Caribbean (126 page)

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 fundraiser 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.

Mrs. Hazlitt, as a member of the SPCA, was shocked when she learned that a church in her community was conducting such rituals, and with the assistance of like-minded Episcopal, Baptist and Presbyterian women, she tried to put a stop to what she and others termed “this savage display more appropriate to the jungle than to a civilized neighborhood.”

In the public debate that followed, two unfortunate statements were made which put the Hazlitts quite at odds with the Cuban community. One of the Santeria worshipers had a son just graduated from law school who saw the vigorous attempts of the Anglo community to outlaw the blood sacrifice as an attack upon freedom of religion. With skill he invoked one law after another in defense of the sacrifices, treating the practices of the Santeria sect with all the high gravity that another might treat a more established religion like Catholicism or Mormonism. This so infuriated the Anglo women that Mrs. Hazlitt told the press: “But those are
real
religions,” and this roused a storm from many who loudly claimed that Santeria was equally real.

The women then tried to invoke a zoning ordinance, but the young
lawyer defeated them. They attempted to outlaw the sacrifices as a menace to health, but again he used the law to hold them off. They tried to call upon what they called a “higher law of common sense” but he produced two professors of religion who proved that every tenet of Santeria, and especially the blood sacrifices, came straight out of the Old Testament.

But the
coup de grâce
was administered by the young lawyer during an interview on the radio talk station WJNZ: “Catholics and Protestants eat the wafer and drink the wine and pretend that these are the sacrificed body and blood of Jesus. They’re doing exactly what we do in Santeria, but we have the courage to really kill our chicken.” After that, any reasonable debate became impossible, and when the ACLU entered the battle in defense of the new religion, the Hazlitts knew their side could not win.

However, one die-hard Protestant woman—not Mrs. Hazlitt, who knew better—fired a final salvo, and it was savage: “If the Santerias start their sacrifice with a pigeon and then a chicken, then a turkey and a goat, how soon do they start killing human beings?” As a shudder passed through the community at this intemperate and wildly inappropriate assault, the Hazlitts told each other: “Sanity has lost. Santeria has triumphed.”

Two weeks ago this fine couple had come to the Calderon residence with doleful news: “We’re leaving Miami. Can’t take it anymore.”

“Please, please!” Steve had begged. “Forget the Santerias. They’re on the other side of town behaving themselves.”

“We have forgotten them. But we began really to worry last week. The attempt to burn the television station.”

“You mean the Frei case?” Steve asked, and he listened to a lava flow of bitter complaint, for this Noriberto Frei, a minor city employee determined to get ahead in a hurry, had finally exceeded the bounds of decency and reason.

He was an engaging young fellow, not among the first Cubans to arrive after Castro but not a Mariel man, either. Announcing himself as the holder of a Harvard degree in business administration (although he had never seen New England) and a world traveler (although he had never been north of South Carolina), he had become involved in one scam after another. His explanations were always both brazen and ingenious: “Yes, I used the initials CPA, but I never claimed I’d taken any exams. Yes, I’ve appointed nine of my relatives
to high-paying jobs, but they tested out to be the best qualified. Yes, the man who built the condominium on land that had been zoned for single-family residential does allow me to use that big apartment on the twelfth floor, but there are no papers to prove that I actually own it. And now about that ninety-seven thousand dollars the papers claim is missing, I can explain …”

“It isn’t the devilish things he’s done,” Norman Hazlitt said. “It’s how your Cuban community has defended his performances … made a hero of him. You’re sending a signal and we’re receiving it loud and clear.”

“It’s been unfortunate,” Calderon conceded.

Indeed it was. Noriberto Frei had, through his charm and fast talking, built himself a little empire, from which he exercised considerable power. But when he became embroiled in yet another scandal, a local television station presented a skit of Frei’s escapades, with the question at the end:
WHAT WILL HE DO NEXT
?

“It was proper castigation of a scoundrel,” Hazlitt said, and Steve agreed.

But on the same evening, after the skit was broadcast, hundreds of Frei supporters—all Cubans—marched on the offices of the offending station, branding the broadcasters communists, and would have set the place afire had not the police intervened.

“That was a deplorable action,” Calderon admitted, but Mrs. Hazlitt added: “I sometimes think there must be a secret Cuban Ayatollah that no Anglo is ever allowed to see who orchestrates these scandals,” and Calderon winced.

But that was not what the Hazlitts had come to complain about. Brandishing a copy of the day’s paper, they pointed to a typical Miami photograph spread across the front page: a jubilant Nariberto Frei brandishing a victory glass of champagne with some two dozen cheering supporters, mostly Hispanic, toasting the fact that he had once again outsmarted the Anglos. “Seven times they’ve tried to get me,” Frei was quoted, “but it’s been nothing but a futile vendetta mounted by that damned station. Well, I’ve proved I’m here to stay.”

“And he is,” Hazlitt admitted. “He and his style of government have won. Victorious, he declares war on people like me. Shut up or get out.”

Then Clara spoke, and as she did she placed her trembling hand on Steve Calderon’s arm: “You better than most, Steven, know that Norman and I are not racists.”

“Heavens, no! Who loaned me the money to get my clinic started?” He reached over to kiss her on the cheek, but this did not placate her: “I do so hate it when I enter a store I’ve patronized for forty years and find that the salesgirls not only can’t speak English but insult me because I use it. I can no longer visit my longtime hairdresser because the new management hires only Cubans who speak no English. Wherever I go, it’s the same.” Turning to face Steve, she said accusingly: “Your people have stolen our city from us.”

When he tried to reassure her that Miami needed the Hazlitts now more than ever, she clenched her fists and said: “It’s no longer a matter of words. We’re frightened … terrified. Tell him what happened two nights ago, Norman,” and the financier related yet another distressing Miami story: “Clara and I were driving home on Dixie Highway, obeying the speed limit. An urgent driver behind us, wanting to pass, honked at us angrily, then took a wild chance and whizzed by on the right-hand shoulder, cursing at us as he went. But that put him behind a car even slower than ours, and now his honking displayed real fury. But this time there was no shoulder. Enraged, he rushed up behind the slow car, bumped it three times, then pulled up beside it at a traffic light. Saying nothing, he reached in his glove compartment, whipped out a revolver, and shot the slow driver dead … not eight feet from us.”