After Fidel, Mr. Mas? : From Exile, the Most Influential Cuban in America Plots His Archenemy’s Fall

JORGE MAS CANOSA, 52, IS A MIAMI BEEKEEPER AND former milkman who made his fortune planting telephone cable and has a very busy-looking passport. It is stamped with the names of far-flung ports-of-call: Brazil. Nicaragua. Czechoslovakia. Argentina. El Salvador. Panama. Hungary. Honduras. Chile. Costa Rica. Guatemala. Portugal. Angola. The Soviet Union. It should also probably be stamped with the name of the city in the United States that he visits most frequently, Washington, since Mas still considers himself a foreigner in the country in which he’s lived for more than 30 years.

Mr. Mas, as he is called by those who know him, visited Czechoslovakia shortly after Vaclav Havel assumed power and, he says, tutored the playwright-president on the mechanics of capitalism. In mid-1991, Mas visited Nicaragua to congratulate Violeta Barrios de Chamorro after she was elected president. Last summer he visited Puerto Rico, where he was honored before a full session of the senate. He also visited Lisbon, Portugal, where he helped broker the peace agreement between Angola’s communist government, backed by Fidel Castro, and the Angolan rebel, Jonas Savimbi, who is a warm personal friend of Mas. In Lisbon, Mas also spoke to the Portuguese president, Mario Soares, before Soares traveled to Mexico and met with the leaders of other Hispanic countries, including Castro, whom Soares called “a dinosaur.” And only a few days after the failed coup attempt in the Soviet Union last August, Mas visited with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, just one week before the Soviets announced that they were pulling their troops out of Cuba.

Sometimes people come to Mr. Mas. When Cuban rafters, called lancheros , wash up on the shores of South Florida, the first name they are likely to mention is that of Jorge Mas Canosa. When President Bush wants to make a policy speech about this country’s relations--or rather, lack of relations--with Cuba, he sends Bernard Aronson, his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, to Miami to deliver that message before Mas and the Cuban-American National Foundation, the powerful lobbying group Mas founded in 1981. Sometimes Bush comes and speaks to the CANF himself, or Mas goes to Washington and confers with the President. “I know him close enough to call,” Mas says of the President, “and even if I don’t talk to him personally, I get his attention.”

In 11 days last summer, Mr. Mas visited 10 foreign countries and was received by 10 heads of state. His visits had a single purpose, just as Mas has only a single purpose: to persuade those heads of state to help him drive Fidel Castro from power and return Cuba to democracy. Jorge Mas Canosa is a trim, dapper, gray-haired little man who favors gray suits, tasseled black loafers and gray-tinted eyeglasses that he wears indoors or out. Little is known about Mas, his personal life, his lifestyle--even his movements, until they are made. What is known about Mr. Mas is that he is a footnote to international politics who happens to be the most influential Cuban in the United States. He is also, according to his friends, the man most likely, after Castro’s demise, to become the first democratically elected president of Cuba. To his enemies, he is the man they most fear becoming president of Cuba.

MR. MAS IS A SOMETIMES-BROODING, SOFT-FEATURED MAN WHO SEES THE world solely in terms of conspiracies that only he can unravel. He drives a bombproof Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL and has been known to carry a loaded .357 magnum in his briefcase. He debugs his house every few months. He is not afraid to act physically to defend a real or imagined slight. A few years ago he punched out his younger brother Ricardo over a business matter. Ricardo sued Mas for libel and won a judgment of more than a million dollars.

Mas has established “a very profitable business” of installing telephone line for Southern Bell, one that has made him a millionaire 10 times over. But more important, to him anyway, it has given him access to the corridors of power, especially in Washington, where he is known as “the Lone Ranger.”

He is a political friend to Presidents (Reagan, Bush) and has been an enemy, too (Kennedy). In 1975, when he wanted to start Radio Marti, a sort of Spanish-language Voice of America broadcast to Cuba, to undermine Castro’s regime, he had a friend contact Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to ensure that the senator, not an advocate of Radio Marti, would not oppose their efforts. He didn’t. In 1985, when he wanted to make sure Savimbi’s rebels continued to get financial aid, he stopped by the late Sen. Claude Pepper’s house. It was done, to the tune of $30 million.

