MIAMI — This city's voluble Cuban exiles, who have been on a collective Fidel Castro death watch for decades, shouted in the streets in a state of ecstasy Tuesday after the communist regime's surprising announcement that the charismatic \o7caudillo\f7 had handed the reins of power to his brother.
Yet for many of the aging Cubans who came to the United States generations ago to flee Castro, the mood of exultation soon gave way to a sober realization: The dictator's long-awaited final hour will come too late for them to reclaim their lost lives.
Many Cuban exiles said they no longer harbored dreams of a glorious return home to open businesses and reclaim family properties in a free Cuba, as they did 10 or 20 years earlier. They are grounded in this country, their children are lifelong Americans, and they plan to stay.
"Why would I want to go to a country where I don't know anyone anymore, to a big house that needs hundreds of thousands of dollars of work?" asked Raquel Blizard, 70, whose aunt had willed to her a mansion, with a wrought iron veranda and ample servants' quarters, in Havana's once-fashionable Vedado neighborhood.
"My family, my husband and my children, they're all here now."
Calle Ocho, the heart of Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, was flooded with exiles waving Cuban flags, dancing and honking horns in cacophonous celebration, after Castro's secretary went on television Monday evening and said Castro, 79, was temporarily ceding power to his brother Raul, 75.
Trucks blared the Cuban national anthem on loudspeakers, while anti-Castro activists in guayabera shirts joyously waved banners that declared, "The tyrant is dead."
"There is a tremendous amount of excitement," said Miami's Cuban-born Mayor Manny Diaz, as he mingled at Versailles restaurant, the epicenter of the exile community. "This is a totalitarian government that has destroyed families, and it may be coming to an end."
Yet many of the Cuban exiles standing along the street made it clear that although they held an inexorable hatred for Castro, and a profound hope that they could live to see their old country returned to freedom, they were Americans now.
"Some people will leave Miami for Cuba, and the real estate market will probably drop," if the Castro government falls, said Mario Torralbas, 72, a retired dentist who stopped by Calle Ocho to revel in the emotion of Tuesday's moment. "But I bet you within a year, those people will be back in Miami. It's going to be very hard to fix the mess this man has made."
