For Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, "opponent'' is something of a career description. As part of Fidel Castro's rebel army in the 1950s, he led 3,000 men against the Batista dictatorship. When the victorious Castro moved politically into the Soviet camp, Menoyo launched a quixotic raid against his former comrades. That landed him in a Cuban jail for 22 years. Released in 1987, he flew to Miami, where he was greeted by cheering crowds of fellow exiles.
Today Menoyo is back in the opposition, this time against the leadership of the Cuban-American community that cheered his arrival. In 1993 he formed Cambio Cubano, Cuban Change, a group dedicated to a peaceful transition to postcommunist rule in Cuba. For Menoyo that requires dialogue with Castro-or as exile hard-liners would put it, fraternizing with the enemy.
Three weeks ago, Menoyo enraged them further by meeting with Castro in Havana. It was one small move in the flirtation between Fidel and the U.S., testing the Cuban leader's willingness to make real changes at home in return for a relaxation of the 33-year-old U.S. trade and travel embargo. Menoyo is convinced that more and more Cuban Americans are accepting, reluctantly, the idea of negotiation with Castro. The largest segment of exile opinion is still represented by Jorge Mas Canosa and his Cuban-American National Foundation, a ferociously anti-Castro organization that claims 200,000 members. But the hard line is no longer imposed as it was in the 1980s, when more than a dozen terrorist bombs were aimed at exiles who dissented from its position. Lately other dialogistas have come forward, including even Antonio Veciana, a co-founder of Alpha 66, an anti-Castro paramilitary group, who now supports some compromise. "Those who had been silent have begun to lose their fear," says Menoyo. "They have started to speak up.''
But how many do they speak for? Among the roughly 600,000 Cuban Americans in the Miami area, this is a time of psychological flux. Despite the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of Moscow's subsidies, Castro has hung on to power. So, asks Menoyo, what have the exiles gained from 35 years of confrontation? "Imagine a person who diets for that long without losing a pound,'' he says. "Anyone with common sense would change diets.''
Enter Castro, holding a carrot. Desperate for foreign currency, he has opened up large sectors of his economy to foreign investment, an opportunity that American companies-and Cuban-American entrepreneurs-can't take advantage of because of the embargo. Meanwhile, the children of older refugees, now grown, have little memory of Cuba and less attachment to the dream of returning.
Which is why some shifts in opinion are detectable. The exile community was shocked in May when the White House announced that in the future the U.S. would turn back Cuban boat people. However, polls indicated that 45% of Cuban Americans supported the change. And an April survey conducted by Florida International University showed that 63% of Miami-area Cuban Americans favor negotiations with Castro.