Bernard Aronson says of Mas: “He’s a widely respected leader in the Cuban community, and his views are taken very seriously by this Administration. I have a lot of respect for Mr. Mas. He’s an impressive man. The stereotype of him”--which holds that Mas is an intransigent demagogue--”is not accurate.” Aronson believes that Mas, and his insistence on a continued U.S. embargo of Cuba, has contributed to that country’s economic free fall. The damage to the Cuban economy, which has shrunk more than 25% since its Eastern Europe trading partners abandoned communism, was also helped by Radio Marti. “Eastern Europeans always said the VOA (Voice of America) sustained them under communism,” says Aronson. “The same is true of Radio Marti.”

It does not matter to Mas whether the men he courts are liberals or conservatives. It matters only that they stand on the “honorable” side of the only issue that concerns him: Castro’s demise. It is his litmus test that determines which politicians receive financial contributions from the vast sums at his disposal--CANF directors contribute at least $10,000 a year to join; Mas contributes $50,000. The 211,000-member Cuban group has been called one of the most powerful lobbying forces in this country because it is not just a group of “hired hands,” says one congressional aide. It’s a group of men acting out of “an emotional and personal imperative” concerning a single issue.

“We never forget our friends,” says Mas. “And we always remember our enemies.” Mas has a lot of enemies, besides Castro. Left-wing Cuban exiles who would like rapprochement with Castro. Right-wing Cuban exiles who want nothing less than a military invasion of Cuba. U.S. apologists for Castro who would like the United States to resume trade with Cuba.

“He has a kind of hypnosis of power,” a left-wing exile says of Mas.

“If a man like Che Guevera were on our side,” says a right-wing exile, “we would have been back in Cuba long ago. However, instead of Che we have Mas Canosa.”

Mas laughs. “I must be doing something right,” he says. “Both the left and the right hate me.”

Mas lumps both right-wing exile terrorists and left-wing Castro sympathizers into a single pot, then empties it. “They have no power base,” he says. He scoffs at the dissidents on the island, who think they can pressure Castro toward democracy. “Can the devil play the role of God?” Mas says. “Never!” He laughs at the left-wing exile who claimed he was a spy for Castro and had infiltrated the CIA and TV Marti--an often-jammed, less effective companion to Radio Marti--before fleeing back to Cuba as a hero. “The only time that guy was taken seriously in Miami,” says Mas, “was when he ran in a pageant for the ugliest Cuban in Miami, and won.” Mas also laughs at the terrorist exiles, like the man who called a press conference in Miami dressed in a black hooded cloak and announced that he was sneaking back into Cuba to assassinate Castro. “It was very humorous,” says Mas. “There was a lot of laughter in Miami. Cubans need that kind of show now and then.”

Such “show” is an important part of the Cuban temperament, Mas adds, which is something Anglos don’t understand. Cubans expect a certain romantic (Anglos would say comical) bravado in their leaders in the same way Anglos expect a dour, pompous seriousness in theirs. Cubans understand that there can be a very strong relationship between a “show” of power and the reality of power. Which was why Mas once challenged to a duel a fellow Cuban exile who had accused Mas of attracting communist investors to develop an island off the coast of Miami. Mas says someone discovered that one of the other investors did business with Cubana Airlines and the whole thing got blown out of proportion. The challenger chose water pistols as weapons to “cool off” Mas. The Anglos in Miami laughed, but the Cubans in Miami understood and applauded Mas.

“What else could I do?” says Mas with a shrug. “He touched my moral fiber, my honor, my Cuban temperament. Sometimes you have to support words with deeds. So I challenged him to a duel on a field of honor. Guns or swords.” He pauses, then adds, “A man without passion is nothing.”

Mas is constantly claiming he is misunderstood by Miami Anglos, especially those who run the city’s major newspaper, the Miami Herald. When a Herald editorial in January opposed a bill in Congress that would tighten this country’s economic embargo of Cuba, Mas was furious at what he called “the paper’s distortion and disinformation.” He promptly denounced the Herald for “manipulating information like Granma,” the Cuban Communist Party newspaper. He paid for signs on Miami’s buses that read, in both Spanish and English, “I don’t believe the Herald!” He accused the Herald of being an unwitting tool of Castro, which to Mas and other Cubans like him was perfectly understood hyperbole.

The Herald was not so understanding, especially when its newspaper boxes began to be destroyed, or defaced with words like “ communistas! “; its offices received bomb threats; and its publisher’s life was threatened. Mas scoffed at such threats and pointed out that the previous Herald publisher had also received death threats, that he himself had received death threats and that nothing had ever come of them.

