Maria Elena Toraño. Published Wednesday, June 21, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Those men were willing to die to regain their homeland.
"Would you like to have your picture taken with me, lady? I'm a dove without a nest. My family left 40 years ago, and this is all I have.''
The soft voice came from a corner of the women's activities ward at the Cuban Psychiatric Institute, best known as Mazorra. I turned and saw a fragile, short woman in her 70s with a sweet, timid expression. I told her I'd be happy to be photographed with her.
I often look at the photograph. It stirs this question: Why is it that, after 40 years of exile, we retain the barriers that keep this sweet woman from finding a new nest where she can live out her life?
In 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected, I began a mission that took me to many corners of the world to reinforce democratic values. That is the principal mission of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. President Dwight D. Eisenhower consolidated into that independent agency several
programs -- the U.S. Information Service, Fulbright scholarships and the International Visitors Program and Voice of America, which many of us listened to before leaving Cuba.
I have learned much in the seven years I have served the United States spreading democracy, incorporating the experiences of someone who in her youth had the sad experience of leaving her homeland behind.
That's also why I have returned twice to Cuba to exchange impressions and to plant seeds of hope and optimism in the hearts of Cubans. On my second trip in 1999, I took along my 12-year-old grandson Jake so he would understand our family history perfectly.
The most important trip during that visit was to Girón Beach [at the Bay of Pigs], so Jake could see where it was that his grandfather and uncle went from youths to men, hardened by pain and suffering. That failed invasion caused many tears in our family in 1961. My husband, Arturo Toraño
Cofino, and my brother, Julio Díaz Vidal, 17 and 22 respectively, left families, jobs and studies to participate in an effort that never had the slightest chance of succeeding.
Jake and I toured Zapata Swamp, Larga Beach and Girón Beach and visited the small and almost-forgotten museum. There, through old maps and photographs, we saw a mirror image, a view opposite of what we know so well, of that fateful event.
The maps illustrated the first 24 hours of triumph by the invading forces, shown in blue, and the swift displacement of the Cuban Army, shown in red.
The one depicting events on April 22, showed a blue circle the size of a 50-cent coin, representing our men back at the beach, surrounded by a thick red circle, representing the forces of Fidel Castro.
Emotion paralyzed me for almost one hour. I had to lie down on the sand where almost 40 years ago my loved ones landed, along with other men, willing to give their lives -- their only valuable property -- to regain their homeland.
LET FREE MARKET PREVAIL
How different from recent years, when our economic and political triumphs bolster an embargo that hasn't worked in 40 years but has helped Castro to oppress a nation and keep almost six million young Cubans in a life devoid of illusions and hopes.
The better hope is that Cuba's future will change when free-market forces remove the binds that Castro has foisted on Cuba's people.
It is time for us Cubans to think of the doves without nests who will die separated from their families and to think of youngsters who live without hopes. Let's turn Castro into an irrelevant figure, focusing our attention in what's really important -- the welfare and reconciliation of a people.
María Elena Toraño is a member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, the Council of Foreign Relations and St. Thomas University's board of directors.
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