La Saguesera: Miami's Little Havana

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope. --Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Among the 650,000 Cubans who have immigrated to the U.S. since Fidel Castro came to power in Havana 15 years ago, the dream for many years was of a post-Castro return to the island homeland. The Cuban exiles still bristle at any sign of a coming rapprochement between the two countries, and were angry about last week's visit to Cuba by U.S. Senators Jacob Javits and Claiborne Pell (see THE WORLD). Miami Extra, a Florida-based Cuban newspaper, scorned the Senators as "tourists of socialism" and ran a cartoon showing the two emerging, battered and bloodied, from a meeting with a club-carrying Castro.

Transplanted Intact. But more and more, the Cuban exiles--particularly the 400,000 who live in Miami and surrounding Bade County--are coming to terms with the fact that the U.S. has become their permanent home. "The Cuba most of us would like to return to no longer exists," observes one Cuban-American wistfully. "How can the real Cuba be there, when there is a much more pleasant Cuba here!" Many Cubans in the Miami area regularly tune in TV station WQBA, which broadcasts filmed images of the Morro Castle and Havana's National Hotel every midnight before sign-off. But more significantly, the Cuban exiles are becoming U.S. citizens at the rate of 1,000 per month. And of these, 80% are registering to vote.

"When we arrived 15 years ago, we were refugees and wanted to stay as such," says Manolo Reboso (no kin to Richard Nixon's good friend Bebe Rebozo). "We were thinking of returning to Cuba immediately." Reboso fought at the Bay of Pigs and later returned to Miami to work as an architect. "The Cuban community," he says, "is now looking for a political voice," and Reboso is proof that it is finding one. Last November he won a seat on the city commission and was promptly named to a one-year term as vice mayor.

Today approximately one-third of Bade County's 1.4 million people are Cubans. They live in widely scattered neighborhoods, including some of the city's finest, but they are centered in Miami's southwest quadrant in a section known as Little Havana or La Saguesera (a Spanish-English corruption of "southwest"). Throughout the county, the Cubans own some 8,000 businesses, including banks and construction firms, newspapers and shoe factories. Five Bade County banks have Cuban presidents. Nearly one-quarter of the county's Cuban families make more than $15,000 annually, and 40% earn more than $10,000. Unemployment hovers between 1% and 2%, while Bade's overall level is 5%.

Such relative affluence is in large part the result of the exiles' hard work and ingenuity. But it also reflects the fact that a large percentage of the immigrants arrived with considerable professional and managerial skills. "Castro wanted to get rid of everyone who had run the country," explains Roberto Fabricio, a Cuban reporter for the Miami Herald. "Everyone who ran Cuba before la revolution is now in Miami."

If Cuba's middle class was transplanted largely intact to Miami, so were the island's language and culture. Today the city has four radio stations and a television station that broadcast in Spanish, as well as a score of Spanish-language newspapers and magazines. Well-to-do Cubans gather daily at the Big Five Club (initiation fee per family: $2,000), a country club made up of members of five of pre-Castro Havana's most prestigious clubs. Bowntown at the American Club, members of the Cuban-American business establishment meet for lunch and a friendly game of cubilete (dice). A once famous Havana restaurant, Centre Vasco, has been resurrected on Miami's Southwest Eighth Street; its walls are adorned with jai alai baskets and its tables laden with steaming arroz con pollo and chilled sangria. The streets of La Saguesera bustle with fruit and vegetable stands, stores displaying religious artifacts, and cafes that serve jet-black Cuban coffee; at dusk the air is filled with the nostalgic beat of Latin music and the aroma of sofrita, the distinctive Cuban seasoning. Even the craft of Cuban cigar making is flourishing in Florida; the leaves come from Nicaragua but are grown from Cuban seeds.

Two Sets of Values. At least 50,000 of Bade County's Cuban-Americans were born in the U.S., and are proving remarkably adept at absorbing American culture. Teen-agers in La Saguesera may delight in the cafe con leche and mediasnoches (Cuban sandwiches) of the garish, mirrored Versailles coffeehouse, but they are equally at home in more anglo surroundings; futbol (soccer) is popular, but so are beisbol and futbol americano. "Being a Cuban-American is having two sets of values," explains Raimundo Sacre, 16, who was brought to the U.S. at the age of three. "At school we live the American life; at home we try to live as Cubans."

The contest between two Cuban-American candidates for the Republican nomination to a congressional seat last week provided an apt reflection of the prevailing spirit of La Saguesera's people. Miguel Carricarte charged that his rival, Evelio Estrella, could not speak English very well; Estrella charged om turn that Carricarte's Spanish was pretty feeble. Carricarte won easily. He is not expected to defeat veteran Democratic Congressman Claude Pepper in November's general election, but by 1976 or 1978, as increasing numbers of Sagueseranos become eligible to vote, it may be a different story.

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