The publisher, David Lawrence Jr., responded with a column titled “Come On Mr. Mas, Be Fair,” in which he said Mas’ intransigence would turn Miami into a “totalitarian society.” “You are a powerful person, here and in Washington,” Lawrence wrote. “You would like to hurt us, destroy us if you could.” Mas responded with an op-ed column of his own, in which he accused the Herald of being intolerant of his freedom to criticize the paper. “You are the one who cannot accept criticism,” Mas wrote, then offered a reward leading to the arrest of those who made the bomb and death threats.

Mas reserves his deepest scorn for those he considers Anglo apologists for Castro, like the Herald and like Wayne S. Smith, who believes that the best way to help Cuba is to encourage dialogue with Castro. Smith, a chunky, counterculture-looking man with a beard and wire-rimmed spectacles, is the former chief of the U.S. interests section in Havana. A recognized authority on Cuba, he has written a book, “Portrait of Cuba,” which portrays campesinos under Castro as happy, smiling, brown-skinned peasants.

Smith says the idea of Mas as president of Cuba is “bizarre. Most Cubans on the island fear him. He’s too narrow and impassioned. He doesn’t even understand democracy.”

Mas describes Smith’s views on Cuba as “the dream of a nice gentleman without a hat on a hot summer day.” According to Mas, it is men like Smith who don’t understand democracy and how it is intertwined with capitalism. Mas learned that the more money he made, the more access he got to the corridors of our democratic institutions. And so he formulated a simple theory: Capitalism and democracy equals power. That’s why he thinks Cubans on the island will welcome him and other wealthy exiles with open arms.

“When Castro falls and the exiles move in,” says Mas, “the biggest problem in Cuba will be its economy. We (exiles) have very carefully designed programs to start companies and businesses that will be partly owned by the Cuban people. They will accept us because we will give them jobs. The power of the free market will annihilate everything.”

Although Mas denies that he has presidential ambitions, he believes that once the exiles have brought capitalism to the Cuban people, the exiles will be rewarded with political power. Which is why Mas has so many enemies in the States. He has mastered the politics of power in ways that Cuban dissidents, exile terrorists and liberal ideologists have not. They resent his power base here, and they fear that he will use it for a leg up on a power base in Cuba in the future.

In the late ‘80s, Mas stood on Biscayne Boulevard among a crowd of exiles throwing stones and eggs at Miamians protesting U.S. aid to Nicaraguan Contras. He claims he is now “wiser, more mature.” At 14, he broadcast slogans opposing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista over a radio station in his hometown of Santiago de Cuba, and was arrested. After his release, his father promptly flew him to the United States and enrolled him in Presbyterian Junior College in Maxton, N.C., to protect him. When he was 19, he flew back to Cuba after Batista was overthrown by Castro. When he grew disenchanted with the man he once called “Robin Hood,” he began broadcasting anti-Castro tirades over the radio.

He was arrested again. After he was released, a friend found him distributing anti-Castro literature on a street corner. “You’re crazy, man!” said the friend. Mas fled Cuba a second time, only to return months later, in a PT boat with other Cuban exiles, during the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco.

He managed to escape a third time, to Miami, where he bought a small boat, armed it with missiles, and fired them at Havana. He rented a B-26 bomber, outfitted it with bombs and missiles, but couldn’t find a country that would let him launch it toward Cuba. So he joined the U.S. Army, urged on by the CIA, and trained with other exiles for what they thought would be an invasion of Cuba. When he discovered that President Kennedy had no intention of launching them against Cuba, just as he’d had no intention of providing the Bay of Pigs rebels with air support, Mas quit in disgust. Kennedy then became the second-most hated man in Mas’ life.

Even today, Mas does not apologize for his past acts of violence. “I am a man of strong feelings,” he says. In 1776, he would have been considered a patriotic firebrand like Thomas Paine. In Cuba in 1898, during the Spanish-American War, he would have been considered a freedom fighter, like his idolized grandfather who fought with the Mambi rebels to free Cuba from the yoke of Spain. But those were simpler times, when men’s only recourse to freedom was physical acts of courage. Today such acts are considered out of step in an age when international problems are debated among nations at a large, round table in a glass-walled skyscraper.

He claims he has tried to change with the times, to shed his caveman image. But his enemies claim that the only thing that has changed is that he’s turned from foot soldier to dictator. His enemies swear that Radio Marti and the CANF are nothing more than de facto political parties and governments in exile, complete with their own constitution, whose sole purpose is to promote Mas as Cuba’s first democratically elected president. Former Radio Marti director Ernesto Betancourt resigned in 1990, complaining that Mas and the CANF were using federally financed Radio Marti as a propaganda tool to, Betancourt says now, “create a political image of (Mas) as the future president of Cuba. He seems to have become obsessed with becoming the president of Cuba--with power. He hurts his own cause with his ambition.”

