From: rravelo@asturias.acs.uci.edu (Ray Ravelo)
Subject: Cuba/Castro
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 7 Apr 92 20:39:00 GMT

From the L.A. Times, April 6 '92
 
CAN CASTRO WEATHER THE STORM?
 
Exiled capitalists and opponents of Cuban leader maneuver for power and
influence, but the social welfare system is deeply embedded - as is a
legacy of intolerance.
 
Miami- Jorge Mas Canosa, a Cuban immigrant who made a fortune selling
tractors and stringing telephone cables in Florida, is peddling something
new these days: oportunities in a "free Cuba" after President Castro is
gone.
 
For $10,000 a year, he tells business people, you can become a director
of his Cuban American National Foundation, which has drafted a new
constitution for the island and a 430 page blueprint for converting its
economy from socialism to consumerism.
 
Cuba stands to be reshaped by homecoming exiles more than any nation
that has already abandoned communism. More than a million Cubans live in
exile, about half of them in south Florida and their total income far
exceeds that of the 10 million people on the island.
 
The problem is that the Cubans with the most money to offer are the most
conflictive. Rich white Miami exiles, decades removed from the island
many left as children, tend to belittle Castro's accomplishments in
education and health and to brand those who stayed as chivatos, or
informers, devoid of any other talent.

Islanders have their own epithet for those exiles: gusanos, or maggots.
Priviledges professionals fear losing their status. Blacks, who have
gained opportunities under Castro, fear a return to the more racist past.
 
 "The future of Cuba is not bright" said Jorge Dominguez a Cuban scholar
teaching political science at Harvard University, "no matter who its
rulers are or what form the regime takes."
 
"Cubans would love to have what the exiles have -stores full of clothes,
limousines, Coca-Cola- but without their politics, without the Yankees."
said a Havana University student. "We want paradise without the serpent."
 
Sensitive to such sentiment, Mas Canosa's chief rival in exile politics,
Carlos Alberto Montaner and his Madrid-based Democratic Platform, have
forged ties to the island's pro-democracy movement, touting it a the
alternative from within. Montaner says he would back a movement leader -
Gustavo Arcos, a human-rights activist, or Maria Elena Cruz, a poet now
in prison - for president.
 
 But Castro's one-party system allows them little in the way of an
organized following or even name recognition at home.

Perhaps as important are the small, liberal exile groups and the growing
informal contacts between Miami's Cuban-American intellectuals and their
Havana counterparts, who can travel more freely these days.

"Moderates on both sides will play very important roles after Castro."
said Damien Fernandez, a political scientist at Florida International
University. "It's not going to be two blocs fighting each other, but a
multiplicity of groups. Some will build bridges."
 

end of my typing without permission. :-)
more later ....
--
Ray I. Ravelo                 "There's a surefire way to double your money;
Office of Academic Computing.  fold it in half and put in your pocket".
UC, Irvine.