As Cuba changes, US exile leader seeks new path

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MIAMI – Francisco Jose Hernandez points to the boarded windows in his secretary's third floor office. Days before, a drive-by shooter peppered the glass with bullets.

The Cuban American National Foundation co-founder and president shrugs off the attack.

"I've seen it all before," his piercing black eyes seem to say.

And he has. Few living Cuban-Americans personify the exile experience better than the 73-year-old Hernandez, known as "Pepe." His journey from anti-Castro Bay of Pigs insurgent to outspoken supporter of limited re-engagement with the communist island provides lessons on both the human capacity for change — and its limits.

Hernandez is hardly alone in arguing Cuban exiles must cease to dwell on the past, but he speaks from a unique platform. While steadily working to topple Fidel Castro's government, he also popped up, Forest Gump-style, in the midst of the war in Angola, the fall of the Soviet Union and even the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Within months of taking office, President Barack Obama eased family travel to Cuba and is reviewing other foundation recommendations.

Friends call Hernandez a man of action. Although he denies ever targeting innocent people in his long battle against Castro, he is cagey about whom or what he did target. A former close associate says as late as the 1990s, Hernandez ran a secret "war group" funded by the foundation.

It would be a stretch to say Hernandez has done a 180-degree turn in his golden years. He opposes a wholesale lifting of the United States' nearly 50-year embargo, and it's unclear whether he regrets his own actions or those of friends. But he is ready to move on.

Of toppling Cuba's government, he says now: "It's not that I wouldn't like to do it. It's that I'm smart enough, and I have enough experience in these things, to know that that is not possible, and that it's counterproductive at this time because the Cuban people don't want that, and we don't have enough resources."

His words come at a key time in history, as an ailing Castro has ceded power to his brother Raul, providing the first major change in Cuban leadership in half a century. And they provide some cover for Obama among the older generation of exiles as the president seeks to reopen dialogue with the island for the first time in more than a decade.

Still, to those on the left, Hernandez remains a hard-liner not to be trusted. To those on the right, he is a traitor. It is, at times, a lonely place to be.

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To understand Hernandez' journey, one must start at the beginning.

He was 16 when Castro and his band of rebels launched their failed 1953 uprising against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Although the son of a career military officer, Hernandez also opposed Batista and became a leader of a Roman Catholic student youth group seeking to restore democracy.

In 1958, the rebels achieved a key victory in the central city of Santa Clara — and it was Hernandez' father, Col. Francisco Hernandez Leyva, who surrendered the garrison to Castro's comrade, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Hernandez's father was given safe passage home in exchange for his retirement, but when he later refused to testify against commanding officers charged with human rights abuses, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Then overnight, before his son could appeal, he was re-sentenced and executed.

Hernandez still rarely mentions his father's death, and stumbles as he reads from a 1962 account by the independent International Commission of Jurists in Geneva.

"Right there, I started to change my mind about many things," he says.

Hernandez began moving between the U.S. and Cuba, arming anti-communist rebels in the mountains with help from the CIA.

In January 1961, he and hundreds of other Cuban exiles were sent to Guatemala to train for the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. The operation was a disaster: The U.S. failed to provide sufficient air cover, and a promised popular uprising inside Cuba never developed. Hernandez and more than 1,000 others were captured and spent 18 months in Cuban prison.

Upon release, Hernandez and a cadre of other exiles redoubled their efforts to overthrow the Castro government while also serving the U.S., their new country.

Hernandez headed to officer training at Fort Benning, Ga., along with Jorge Mas Canosa, who would later serve as the public face of the Cuban American National Foundation, and Luis Posada, who would be accused in the bombing of a Cuban airliner, hotel explosions in Havana and other plots on Castro's life.

Hernandez became a Marine captain, working intelligence during the Vietnam War. The men also trained for missions to destabilize the government of Cuba and gather intelligence on the Russian presence there. They practiced in the eastern edges of the Everglades, before that wild swamp — like their dreams of returning home — slowly gave way to a quiet, suburban way of life.

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Like many in his generation, Hernandez worked hard to establish roots in his new home. He helped raise four children with his wife Ana, earned a masters in economics at Duke and a doctorate at the University of Florida, and built multimillion-dollar businesses in construction, animal feed and communications.

He also provided cover for CIA missions in the Middle East and in Africa, he says, and describes hiding for six hours in a broom closet in the Nairobi Hilton Hotel during Kenya's failed 1982 coup.