Others think of Mas as less presidential than fascistic. They claim he is a right-wing reactionary; an unregenerate capitalist; a man who is betraying Cuba and its exiles by his intransigence; a man whose view of the world is solipsistic; or worse, a man who is so out of step with the times, the country he fled in 1961 and even the country he has called home since, that he is a fool.

Mas throws up his hands and shrugs. “I am a misunderstood man,” he says. Then he goes on to admit that many of the criticisms leveled against him are valid. He is passionate, prone to physical action, unbending, but only because his cause is just. And, of course, because he is Cuban, not American. He sees Americans as flaccid, emasculated, without passion. Which is why, he says, “I have never assimilated.

I never intended to. I am a Cuban first. I live here only as an extension of Cuba. I live a Cuban life here. My friends, my social activities, they are all Cuban.”

Mas says he did not come to this country like immigrants before him, hat in hand, looking to be fed. “I was a political exile,” he says, “not an economic immigrant. I thought I’d return to Cuba in a few months, a year or two.” When he finally realized that was not a realistic goal, he accommodated himself to his new country, but only up to a point. He became an American success, but only in ways that would lead him back to Cuba. If his passion and righteous cause were not enough, then he would do it the American way: with money and power.

“I love America,” he says. “I would die for it. I’d never have been so successful in Cuba. But people like me need to be fed with more than success. I have all the money I’ll ever need. I don’t do this for money. I do this because I feel like a tree without roots.” He does it, he says, because he wants to have his tombstone planted in the old churchyard where he used to meet his sweetheart, now his wife, in Santiago de Cuba. On it will be chiseled: “He belonged to a generation that lived longer in the United States than in his own land. And still, this generation was the one that made us free. . . .”

DURING THE GULF WAR, MAS IS A GUEST SPEAKER AT THE GREATER MIAMI Jewish Federation in Miami Beach. Before he speaks, Mas schmoozes with his hosts in their conference room. Men approach Mas as if for an audience. They are mostly Jews, with European ancestry and angular features. They shake his hand vigorously and call him “George,” or “Mr. Mas Canosa.” He says to them, laughingly, in accented English, “Not everything I say this morning is for publication,” and winks. Fellow conspirators. Men who, in Mas’ mind’s eye, see the whole world in terms of conspiracy. He understands such men and their penchant for secrecy and labyrinthine ways. They see enemies everywhere, because like him, they have a single goal. To protect their homelands.

Mas has a fascination with Israel. Israel was founded by men who were called “terrorists” until they assumed power and, miraculously, became “statesmen.” It’s a transition that he and other exiles would like to make in Cuba. He is also fascinated by the subtle way the Israeli lobby in America has pressured this country to support Israel, by linking its survival with American ideals of freedom and democracy. He has learned from that lobby that it is more important to have access to congressmen and senators than speedboats with missile launchers. He has tried, not always with success, to make that transition himself, from a man of action to a man who wields influence behind the seats of power.

Some of the men who approach Mas are darker-skinned, with soft, pouty features and black hair. He holds out a limp hand, like a cardinal might. They bow slightly and touch his fingertips. They call him “Jorge,” or simply “Senor Mas.” To these men, Mas is not so jovial. He leans slightly forward, his lips close to their ears, and says something softly in Spanish while keeping his eyes straight ahead. After 30 years in a country that his own country’s heroes, from Castro to Jose Marti, always distrusted, the conspiratorial whisper is a difficult habit to break.

“Cuba is a bankrupt society on the verge of collapse,” Mas begins his speech. “Castro will fall in a year or two.” Mas is so sure of this that he has already made arrangements to rent the Orange Bowl for a celebration on that day.

Now he is talking about recently liberated Eastern Europe. Mas says that Eastern Europe’s economic problems stem from its having no recent history of a free-market economy. Such a fate will not befall Cuba after Castro, because 20% of the island’s population is exiled in America. Those exiles understand the free market. They came to America with nothing, remade their lives, became successes, without welfare, and now they are strong enough financially to aid in Cuba’s reconstruction. They will rebuild Cuba with private capital and American know-how. “And we won’t ask the United States for anything,” Mas says. Applause.

