Published: 07/20/95
Section: EDITORIAL
Page: 18A
CUBAN EXILES are hailing as a major victory the 13-boat flotilla that paid tribute to 41 people massacred last year by Fidel Castro's henchmen just a few miles off Havana's coast.
Still one must ask whether or not the exiles' celebration is yet another example of exilium tremens. Cuban exile writer Carlos Alberto Montaner coined that term to designate his fellow Cubans' tendency to answer Castro's wicked acts with childish, outlandish tantrums.
To be sure, there is a conditioned reflex that will likely prompt the White House and some of the mainstream media to dismiss the flotilla as exilium tremens. But that would badly underestimate the event's significance. Leave aside its tragicomic elements. Unlike the rhetoric of Miami's anti-Castro organizations, this tiny, peaceful armada fulfilled its chief objective: It honored the victims of the 13 de Marzo tugboat's sinking in Cuban territorial waters, and not too far from the spot where these refugees were sent to their deaths for trying to exercise their right to emigrate.
The flotilla also succeeded in drawing wider attention to the tragic story of the 13 de Marzo victims, 23 of whom were children. America's mainstream media had stubbornly neglected, or refused, to report the massacre in all its heinous details. After last Thursday's encounter in the Florida Straits, the press that continues to ignore the story -- such as The New York Times -- does so at the expense of its credibility.
In addition, the exile vessels fulfilled their objective of staging a peaceful protest, thereby presenting Cuba's demoralized people with a relevant instance of civil disobedience in the manner of India's Mohandas Gandhi and America's Martin Luther King Jr.
That the flotilla was organized and executed by relatively young Cuban Americans and exiles is also encouraging. It is further evidence of the reserves of creative energy that the exile community still possesses. To realize this energy's full potential, the exiles' jaded pseudo-leadership must make more room for younger generations. The best alternative to Castro's gerontocracy is young Cubans, on the island and in exile, who are unburdened by guilt over their role in bringing Castro to power or by self-centered exhibitionism.
Younger exiles and Cuban Americans are not decorated by ex- s as in "ex-rebels," "ex-labor leaders," "ex-intellectuals," and "ex-comandantes." Sometimes these emigres balance themselves on their hyphen, as if it were a tightrope strung between assimilation and a separate identity.
Though a small speck on Washington's radar, the flotilla should give pause to those who assume that the exile community is a pushover. The exiles' decision not to avoid a peaceful confrontation with heavily armed Cuban government pirate vessels (violators of the law of the sea, which governs "innocent passage") denotes a refusal to permit the world to put them in a "docile Cuban-American" straitjacket. This stereotype captures the image of the passive exile who meekly accepts every change in U.S. policy toward the dictatorship. By freeing themselves from this straitjacket, exiles show Washington that the struggle for a free, democratic Cuba is compatible with their efforts to remain exemplary U.S. citizens, too. Analogously, an American Jew can be both a good American and a defender of Israel's interests.
Against this background, flotilla organizers provided an eloquent illustration of how two objectives -- being true to Cuba and to the United States -- can be reconciled. They pursued their action plan without breaking any laws, a principle that they would be wise to follow in the future, too.
Inevitably, however, even peaceful actions against a brutal de facto
regime, such as Cuba's, pose certain risks. One cannot fight a dictatorship,
which is sheer lawlessness masquerading as legitimate government, without
venturing to violate arbitrary laws and without paying a price for such
actions. The flotilla took the risk of violating Cuba's specious sovereignty,
specious
because a government is truly sovereign only when it embodies the will of the
governed. Cuba's does not.
To bring this off, exiles will need large doses of patience. Only recently, U.S. administrations were sympathetic and even encouraged the Cuban exiles' struggle against Castro's dictatorship. The present one wavers. It even went so far as to commend the Cuban regime for its "restrained" response to the flotilla! Now, that's what I call a case of political delirium tremens.
© 1996 The Miami Herald.