Cuban American

Fidel Castro was never a fan of casinos, but that did not stop the Tropicana Casino Resort from putting him and his cigar on a billboard touting its new Havana-themed expansion. Nor, apparently, did the fact that the Cuban dictator is reviled in the Cuban American community. Now, 44 years after Castro's followers pillaged casinos in Havana on New Year's Day, including the old Tropicana nightclub, the Cuban dictator is again causing trouble for a gambling joint. Yesterday, responding to incensed Cuban Americans from New Jersey to Miami, Tropicana officials said they would alter the two peach-colored billboards that feature the likeness of Castro, cigar smoke rising around him and the words "The next revolution.

Exactly two years ago I became an American citizen after being a resident of the United States since my arrival from Cuba (via Spain) in 1974. I've always bought the idea that the power to vote is not only a luxury, but important enough to make my one vote count and make a difference. Call me an idealist. And I wanted my vote to make a difference in the last presidential elections. My side won. I watched the election returns on television with a group of American friends in Baton Rouge.

In the heart of Little Havana, sipping Cuban coffee under the awning of the Versailles Restaurant, Manny Perez announced his choice for president with a wave of his hand. He pointed across the street, where a Kerry/Edwards office has established a beachhead in this heavily Republican section of Miami. "I'm Republican, and I'm Cuban, and I'm voting for Kerry. I'm very unusual," said Perez, 46, a sales manager for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. In 2000, President Bush captured about 82 percent of the approximately 400,000 Cuban American votes cast in Florida.

Cuban American leaders yesterday decided to temporarily halt street protests in Miami against the return of a 6-year-old boy to his father in Cuba. "We have called for a cautious, temporary hold of the civil-disobedience campaign," said Ramon Saul Sanchez, head of Democracy Movement. About 100 protesters had been arrested since Thursday, and another protest was planned tomorrow to block access to Miami International Airport. The organizers cited a "more positive course" in the custody battle over Elian Gonzalez.

El proximo ano en Havana. Next year in Havana. For 35 years, ever since Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba and triggered a mass exodus to the United States, Cuban exiles have greeted each other with that phrase. And that's not just in Miami. It can be heard also in New Jersey, home to the second-largest Cuban American population in this country, with 90,000 exiles living in Hudson County. In these two Cuban strongholds - even as Castro marks today the 41st anniversary of the revolution's first battle - thousands are preparing for a Cuba without Fidel.

The judge who approved the FBI's electronic surveillance in the City Hall corruption investigation, including the bug in Mayor Street's office, is a Republican who has served a dozen years on the bench and was the first Cuban American to become a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Eduardo C. Robreno, 59, was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 with the support of Pennsylvania's Republican U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. Legal motions by defense lawyers only recently disclosed that Robreno was the judge who approved the wiretaps underpinning the government's cases against 19 defendants in two indictments alleging corruption, as well as a third indictment accusing five people of ripping off a taxpayer-paid adult-education program.

The Cuban exile lobby is arguably the most cost-effective in Washington, dominating the U.S. policy debate on Cuba and winning legislation and hundreds of millions in funding with relatively minor political contributions, a new study reports. The study was immediately attacked as biased by the conservative exile lobby, which noted it had been paid for in part by a foundation that wants a more liberal U.S. policy toward Cuba. Since 1979, leaders of the Cuban American National Foundation, their families and their political action committee have contributed $3.2 million to U.S. political candidates, the Center for Public Integrity, a financial watchdog group, said yesterday.

The fight for Florida in the 2000 presidential race may ultimately hinge on the fate of a 6-year-old Cuban boy who came to America on an inner tube. Elian Gonzalez may foil Al Gore's efforts to win this key Southern state. Cuban Americans are furious that the Clinton administration has been trying to return the boy to Cuba - and they seem poised to take it out on the vice president, by punishing him at the polls in November. That could greatly dim his prospects statewide. In the words of Miami political analyst Dario Moreno, "This is a classic case study of how a symbolic issue can wind up having potentially far-reaching political consequences.

Janet Reno, who formally declared yesterday that she wants to supplant Jeb Bush as the governor of Florida, will be forced to tote some heavy baggage into the 2002 campaign. To put it charitably, the name of Bill Clinton's attorney general, who ordered Elian Gonzalez back to Fidel Castro's Cuba, is still mud among Cuban Americans. And that's a lot of votes to cough up at the starting gate. As Miami political analyst Dario Moreno put it recently: "The Democrats' most prominent candidate for governor is also the most vilified figure in the Cuban community, with the exception of Castro.

In the United States, unless you grow up in Florida, New Jersey, or New York, you don't get much firsthand contact with Cuban American politics. The Elian Gonzalez drama has exposed most Americans to the passionate political extremes of the Cuban American community. Reminded of my own heated political debates with Cuban American friends growing up in Puerto Rico, I decided to talk to several Philadelphia-area Cubans about Elian and Saturday's events. Their responses reflected the emotions of the case, but also something I had rarely been exposed to before: moderate viewpoints trying to make their way through the loud Cuban American extremes.