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Democrat Hears Obama, Senses Castro

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By TOM JACKSON

@tampatrib.com

Published: October 22, 2008

DADE CITY - Two things, and only two things, are off-limits in the examination of Rose Fernandez's life: "My age and my weight. I don't discuss them." Otherwise, her experiences, decisions, associations, philosophies and maybe even - assuming one thought to ask - shoe size are open for inspection.

The tradeoff is a bargain.

Where else can we find an international finishing school graduate, a former member of the anti-Castro underground who stared down Fidel's machine-gun toting thugs and was spirited to the United States only months after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961?

Who earned multiple degrees from nearby colleges and universities, was once the Bill Gates of Pasco County grant-winning teams, and has had her picture taken with every significant Democrat to pass through west-central Florida since disco was king?

Who had esteemed Lawton Chiles as her mentor, and whose loyalty was repaid by the revered he-coon when he praised Fernandez as the personification of the final two syllables in "American"?

"I can," Fernandez says, adding in a voice enriched by emotion, "that's what it means to be an American."

Harsh Lesson Revisited

But history and achievement are not what summoned us here, to this corner office in the shadow of the goal posts of Pasco High's W.F. Edwards Stadium where she oversees a trio of family care medical clinics, and into the presence of all these framed moments with Democratic immortals.

Rose Fernandez knows what she is about to say may come at a cost. But the past often is prelude, and with Election Day at hand, the dark days of her youth are suddenly very much with her. Then as now, the mountains and valleys, beaches and boulevards reverberated with a single, unifying chant. "Cambio!" Castro was coming, bringing change.

"I hear it again now," Fernandez says, "and truthfully, I don't like it."

Experience's harsh lessons are not easily dismissed. "Poor people thought Fidel was going to take money from the rich and distribute it among them," Fernandez says. "But that's not what happened. The poor stayed poor. The middle class became poor. The very rich flew away."

Cuba's revolutionary government seized the restaurant Fernandez's father owned, she says, as well as the beachfront property where Ernest Hemingway conceived and wrote "The Old Man and the Sea." It seized the retirement savings her grandmother accumulated working at a stocking factory.

Before Castro came down from the mountains, Fernandez says, "Everyone said, 'Communism is not coming; the Americans will stop it.' Well, they didn't, and that was 90 miles away. What will we do this time?"

Spreading Misery

If Fernandez seems to be jumping at shadows, remember Joe the Plumber and his epic encounter with the Agent of Change. Barack Obama's guileless admission about spreading the wealth could have been torn from Castro's 1958 playbook. "Who got the wealth?" Fernandez says. "Fidel and his closest allies."

For months, since the subduing of Hillary Clinton, Fernandez has been in a perpetual state of cringe, asking, "Whose change? What kind of change?" Now this once steadfast Democrat thinks she knows, and she fears for the America she loves.

"This election," she says, "has become a nightmare."

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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