KEY POINTS:
There is a dirty secret circulating in Little Havana, Miami, and Mario Perez has heard.
After almost 50 years of Cuban Americans successfully lobbying presidents from Eisenhower to Bush to maintain a crippling embargo on their homeland, some in the community are daring to speak out against it.
"There are two kinds of Cubans here," growls Perez, who fled Cuba 30 years ago and is lingering outside the Versailles Bakery on Calle Ocho, Eighth Street, a haunt of hardliners who would sooner die than see the embargo lifted.
"There are people my age or older and the ones who were brought up under communism and came here later. Stupid sons of bitches - communism has infected their blood."
It is to Calle Ocho that prospective candidates for next year's presidential race will one by one make their pilgrimages. Arguably more than any other single constituency, the million-odd Cuban Americans in Miami can make or break their chances, if only because of the state they are in. In 2000 George W. Bush eventually won - and took the White House - by a margin of barely 500 votes.
But Perez, 74, is right on two counts: at a time when at least light breezes of change are blowing in Cuba as an ailing Castro withdraws from view, so too in Miami the once near-monolithic voice of Cuban Americans is showing cracks. And indeed it partly has to do with their changing demographics.
To feel it, you only need drive a few blocks east to Tinta y Cafe (Ink and Coffee), dubbed a hangout for "Cuban Yuppies" by the Miami Herald and nowadays a hub for younger Cuban intellectuals who see things differently from their elders. To them the embargo has been a cruel failure.
Sleek and modern compared to the faux grandeur of Versailles, the place is strewn with nightclub fliers and copies of weekly American magazines like the left-leaning Nation. Look carefully and you will even spy a tattered art book with the iconic picture of Che Guevara, Castro's comrade in arms, on its cover.
"There is no single view any more," says its owner, Neli Santamarina, 52, who will soon hold meetings at the cafe for friends to discuss alternatives to the embargo.
"I would love to see change in US policy, it's long overdue. Things are going to change but the changes in Cuba have to come from within.
"It's kind of arrogant on our part to say we have the right solutions and right answers for Cuba."
Hers is a position, she admits, that hasn't been heard much before in Miami and especially on Calle Ocho - the scene of chaotic celebrations the night that Castro's illness first became public last summer - because "people are afraid of being called communists and of reprisals".
And it is also because the hard-line Cubans here shout louder.
Divining just how many Cuban-Americans are now ready to question the embargo remains difficult.
When Fidel finally passes, most experts now think that when Fidel finally passes, it is likely that Cuba will go through a "soft-landing" transition with his brother Raul cementing his leadership.
The best hope for the moderates in Miami will be that Raul makes some early gestures, at least, towards political reform.
As for the picture of Che, Santamarina admits that more than a few people have noticed, including one gentleman customer who, each time he came in, would turn the book cover to the wall and turn it face out again when he left. Recently, he has been ignoring the book, however.
Is he coming round to her way of thinking? More likely he just can't be bothered any more, she admits. But even that is change.
- INDEPENDENT
