So I was at Partner College. Eleian happened in November, right Thanksgiving. Then there's winter break, and when I went back to New York, there's a massive uproar of more of these crazy Miami Cubans.
Vanessa Garcia was born and raised in Miami. She grew up hearing stories about her Cuban family, including family members who were imprisoned by the dictatorship in Cuba Aspresos Politico's political prisoners. One of her grandfathers, she tells us, fled three.
Dictatorships, Franco Hitler and then Fidel.
This family history has deeply marked her, and so has her upbringing as a Miami Cuban, because Miami is unique.
It's another world to the rest of the country.
The most Cuban place in the United States, that's for sure. She was used to the dominance of Spanish, of given culture and politics and everything that came with it until she went away to college in New York, and the alien story magnified the differences.
When I laned in New York City, when I land on campus, essentially, I very vividly remember going into an office hoer with one of my favorite professors and she looking at me and saying, you're so smart and your Cuban American, you please explain these crazy Cubans to me. I was like, Oh, this is a very different perspective.
Crazy cue ones. Vanessa was confronted with a narrative about her community that was new and unexpected, and she wasn't the only one. There was a sense that Elian changed how we were seen and maybe even how some of us saw else. I am Pennileetera Metis and this is a special bonus episode of Chess, Peace, Deli and Gonzalez Story, a production of Utuda Studios in partnership with Iheart's Michael
Tuda podcast network. When we were reporting for this podcast, we heard this term of the crazy Cubans come up, and it made us curious to explore the idea more.
Were these crazy people that don't want the kid to go home?
Who are these crazy Miami Cubans.
On this episode, we're going to unpack this perception about Miami Cubans and the idea that the Cuban American community lost control of the narrative during the eliansaga. And I'm not going to dig into this alone. I'm here with my back a little loving producer Tasha Sandol, who you know from the series from episode seven when we met with her adorable a Wili Daladi. Hi, Tasha, Hi, Penny.
I'm excited to be here and excited to get to air some of this interview tape that we really enjoyed and really want to share with our listeners, but that we didn't get a chance to include in our earlier episodes.
Me too, I'm so happy to be recording this with you. I'm just so sad that we don't have patelitos today. But before we hear more from these interviews, I want to take some time to really talk about why we are focusing on this topic.
Yeah, I agree, Penny. I think for me, I've just been really interested in the fact that there was this kind of us against them dynamic that seemed to be growing between Miami Cubans and the rest of the country. So some people outside the South Florida context didn't seem to understand the Cuban American context, and I think that that lack of understanding seemed to lead to judgment and resentment. They just didn't understand what the fuss was all about.
Well, I think it was like several things happening at the same time. On one hand, you had these very strong feelings of anger and resentment from Cubans in Miami, and something else that was happening was about the way that Miami relatives were presented in the media because they were on the news all the time.
Yeah, I think I started questioning how Cuban Americans were perceived from the outside only when I first left Florida, so much like Vanessa, I was surprised, but it didn't happen to me when I went away to college. It actually happened right after college, when I started traveling abroad in places like Europe and going back to Columbia, where
my dad's family is from. And that's when I started realizing that people sometimes seem suspicious when I told them about my mom's side and told them that my mom's
side was Cuban American. It's almost like they wanted to know more in order to understand what kinds of Cuban Americans my grandparents were, and kind of once it came out they were or what we would call golden exiles, so folks who left the very very beginning the first few years of the revolution that suspicion kind of became confirmed, and there was a sense that those particular Cuban Americans had a negative connotation. Maybe for the people I was
talking to. It seemed like there was this idea that everyone who left early on, you know, was the wealthy elite, and they didn't care about the revolution or didn't care about equalizing society. So after that, you know, I started to gain this new political awareness and understanding of Cuban Americans and how they're perceived from the outside, but also
how it's really complicated baggage for them as well. And I think that in this reporting, coming across this narrative of crazy Cubans did set off some alarm bells for me. I have to say, it made me feel defensive.
Really defensive.
Why because, as you heard in episode seven, I'm in some ways part of that community through my mom and of course through myo Elita, And so yeah, make me defensive because I love Miami and Cuban Miami and Miami Cubans like my family, and I'm just not a fan of this idea that the community had been branded crazy in this narrative during and after Alien.
And I understand I have some of the same reaction because also most of my family lives in Miami.
And so from what Vanessa and Joe Garcia told us, I think that the Alian case really marked the image of the Miami Cuban community and how they would be viewed during the aftermath. Joe Garcia, who we'll hear from in a bit, is a Cuban American politician.
So really, on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban community and the Kuban government were pushing their own narrative because both sides were saying, we love Cuba, we are real paid to it. The only problem is that loving Cuba meant something completely different from Lavana and from Miami. So another thing we heard in our reporting is that in Miami, the Quan Americans lost the narrative. You might remember this, Tasha.
