Cuba: Hard New Life

Arriving in Miami, a Cuban underground agent code-named “Lucas” called for more arms and bombs to step up sabotage against Fidel Castro’s regime. Carlos Prio Socarrás, a onetime President of Cuba, talked of forming a government in exile. José Miró Cardona, head of the ill-starred Cuban Revolutionary Council, was still shuttling back and forth to Washington, conferring with Kennedy aides. But for all the anti-Castro shadowboxing, the ordinary Cuban exile is becoming resigned to the idea that Castro, may be around a while longer. By last week, most of the approximately 100,000 Cubans who have taken refuge in the U.S. were engaged in the difficult pursuit of a job and a home in an adopted land.

Eating not Plotting. As examples, they had only to look at some erstwhile underground leaders, who now spend less time fanning revolts than trying to feed themselves. Manuel Ray. former coordinator in the U.S. of the promising M.R.P. underground in Cuba, was hunting an engineer’s job, and his second-in-command works for a freight-shipping company.

Miami alone has some 60,000 Cuban exiles, and with 1,500 more arriving each week, the city finds it increasingly difficult to absorb the refugees. The desperate Cubans draw $750,000 monthly from the Federal Government’s Cuban Refugee Emergency Center. A few with jobs have started returning their checks with touching letters of thanks, but so many newcomers need help that the $5,000,000 federal fund is disappearing rapidly. Last week Florida Governor Farris Bryant flew to Washington, asked Health. Education and Welfare Secretary Abraham Ribicoff for $8,000,000 to help make up for the $9,909,000 his state has spent to school 10,000 Cuban children. ”This situation is visited upon Florida because of its geographical location, and is burdening Florida with a national problem.” said Bryant. Ribicoff issued an “urgent appeal” for communities across the nation to offer jobs to Cubans.

Sleeping on the Floor. Spreading out from Miami, up to 40,000 Cubans have migrated to 45 states. Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. On Florida’s west coast, 2,500 refugees are in cigar manufacturing Tampa. The city already has 11,000 unemployed, and jobs are scarce. A former university professor gets $139 a month as a floor refinisher; his wife, who was a teacher in Cuba, brings home $72 a month as a church-school playground supervisor. In Cuba the family earned $1,000 a month, but now they sleep on the floor for want of a bed.

Jobs are easier to find up north, where approximately 15,000 Cuban exiles have settled in the New York area. Boston has 300 Cubans, many of them elite professionals and some of them as lucky as Dr. and Mrs. Gerardo Canet: he is an economist with a Cambridge consultant firm; she is curator of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Years ago. both studied at Harvard. ”For us. the transition was easy.” says Dr. Canet. ”We simply returned to an area we knew.” But in New Orleans, where 400 refugees are clustered, an architect works in a shipyard, a former gentleman farmer loads milk cans in a dairy, and a lawyer is a $50-a-week warehouse checker. “I have to go on,” the lawyer says. “With a family of four, I cannot slip.”

Many Cuban doctors have settled in Chicago, lured by the city’s shortage of physicians, supporting themselves by doing medical research and laboratory work while they study for licenses. The Cubans must first pass a state examination prescribed for foreign physicians, then serve a year’s internship, finally pass another state examination before they can practice. Says one 32-year-old University of Havana medical school graduate: “I am glad to start again. It is not easy, but it is better than to be there.”

Learn Russian. Back “there” last week.

Cuba’s Communist dictatorship branded the fleeing professionals (half of the nation’s doctors are gone) as “traitors” and announced that their citizenship was to be revoked. To guard his new Cuba against such treachery, Castro announced that another 1,672 Cuban youths will soon sail to be “educated” behind the Iron Curtain. He also said that he would import 100 Soviet professors to teach Cubans a new language—Russian.