In Miami, graying anti-Castro movement is losing steam

[norml]

In Miami, graying anti-Castro movement is losing steam

The community's once-monolithic political voice has fractured along generational lines and weakened as a national force.

Carol J. Williams / Los Angeles Times


MIAMI -- At the height of the Cuban American exile rallies after President Fidel Castro ceded power July 31, there were never more than a few hundred participants in the streets. Their noisy celebrations of Castro's latest illness showed a bitter face to the rest of the world.

But the embarrassed quiet that now prevails is perhaps a more accurate indicator of the mood among the city's largest ethnic minority.

The community's once-monolithic political voice that dictated a hard-line U.S. policy on Cuba for four decades has fractured along generational lines and weakened as a national force.

Militancy is out of fashion in this post-Sept. 11 world, as evidenced not only by the recent sparsely attended demonstrations but by government cases against its last defiant practitioners.

It would have been unthinkable just a few years ago for immigration authorities to detain Luis Posada Carriles, a Bay of Pigs veteran, CIA operative and suspected bomber of a Cuban airliner.


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http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060813/NATION/608130304/1020

[Downtown Hound]

1. I think the Elian Gonzalez case

really damaged the anti-Castro forces. It made them look like fanatics that would steal a child from his father to further their cause. I think most people, Cubans and Americans alike, just want to bury the past and start fresh. Our current government will never allow that though.

[Judi Lynn]

2. You're absolutely right. It focused attention on a group of people

whom were not all that familiar to the rest of us, moving some people to start trying to find out what the hell was going on there.

I'm certain the damage done them by the cold light of reality is irreversible, can only be altered by different attitudes in the successive generations, as the old prejudices and hatreds fade.