusually successful as a businessman, he had practiced good relations with labor, had been a major force in building a strong Presbyterian church, had served the Boy Scouts for decades, and helped keep the local Republican party alive in years when it won few elections. His wife, Clara, had been a principal fund-raiser for Doctors Hospital and the financial angel for the Center for Abused Wives. Among the charities of Miami it was known that ‘if you can’t get the money anywhere else, try the Hazlitts.’
Three months ago Steve had become aware that the Hazlitts were becoming unhappy with the way the Cubans were taking over the community; they were especially ill at ease regarding the religious sect Santeria. The matter became public when a brash young Santeria minister bought a vacant house at the far edge of the district in which the Hazlitts and other millionaires lived, and there conducted lively services in which large groups of predominantly Mariel worshipers sang in beautiful harmony and prayed in the Catholic style, for they were tangentially a part of that faith as practiced in Cuba. Trouble arose because their rituals were also strongly influenced by ancient African voodoo rites, including specifically the climactic sacrifice of live chickens and other animals in a way that allowed the blood to spatter members of the congregation. This was not ritual sacrifice, in which a symbolic knife made a symbolic pass over the animal; it was the severing of a living neck and the gushing of hot blood.