The Cubans by Anthony DePalma

Author:Anthony DePalma [DePalma, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

MIAMI

May 1999

The day after they had landed in Miami, Jorge García, La Flaca, and María Victoria were picked up at the house where they were staying with Jorge’s brother-in-law Elio and driven in a black limousine to the headquarters of the Cuban American National Foundation, an anti-Castro political powerhouse in Miami. They walked into a room full of TV cameras and reporters and held a news conference. “We are very hurt that the Cuban government has denied responsibility here. That incident was murder, and the government keeps claiming it was an accident,” María Victoria told the reporters. Five years had passed since she had lost her family on the 13 de Marzo, and the hurt had not lessened. “Our life is not, and never will be, a real life without them.” She described her uneasy existence ever since the tugboat sank. “Even today, I look back and can’t help but think someone may be following me,” she said. “We’re speaking out here now so that the truth of life in Cuba can be known.”

For the first time outside Cuba, her father declared that the sinking of the 13 de Marzo five years earlier had not been an accident, as the Castro government claimed, but “an assassination.” He described how, when the man he presumed was a state security agent had come to his house with the list of names, his first impulse had been to grab a knife and seek revenge. “But then I reconsidered it and learned to live with the heartache in my chest.”

Like many of the 1.5 million Cubans who have gone into exile since the triumph of the revolution, Jorge remained deeply Cuban. He still loved Cuba, but it was the Cuba of his youth that endured in his heart, the Cuba of sun-drenched afternoons around the park in Guanabacoa, of big dogs and houses filled with family and friends, that he clung to, and not the Cuba he had fled. After he rented a ranch-style house near a boatyard in Miami, he tried to put that other Cuba behind him. He had taken very little with him from there—some clothing, the CDs with his interviews and transcripts hiding under Princess Diana’s profile, and a few photographs. He hung one of those photos in a back room he used as an office and workshop. It was a picture of his son, Joel, looking directly at the camera with a big smile and no hint of the tragedy that would swallow him and his family.

It wasn’t easy for Jorge to start over in a new country, especially one just entering a fierce presidential election campaign that would turn in part on events in Miami involving Elián González, the Cuban boy who, a few months after Jorge landed in Florida, would be rescued at sea by American fishermen. The boy’s relatives in Miami took him in, but when his father—who had stayed in Cuba—demanded he be returned, it set off a fierce international struggle that enraged Fidel and exposed an ugly, fanatical side of the Cuban American community.

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