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REMAINING DEFIANT
MARCH 4, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
With the international community still debating the actions of the Cuban Air Force in the downing of two civilian planes, Cuban exiles staged memorials to the pilots. In ceremonies in Miami and in the Florida Straits, "Brothers to the Rescue," the refugee group who piloted the planes, continued to speak out against the Fidel Castro. Betty Ann Bowser reports.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: A crowd estimated at more 60,000 filled Miami's Orange Bowl to memorialize the four young pilots shot down last week by Cuban MiG's off the Coast of Cuba.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, U.S. Ambassador to the UN: When the government of Fidel Castro tries as it has to deny that what it did was murder, America will tell the truth. (cheering of crowd)
BETTY ANN BOWSER: The young fliers belonged to Brothers to the Rescue, an organization founded by Cuban exiles. They routinely fly over the Florida Straits looking for Cuban rafters fleeing Cuba. The four pilots were killed when they were on such a mission. (crowd cheering) There were thunderous applause when founders of Brothers to the Rescue flew over the Orange Bowl in a tribute to their fallen comrades. (applause) For Cuban exile Tere Zubizarreta and her American-born daughter, Michelle, it was an emotional experience. They've heard stories about Castro's brutality for years, but nothing prepared them for the reality of the shootdown on February 24th.
MICHELLE ZUBIZARRETA: I don't think there's anything at least in my generations, in the years that I've, you know, been alive that had this kind of impact, and then you also look at their ages. I think that for my generation that kind of touched us also because it's a whole different factor in terms of your own immortality. I mean, they were 24, 29 years old. I'm 28. So--and they were doing things that I don't think a lot of us would do, and yet, they were--every day that they got into those planes, they were sacrificing their lives for Cuba--some of them weren't even born there.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Michelle Zubizarreta is a senior vice president in her mother's advertising business, the largest Hispanic ad agency in the United States, with billings this year alone of $40 million. For years, Mrs. Zubizarreta has been active in Cuban-American causes, but the deaths of the young fliers has reignited her passions about Cuba.
TERE ZUBIZARRETA: This has been like a, like a blow in the head. You know, it has made us realize that, that Castro's still there, that Cuba is still crying, and that we have to do something.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Do you think there should be any kind of normalization of relations between the two countries?
TERE ZUBIZARRETA: No, never. Not now.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: This is the position of a number of anti-Castro organizations like the Cuban American Foundation. President Jorge Mas Canosa says the four pilots' deaths have become a rallying point for the so-called hard-line right.
JORGE MAS CANOSA, Cuban American Foundation: We believe that this is a turning point in Cuban history, and it has redeemed the position that we have sustained all along: You can't dialogue with a criminal.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Andres Oppenheimer is Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the "Miami Herald." He has been covering Cuban-American issues for more than 20 years.
ANDRES OPPENHEIMER, Miami Herald: There's no question that this has helped the hard-liners within the Cuban community. This has pushed their agenda incredibly and is as strong as a cold shower and all the moderates and all the people who thought the U.S. and Cuba could begin negotiations towards a gradual normalization of relations.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: One of the leaders of the pro-dialogue movement, Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, concedes his side has suffered a setback. Once a political prisoner in Cuba now living in Miami with his family, Menoyo says Brothers to the Rescue was deliberately provocative with the Cuban government.
ELOY GUTIERREZ MENOYO, Cambio Cubano: (speaking through interpreter) They have done it with conscience. They needed those martyrs.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Martyrs?
ELOY GUTIERREZ MENOYO; (speaking through interpreter) Martyrs. They needed them because it has proven that they have put an obstacle towards all the talks that have been done or anything that Clinton was doing with Cuba and trying to talk through a peaceful solution.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Jose Basulto, founder of Brothers to the Rescue, says he and his pilots have never tried to provoke Castro.
JOSE BASULTO, Brothers to the Rescue: We must not waver in our effort to bring assistance and support to those who struggle through non-violent means inside the island. It is there where our first priority lies.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Basulto supports a third approach to the Cuban question, based on the peaceful, non-violent principles of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King. Basulto and other Cuban-American leaders believe that organizing flotillas, that by flying close to Cuban air space, and holding demonstrations in a non-violent manner will keep Cuban issues alive in the international arena. Over the weekend Basulto and the Brothers flew near Cuba to memorialize the four dead pilots. In the waters below, a
flotilla braved eight-foot seas to remember the young Cuban-Americans. The television pictures were broadcast around the world, a strategy reporter Oppenheimer says is working.
ANDRES OPPENHEIMER: The hard-liners are seeing that Brothers to the Rescue, through non-violent, peaceful moves, have sort of No. 1, challenged Fidel Castro's propaganda line that all Miami exiles are right-wing terrorists, and No. 2, it has attracted international attention to Cuban civil rights violations.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Seventeen-year-old Patrick Hidalgo has heard many stories of human rights violations from his exiled parents. Last Summer, he spent eight days with a Cuban family near Havana. He says the experience convinced him that opening up relations with the Cuban people is the only way to make Castro go peacefully.
PATRICK HIDALGO: They don't even know the good of democracy, and I think how can, how can they fight something, if they don't even know what it is. That's why I think we shouldn't isolate them further as the Helms-Burden bill, and all these other bills are trying to do.
ELOISA HIDALGO: I was beginning to think that the dialogue will work. Now, I don't believe it will work at all.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: What changed your mind?
ELOISA HIDALGO: The way he killed these two planes, you know. They were not doing anything to the country. They had never done anything. They had never killed anybody, just throw leaflets, which doesn't do any harm, and just to, you know, go and drop a bomb right on them the way they did, I mean, shows you what he is. He is an animal.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: So for now, the division in Miami's Cuban community over how to deal with Castro has been muted by reaction to the shooting down of four young pilots.
TERE ZUBIZARRETA: I think it has united us for the first time. I think it has finally struck a cord of patriotism and also of anger. I'm angry. I'm very angry, and I'm very sad.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Over the weekend, that was the unmistakable message.
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