Among exile elite, a shift over Cuba-US policy

Among exile elite, a shift over Cuba-US policy
By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ, Associated Press | February 8, 2014 | Updated: February 8, 2014 1:48pm



Photo By Lynne Sladky/AP

FILE- In this In this Dec. 11, 2013 file photo, developer and art collector Jorge
Perez, poses for a photograph in his office at the Related Group, in Miami. Perez
is one of Florida’s powerful Cuban-American business leaders. He wants to
soften the U.S. government’s longtime economic embargo against Cuba’s
communist government.



MIAMI (AP) — When Miami's new art museum opened in December, namesake Jorge Perez spoke easily about a once-taboo topic among Cuban-American powerbrokers: his desire to increase artistic exchanges with those on the communist island.

Then, this week, billionaire sugar baron Alfonso Fanjul — whose family's business was seized by Fidel Castro in 1959 — spoke publicly for the first time about investing back in Cuba.

Both men are among a growing number of powerful South Florida Cuban-American business, civic and political leaders breaking the long-held public line on U.S. relations with Cuba and the Castro government. For all the talk of changing attitudes among second-generation Cuban-Americans and newer Cuban arrivals, older powerbrokers have remained the guardians of the U.S government's five-decade economic and travel embargo against Cuba and have for years used their political influence to block any major changes.

"If you set a policy in place to seek a certain set of objectives. After a while, if those objectives are not achieved, you either changed your policies or you change your objectives, "said businessman and former Ambassador to Belgium, Paul Cejas, who also left Cuba shortly after the revolution. "Diplomacy is a tool of policy. It's a tool of engagement. It's used with even the most bitter of our enemies,"

More:
http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Among-exile-elite-a-shift-over-Cuba-US-policy-5216827.php