THE FIRST CONTRAS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807410004-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: March 31, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/11 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807410004-1
ARE"IS 7 F-r~i' i ~ 31 March 1986
ON PAGF Now
91
The First Contras
t is now an Electrolux store, that small building where the
CIA recruited eager Cuban patriots-the first contras-for
Ian invasion 25 years ago. The store is near "Calle Ocho"-
utwest Eighth Street, in Miami's "Little Havana"sec-
tion. Down the street from the tiny park where old men
play dominoes is the small monument to the young men who
died at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, in a feckless use of
U.S. power, one that foreshadowed others, from Vietnam to
Lebanon.
Last week the House of Representatives, compounding the
cruel folly of U.S. policy regarding the multiplication ofCubas in
this hemisphere, voted to kill Nicaragua's contras. It is instruc-
tive that all but two of Florida's 19 representatives voted for the
contras. It helps having reality just over your horizon and
reality's victims on your voting rolls. As the House was consign-
ing the contras to a fate comparable to that of the Cuban contras
in 1961, Miami's Cuban-Americans could ponder this para-
dox: the Bay of Pigs helped them become proof of the con-
tinuing vitality of Ameri-
ca's immigrant tradition.
Miami's new mayor is 36
and Cuban born. Elsewhere,
America's key institution-
no, silly, not the White
House, the Coca-Cola Co.-
is run by a Cuban-Ameri-
can. However, the most
exciting success is the flour-
ishing in south Florida of
the average Cuban-Ameri-
can. Miami is America's
most interesting city and or-
dinary people from Cuba are
the stars of Miami Nice, a
new installment in the saga of America's absorptive capacity.
New home: The failure of the 1961 invasion was followed in 18
months by the Pyrrhic U.S. "victory" in the missile crisis, in
which the United States in effect guaranteed the survival of
Castro's regime and gave the Soviet Union license to use the
isla for any purpose other than as a missile platform. (Nica-
ragua, he second Cuba, is not the final consequence of that
capitulation.) When refugees from Cuba saw their dream of the
liberation of their homeland indefinitely deferred, they turned
their prodigious energies to the task of prospering in their new
home. This they were well equipped to do. Castro's swift unveil-
ing of his communist plans provoked a flight of human capital.
Many of Cuba's professionals-upward of 5,000 doctors in the
first two years-crossed the Florida straits. Of the many waves
of immigrants that have enriched this nation's social soil, the
Cuban wave is perhaps the only one in which the middle class
came first. Like the first wave, the Pilgrims, the Cubans came
from a competent, assertive and principled class.
You cannot throw a brick among Cuban-American leaders
without hitting a hero of the cause they do not consider lost.
Pepe Hernandez, 47, was 21 when Castro shot his father. He
came to Miami, si ed on with the CIA, was infiltrated in and
out o Cuba and Join the Bay of Pigs brigade in Guatemala.
After the debacle he spent 20 months in a Castro jail. Today he
is a successful entrepreneur exporting technology to Latin
America. A million Cubans migrating to Florida have done
what 5 million Minnesotans migrating here could not have
done: they have made Miami the booming bicultural gateway
to Latin America. Like divided Germany and Korea, the divid-
ed Cuban nation illustrates the fecundity of freedom. Hernan-
dez says that, given the multiplier effect of Cuban-Americans
on the U.S. economy, they produce many times more wealth
than the 10 times as many Cubans isolated offshore.
Hernandez says Cuba is like Canada in that it has a history of
high achievers achieving outside their country. Jose Marti,
Cuba's George Washington, spent much of his adult life in the
United States and Spain, less than two years in Cuba. Cuba's
first president was an American citizen who had run a school in
New York. For Hernandez, the salient point is that they re-
turned. He helps run a splendidly militant lobby that promotes
policies designed to isolate and weaken Castro and keep.the
United States unreconciled to a future ofesndless communism in
Cuba. But he is a rooted American. Recently he built an office
complex. He could have giv-
en the contract to any of a
number of Cuban-American
firms. He gave it to the
low bidder, a firm run by
emigres from ... Nicaragua.
If Congress continues its
ways, one day south Florida
will have freedom-loving
people who have fled from
communist regimes in Costa
Rica, Honduras, Guatema-
la, Panama ...
PaMetisw: In a restaurant
on Calle Ocho, drinking
inky, bitter Cuban coffee,
seven leaders of the Cuban-American community the 1984
vote was Reagan, 90 percent, Mondale, 10 percent) speak with-
out bitterness about their one disappointment with America-
its shallow misunderstanding of these years of living danger-
ously. Four served briefly in Castro's government until they
concluded (as one of them. an economics professor, says dryly)
that Castro was not just a post-Keynesian. One of the four
served 16 years in prison for working in Cuba to prepare for the
1961 invasion. :Afifth was infiltrated into Cuba 13 times, once to
collect intelligence on the surface-to-air missile that downed
the U-2 during the missile crisis. One runs a radio station where
a commentator is Juanita Castro. the dictator's sister. Another,
a woman who runs a real-estate firm, compares Cuban-Ameri-
cans with American Jews, whose attachment to Israel in no
way dilutes their patriotism. Indeed, to understand the heat in
the heart of Little Havana, imagine the mood of Jews if Israel
were tyrannized and were located 90 miles east of Long Island.
The day these exemplary Americans initiated a columnist to
fried bananas and black bean soup and other Cuban contribu-
tions to the tanginess of American life, a 16-year-old Cuban in
Miami was rhapsodizing about hospital food. His brother-in-
law had drowned on the five-day float to freedom on a ram-
shackle raft fashioned from inner tubes. "Things in Cuba are
very bad. There is no food. Look at this. Juice. Milk." And there
is black bean soup on Calle Ocho. an American Main Street.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/11 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807410004-1