Yeah, I think it was one of the things that really most struck me. That joke.
Arcia said he was living in tallahasse which is the capital of Florida, when the Lean saga started, so he told us what it was like.
This is one of those events where you didn't have to be a scientist to understand. You understood that boy his father, I got it. Who are these crazy people that don't want the kid to go home? Likewise, for a Cuban, you didn't have to explain it. They understood. Of course he should be with his family because he escaped Cuba. It makes all the sense in Orland, why would you send the boy back if the mother died trying to get him out. You don't even have to
have that conversation. People immediately understood, and so you could appine. And in this case, it's a very simple case.
That people understood.
When I was the chairman of the Florida Public Service Commission, these events happened. I wasn't here. I lived Monday through Friday in Tallahassee, and so you know, I was watching Alian surrounded by communities that weren't my community. The same sort of narrative that I've just tried on you. When I tried it on them, they'd say, hey, ridiculous. A boy should be with his father. And I remember talking to some of the leaders that I knew around Elean
and said, listen, this story ain't playing here. My career was after Alian, which was, you know, the government took Alian. I was called by the kimin American National Foundation and made executive directors. They realized that it been a disaster pr wise, but I had been asked to become executive director of this very powerful group, and we organized other powerful groups around.
When I was hired to do this job. Part of the.
Reason that they brought me in is that they lost control of the narrative. One of the things we did is we did a nationwide poll about Cuban Americans, right, and the perception people had of Cuban Americans. It was a fascinating thing. First of all, in South Florida, the polling numbers were horrible, Like, if you knew us, you hated us.
Right.
The overcrowding in Miami, it's the Cuban's fault. Bad economy, it's the Cuban's fault. Global warming, it was the Cuban's fault. Right, And we did a concentric circle diagram. The closer you got to Miami, the more they hated Cubans. The further way you got, the more they liked us. So to know us was to hate us, right if you had actually interacted with us. Correct, Like if you were close to the eye of the hurricane, it wasn't that pretty to look at right.
And did you get in that poll the sense of why they were considering Cubans were the worst of the worst.
I think there was so little common ground when you come at things from an archetypal point of view, from a very basic understanding of the family. Of course, a boy should be with his father. I will say that to you, the boy should be with his father. However, if that boy happens to be in a precarious situation, you shouldn't, right. So the equivalent for Cuban Americans, if the father of that boy was in a jail, you wouldn't say, let's take the boy and put him in the jail with his dad.
This is the closest of kin.
Which goes back to my question of what does free Elian means in this case.
Well, it depends where you're standing, and it depends who you are.
Joe has a unique perspective because as a Kiban American he really understood what Cubans in Miami were feeling during the Earlyan case. But as a politician in Lahassee, he also understood the optics and how mainstream America was seeing Cuban Americans by the way that poll. Joe mentions was never published. It was an internal poll the organization did to gauge public opinion after the Ilian case. And at
some point I was also thinking about my dad. You know, my dad got to Miami in nineteen ninety eight, so just a year before the Liang case started. I asked him why he was not there also protesting in front of Aliant's house. And he said, first that he was working hard and trying to bring his family to the US. But also he was in the middle, you know, because
he was part of the community. But at the same time, he understood that the father wanted to be with Alian because at the same time he was separated from me and from my brother. So he understood the Liian's father's right to be with his son. But he totally got why Cubans in Miami were so upset and so frustrated with the US government because from their perspective, the US government was citing with Filas and as we have said in this series, that's something you never ever ever do if you're.
In Miami, and Panny, that makes me curious, how is Miami represented by the Cuban government. Did you grow up thinking of Miami or having a sense of Miami Cubans.
Well, you know what I remember is this clear perspective, obsessive narrative. I remember it from the years I lived in Cuba. I remember I was a child, and I left Cuba when I was a teenager because the Cuban government was day in and day out promoting this idea that Cubans in Miami were all these hateful people that wanted to destroy the revolution, that all they wanted was to record their properties and their money back in Cuba. And also the Cuban government have been calling these Cubans
living in Miami as gusanos. So worms, you know this, Tasha. So in Cuba, the Cubans of Miami are treated as undesirable and on patriotic.
For sure, Gusanos is pretty intense language. So, Panny, do you think that this perception of crazy Cubans in Miami started with Alian or did it start after maybe when Florida really went red, or was it even before that.
I think that definitely the Lian case was a big inflection point, and both Vanessa and Joe said when we interview them that Cubans in Miami lost the narrative during the Alian case.
I think that Elian was a formative moment for anyone that was Cuban, Cuban American, or American born Cuban like myself in Miami or outside of Miami, or Cuban American around the States. So two things were happening at the same time, which was an introduction to how I think the perspective of Cuban Americans was changing because of Elian, but also what people thought of Cuban Americans outside of Miami, because Miami is a bubble to a certain degree, and you leave the city and you start to get a
different perspective. This is a very Cuban city. It's more than that now, much more in a great way. But it's a bubble in the sense that people know the story. They know the story deeply of Cuba and the United States, of what it means to be Cuban, what it means to be Cuban American. All these sort of gradations.
