She is executive director of the Cuban Committee for Democracy, founded in 1993 by moderate Cuban-Americans. Born in Cuba, she came to the United States in 1960 when she was 12 years old. Freyre has returned to Cuba for the first time in 1998 and since then has made three more trips.
What was the Elián saga about? It was never about a child. It was always about Castro versus the exile community. ... From the beginning, this child was politicized on this side of the Florida Straits, especially after the poster that the Cuban-American National Foundation were planning to take to the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle if Fidel attended. The moment that happened, it was inevitable that the Cuban government was also going to politicize it. How did it become so huge?
It had all the elements of some sort of Greek mythology. Dolphins were taking care of this child. Our Lady of Charity had guided him in. He was at sea for three days and yet he had almost no exposure. It grew to these mythical proportions where people got absolutely drawn into it. Then, of course, it was tailor-made for the media. This child was not some ugly black child from Haiti. This child was an adorable-looking little boy--very photogenic, very, very, very precious to the camera. At that point, all bets were off. What does the Miami community want?
Very few people would admit it, but they want the Marines. They want the US to send its Marines to Cuba, clean up Cuba, and then give it back to them. Do you really think so?
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. There is a group of people in Miami that are never going to get what they want, which is to rule Cuba in the future, unless it's through a US intervention. It wouldn't happen any other way. To them, whether it happens because the US gets fed up and decides to go in there like they did in Panama--which is of course not the same situation--or whether it happens because they continue to tighten the embargo to the point where the people of Cuba can't handle it anymore and they take to the streets and such a chaotic situation ensues that the US government thinks they have to intervene. . . . Whether it happens that way or the other way, they know that that's the only way they're going to have positions of power in a future of Cuba. It would be bloody for Cubans, though, wouldn't it?
They don't care about the Cuban people. If you remember, when the Berlin Wall fell and Cuba lost all the subsidies it had from the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, there was real hunger on the island. I didn't hear any calls for a huge amount of humanitarian aid. On the contrary, two things happened: one, the embargo was tightened to see if the Cuban people would suffer still more; and two, people here were celebrating. They were putting champagne bottles in their refrigerators. It's a good thing they didn't open them.
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