MIAMI (AP) – Hours before President Barack Obama announced an end to a half-century of U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba’s communist government, the Cuban American National Foundation opened the doors to its inviting new headquarters, with a modern glass and concrete lobby in the heart of Miami’s Cuban exile community.
The symbolism is hard to ignore: The lobbying group was founded in 1981 by veterans of covert U.S.-supported missions to overthrow Fidel and Raul Castro, and for many years it worked to undermine the communist government from offices in an unmarked Miami building outside Little Havana. A guard kept out unwelcome visitors, and its leader Jorge Mas Canosa tended to leave little room for differing opinions.
But Mas Canosa’s son, Jorge Mas Santos, has transformed the foundation since his father’s death in 1997, and the new building is better suited to this latest, more direct and transparent chapter in U.S. Cuba relations.
It also reflects how a niche industry of passionate anti-Castro groups, sustained in part by millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars over the decades, will have to adapt to new ways of dealing with Cuba.
“I think now everybody is going to be – and should be – more open about the activities they do with the opposition in Cuba,” the foundation’s president, Pepe Hernandez, told The Associated Press in an interview.