And going back to this moment when you are told by this professor that you'll help them understand this crazy Cubans, how did you deal with it?
I remember saying it's complicated.
We keep saying that forever.
But the biggest thing for me was the was the piercing of the crazy, which was like, oh, we've already lost this, the narrative, the narrative because if she's asking me the question in that way, we've lost the story. We've completely lost it. And the Cuban government won, which is what I felt completely in that office.
How did you feel about that realization?
Like a giant weight. It felt like like, now, what what do you do with this? How do you get out from under this rock? People were like, let me scream through it, but you can't. The only thing you can do is lift it.
So what I hear is that Vanessa understood that the outsider's perspective dominated the media, and then she got a real taste of that perspective from her college professor in New York. I think she felt there was nothing she could do about it, and I understand why that's frustrating,
because it's really hard to undo perceptions and stereotypes. And all of this makes me think about Cuba because at the same time, in Cuba, there was so much propaganda that Miami Cubans were selfish because they wanted to keep Elean no matter what. But we also knew that if Elean came back to Cuba. That would be very hard for his father to free himself from the pressure of you Castro. So this perception of crazy Cubans is happening on both sides of the Floody Straits.
And I have to say, really, one of the reasons I was excited to do this project is because I wanted to hear this Cuban perspective from Newpenny.
Ah, that's very cute, thank you.
Honestly, you're one of the very few people I've met in my life who grew up in Cuba and is under like seventy years old.
Yeah, that's because of most of the Miami Cubans you know are from your family, right right.
They all left really early on, in the early sixties or at latest in the seventies, and so you know, they've all been in Miami for a really long time, and I've never met anyone closer to my age who really spent their formative years in Cuba. You know, I think in doing this project, I've realized that even though our perspectives are totally different around Cuba, we have a lot more in common than we have difference.
Like our love for past delitos, for example now, but really we're Cuban, but we grew up thinking of Cuba very differently exactly.
For example, I grew up thinking of Cuba as this kind of untouchable place where you absolutely couldn't go, at least when I was little, and you grew up living on the island. But telling the story has been exploring about what it means to be Cuban and how expansive that definition can be, which I think that you and I can kind of embody.
Also to me, Tasha, it's been amazing to learn more from your perspective because most of the family that I have in Miami, they came to Miami in the nineties, so they don't have that perspective of the early waves of migrants. So I have learned a lot from the perspective that you have, that your mom has, and of course the perspective from Yurauelita.
I'm really grateful that through reporting the story, you know, we were both able to learn so much and get to some of this nuanced together from one side to the other. And I think we were both really struck by these lines, these specific ideas of the narrative of crazy Cubans and of losing the narrative, and I'm really glad that we were able to kind of dig into it a little bit more of this episode me too.
Thank you Tasha for joining me on this bonus episode, and also thank you for all the past delitos that you shared with me what we were reputing this podcast. We don't know if the Elian case changed the perception of Cutane Americans forever, but we know that it made up clear mark and that at least for a while, the community lost control of the story it was telling
about itself. So where do we go from here? We keep having this conversation, We keep meeting like I'm doing here with Tasha, like we did with Vanessa and Joe. We come to a story with different perspectives and we try to make meaning together. An Penny Leea Midez see you in the next week's bonus episode.
My mother left, always thinking that Paulie's father, once he saw that she had left, would change his mind and let his son leave. But that just never happened. So basically that was the beginning of this very painful family separation.
We'll be sharing an extended interview with Cuban American historian Ala Ferrer, who will tell us about her own family's complicated separation and how it informed her view on Elian's story. Now Veemo Hencient Episolio. See you in the next episode.
Jess Peace.
The Lean Gonzalez Story is a production of Utudo Studios in partnership with Iheartz Michael Tura Podcast Network. This show is written and reported by me Penni Lei Ramirez, with Maria Garcia, Nicole Rothwell, and Tasha Sandowa. Our editor is Maria Garcia, additional editing by Marlon Bishop. Our senior producer is Nicole Rothwell. Our associate producers are Tasha Sandoval and Elisabeth Loental Torres, and our intern is Evelin Fajardo Alvarez.
Our senior production manager is Jessica Elis, with production supports from Nancy Trujillo, Francis Poon and Lodi mar Marquez. Mixing by Stephanie Levo, Julia Caruso, j J. Carubin and gabrie Lewis. Scoring and musical creation by Jacob Rossadi and Stephanie Levo and credits music from Los Ace geos Or. Executive producers are Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia, who Tua Media was founded by Maria Novosa. For more podcasts, listen to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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