What do Cubans in the United States Want?

A few things I've come across in the past few days, like this article on a study of the possibilities of redressing the illegal seizures of the Castro regime, have gotten me to thinking, always a potentially dangerous pursuit.

We all know the stereotype du jour that Cubans in the United States are an intransigent lot, just waiting to descend on Cuba, impose our will on the island, squeeze blood out of an economic stone, toss hapless Cubans out of their homes, and reclaim the vast holdings of our Batistiano forbears. I think I got it all.

Reminded me of a great old story, "Sir Gawaine and the Loathly Lady." One of King Arthur's knights ravishes a fair maiden. As punishment, he must find out what women want. Eventually, through marriage to a truly gruesome hag, he finds the answer: sovereignty.

Cuban Americans and Cubans make a virtual sport out of disagreement, but I think none would question that it is sovereignty we want for the Cuban people, the people, not the government. We want them to know what it is to have control over their lives, to earn through the sweat of their brows a decent wage to feed their families, to have the ability to improve their lot through their own enterprise, to be able to stand on any street corner and question the parentage of their leaders without repercussion. In short, what any American or Spaniard or Costa Rican or Turk has.

No one is interested in evicting Cubans from their humble homes. However, if a family had owned a sugar refinery, a home in Varadero where Melia has planted one of its hotels or a Commie bigwig has taken up residence, I would suspect that would be a different case.

The universe has been disturbed. Some judgement must be made, whether through the criminal legal system as in Nazi Germany and Iraq or the civil legal system as in the reunification of Germany...perhaps, at the very least, an acknowledgement of the wrong done to whole generations of Cubans. What form it will take, how dramatic an undertaking, is a question for the Cuban people. One could argue that part of the problem in Russia today is that there was no such cleansing, and the party apparatchiks shed their ideological cloaks and morphed into a gangster ruling class.

With no signs of democracy on the horizon for the poor, benighted island, discussing what we want may seem premature. But it is never a inopportune time to counter stereotypes designed to render us into objects of scorn and sap the moral strength of our arguments.