Havana on Hudson Reverberates After Castro’s Operation

UNION CITY, N.J. — The 64-year-old secretary of the Union of Former Political Prisoners of Cuba, Jose Gutierrez-Solana, hurried into the union hall yesterday afternoon seeking refuge. It wasn’t the unbearable heat he was seeking to escape, but his home phone, which hadn’t stopped ringing since news of Fidel Castro’s illness was announced.“The members, they won’t stop calling,” he said. “‘What happened, what do you know?’ they ask. I tell them, ‘We all have the same news.'”Several of the group’s leaders sat in chairs around the union hall on a quiet street in Union City, N.J., a town minutes away from Manhattan that was once known as “Havana on the Hudson.” Fox News was playing on a television, recycling the same story they had heard the night before: The Cuban leader, weeks away from his 80th birthday, had temporarily ceded power to his 75-year-old brother, Raúl. As usual, the news from Cuba was inconclusive, and so when they expressed optimism about the future of the old country, they did so with the warning that things could also get much worse.“We want a democracy, human rights, liberty, elections,” Mr. Gutierrez-Solana, a former political prisoner in Havana for 10 years, said. The walls of the union hall are covered with more than 120 photos and captions for political prisoners that were killed fighting Mr. Castro. “There’s a possibility that nothing happens. When I saw the news, I think that it’s the beginning of something, but …”Mr. Gutierrez-Solana pointed to a photo on the wall of César Páez Sánchez, an old friend of his who was sentenced to 20 years in a prison in Havana for “conspiring against the powers of the state.” He died of leukemia 17 years into his sentence, literally “bleeding to death” without any treatment, Mr. Gutierrez-Solana said.The one thing that the Cuban-Americans in this town agreed on was that if anything bad happens to Mr. Castro it would be a good thing for the Cuban people.Not far from the union hall, in a small park named after José Martí — a leader of the Cuban independence movement, poet, and foreign correspondent for The New York Sun in the 1880s and 1890s — another group of Cuban-Americans was sitting around stone tables in the shade of a few thin trees. The park is a place where locals come to smoke and play dominos, while the old-timers tell their stories of the early days of Cuba. One such raconteur, now deceased, was “Chino” Esquevel, who was a childhood friend of Mr. Castro. Before he died he visited Mr. Castro in Havana, where they reminisced about their days in college, according to those who knew Esquevel.“Chino always said Castro was crazy, in an ambitious way,” Martinez Blanco, 62, said as he smoked a cigar from Miami. “He should be suffering for the next six months to pay back for what he did.”The park contains a sculpted bust of Martí as well as two wall memorials to Cubans killed trying to get to America. Below the sculpture, there is a quote from Martí that reads: “Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.”A substitute teacher, Pablo Morilla, 57, said he felt the changing power structure of Cuba was the beginning of the end of communism on the island.“The tyranny of this man, of the communist system, is the worst kind of tyranny because it is also on the minds of the people,” he said, invoking the anti-communist writer and Yugoslavian dissident, Milovan Djilas.“As one of the popes said, the system is ‘intrinsically perverse,'” Mr. Morillas said. The death of Mr. Castro could “create a power vacuum” where the political and economic systems are loosened from the foundation of the country, he said.Friends and families still in Cuba were staying indoors and being cautious, several of the town’s Cuban-Americans said. They said the fear is that Mr. Castro would emerge perfectly intact from his operation, as he has so many times before. They pointed out cheerily that he has never ceded power temporarily to his brother, an indication perhaps that Mr. Castro was the sickest he has ever been.There is a myth of fatherhood and invincibility that surrounds Mr. Castro, who has the record in the world for holding a position of head of state. He has led Cuba for 47 years and is thought to be the main force keeping the poverty-stricken country together. Cuba has been subjected to emaciating embargoes since 1962.“After so many years, I don’t think I am going back to Cuba. My daughters were educated here, they have careers here. But I’m happy for my people. They are going to be better with no Castros around,” a clerk at an accountant’s office who fled Cuba in 1971, Eneida Cardoso, 65, said. “This is the first stage that we are facing now. A step toward a free Cuba.”

Havana on Hudson Reverberates After Castro’s Operation

Havana on Hudson Reverberates After Castro’s Operation

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