In the early 1980s, Hernandez and others established the foundation. From the Reagan through Clinton administrations, it reigned as one of the most powerful, single-issue lobbying groups in Washington, funneling millions of dollars to politicians across the country.

The foundation brought Reagan to speak in Little Havana in 1983, helping to link the Cuban-American vote to the Republican Party for decades to come.

Hernandez recalls grasping Reagan's elbow at a 1985 gala so Mas Canosa could question him on why U.S.-run radio broadcasts to Cuba had been approved but not launched. The move earned him an elbow jab from a nervous Secret Service agent. A photo of the three from that night shows them all grinning.

"Pepe's not a guy who likes giving speeches. Pepe's much more a guy of action," said Joe Garcia, a former foundation president.

The foundation persuaded Congress to repeal a law prohibiting federal aid to paramilitary groups in Angola, the African nation where forces trained by the Cubans and Soviets were fighting one of the Cold War's most high-profile Third World battles. Mas Canosa, Hernandez and others flew there and set up a radio station to help the anti-communist side.

There, Hernandez found a certificate given to an Angolan fighter by his Cuban trainers emblazoned with a Che Guevara quote: "....a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy."

It was then, Hernandez says, that he began to question how long Cuban-Americans could "keep fighting with the same arms, with the same killing and revenge."

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The fall of the Soviet Union made Hernandez hope that Cuba would follow the lead of the Eastern Bloc countries and take its first steps toward democracy. World leaders fueled his thinking, treating him and the other foundation leaders as if it were a question of time until they were heading a new Cuban government. Russia invited the CANF leaders to attend the official Christmas Day 1991 dismantling of the Soviet Union. Then the Czech government called on CANF to negotiate the future of Cuba's debt to its national bank.

"At that time everybody came to the conclusion that things in Cuba could change if there were just a spark," says Hernandez.

But who would light it?

According to a former foundation director, Tony Llama, Hernandez was selected in 1993 to head the group's secret war group, which authorized Llama and others to buy several boats, a helicopter and weapons to help destabilize the island and assassinate Castro.

Hernandez says the so-called war group was a joke, that the men merely wanted "a contingency plan" in case that match was struck. He maintains the foundation has always been dedicated to nonviolence.

Llama was arrested in 1997 along with several members of the group off the coast of Puerto Rico on charges they were on their way to assassinate Castro during a summit in Venezuela. Hernandez' high-powered rifle was found on the boat, and the FBI listed him as a person of interest, even fingerprinting him. But he was never charged, and the rest were acquitted.

Hernandez says he bought the rifle to help those attempting to extract Cuban dissidents from the island defend themselves, but he is vague about how it ended up on the boat.

In 1997, hotel bombings in Havana killed an Italian tourist. In an interview the following year, Posada, a former CIA operative, claimed responsibility and said foundation directors had funded his activities for years; he then recanted both statements. Today, Posada lives in Miami, awaiting trial on immigration fraud charges. He is still wanted in Venezuela for allegedly masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73.

Asked about Posada, Hernandez' steady gaze falls and the occasional stutter returns. He repeats that Posada denied implicating the foundation.

"What world public opinion pictures as a terrorist, he's not that," Hernandez says. "He has had, much as I have had, my mind very set on trying to get rid of a government and a regime in Cuba but not to terrorize the people in Cuba."

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The foundation's members began to splinter and its power to wane after Mas Canosa's death in 1997. A few years later, the Elian Gonzalez case made clear how much had shifted.

The Cuban boy was found lashed to an innertube off Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving 1999, his mother and others having drowned when their boat sank in an attempt to reach Florida; his father in Cuba asked that he be returned. When the U.S. Cuban community's mobilized to try to keep the child here, many Americans reacted with outrage.

Old assumptions about public support no longer applied. Meanwhile, new immigrants from Cuba lacked the earlier generation's thirst for revenge. They wanted to help their families back on the island.

To remain relevant, leaders like Hernandez had to change. One example: He joined the Cuba study group of the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

"He's had a remarkable transformation from being Mas' right hand to a man of dialogue," said journalist Ann Louise Bardach, who has written critically of the foundation. "I do believe he is sincere, maybe not pure — but who is in the Cuba War?"

If the shooting in his secretary's office was a skirmish in that war, Hernandez says he's is ready to let it go.

He speaks of what he has learned and refers to the younger generation, including his own U.S.-born children. "Instead of imposing, I have to try to convince, or I have to show examples of where I have made mistakes and how not to make them. This is what our generation must do with Cuba.

"If we want to do something for the Cuban people, it has to be something that our children also recognize as something of value, not simply trying to destroy."