This sense of superiority is precisely why Castro threw out the exiles in the early ‘60s. He threw out the wealthy so he could confiscate their wealth; the intellectuals so no one would question his actions, and the politicals so he would have no rivals. Most of those exiles were of the white upper class. Today in Cuba, 65% of the islanders are black or mulatto. If they have not exactly prospered under Castro, at least they have running water, electricity and access to education. They owe their loyalty to Castro, no matter what freedoms they lack, and many fear that rich white exiles like Jorge Mas Canosa will return them to their pre-Castro peasant status.

It does not help that even Miamians refer to the CANF as a rich, white men’s club. Miami blacks have been frustrated ever since the first exiles came ashore. Those exiles were doctors, lawyers, college professors and businessmen, who not only didn’t want to be here but also couldn’t speak the language. Still, they remade their lives into successes by taking menial jobs (Mas was a milkman, shoe salesman, dishwasher, stevedore), and quickly moving up the social ladder, past the city’s blacks. Today, they control the city both politically and financially. Mas likes to say he knows 10 Miami millionaires who can speak only two words of English, “yes” and “no.”

These CANF exiles have already drawn up a constitution to be implemented in Cuba once Castro is gone. They have made contacts with foreign countries for goods and services that the island will need. “I met a friend in Helsinki recently,” Mas tells his audience. “I said, ‘Jose, what the hell are you doing in this frozen country?’ ” Laughter. “He said, ‘Jorge, I’m buying ferryboats so I can have the first ferry service from Miami to Havana once that S.O.B. is gone.’ ” More laughter.

“I am sorry I go on so long,” Mas continues. “I have a lot of passion. We Cubans are controversial. We have strong opinions. But we are not so rigid, so conservative, so inflexible as some present us. That’s how Castro plans to divide us so the United States will lift its embargo. But we exiles are not divided.”

Which, again, is not precisely the truth. About the only issue that unites the disparate exile factions is their hatred of Castro. Historically, they have been divided into four groups. The most liberal are called dialogueros because they want to have a dialogue with Castro either to persuade him to hold free elections or to return the revolution to its pure socialist roots. The conservatives, like Mas, refuse to have any dealings with Castro and lobby the U.S. government to maintain strict embargoes against Cuba until its people become so deprived that they turn on Castro and overthrow him. Liberal Cubanologists, like Wayne Smith, who considers himself a dialoguero , believe that is wishful thinking: “It’s a fantasy to think Castro will be overthrown in even five years. I think men like Mas are just playing into Castro’s hands by their hostile attitude. It seems to me you encourage change by letting light in. Still, he isn’t the craziest of the exiles. He’s just the most powerful and the ultra-right wing of the non-terrorists.”

Bernard H. Barnett, the late Washington lawyer, helped Mas set up the CANF in 1981, under the principles he used with the pro-Israel Jewish lobby. He taught Mas the necessity of changing the American public’s perception of Cuban exiles as bomb-throwing terrorists. “Mas,” Barnett once told the New York Times, “has taken a group of exiles who couldn’t agree on anything in the past along a moderate road.”

The fourth category of exiles believe that nothing but an armed invasion of the island will satisfy their thirst for revenge. Groups such as Alpha 66 and Omega 7 like to call themselves militarists; others call them terrorists. After 30 years, they still don combat fatigues and conduct military maneuvers in the Everglades.

Mas was so determined to disassociate his Cuban movement from terrorists that in 1984, accompanied by an armed bodyguard, he journeyed to New Jersey to meet with members of Alpha 66 and demand that the group stop its terrorist activities. His demands, alas, were of no avail. Mas’ name began appearing on mysterious “death lists” being circulated among exiles in Miami.

And today, previously peaceful pro-Castro exiles are beginning to get into the terrorism act. One such group destroyed the training camp of Alpha 66 in the Everglades. Mas claims that a similar group has tried to kill him. He points, as proof, to a suspicious package he received in the mail in 1987. Mas went on a Spanish radio program and, with typical hyperbole, told listeners that Castro had sent a bomb to kill him. At the same time Miami police discovered it was only a videotape. “We are beyond fear,” Mas said, while the police were blowing up the videotape with a water cannon.

On the one hand, Mas claims he’s so powerful and hated now that he “can’t go with my pals to redneck bars because of security problems,” but in the next breath he says the differences among exiles are exaggerated. “We all want the same thing,” he says. Rene Silva, an exile and director of the South Florida CANF, says all the bickering among exiles has to do with “the law of the crab”: It’s a crab’s instinct to pull down another crab trying to claw its way out of the bucket. Mas, who has clawed his way out of the bucket, is the primary target of various exile groups without his power base and wealth.

After an hour, Mas’ listeners at the Greater Miami Jewish Federation are growing restless. They have waited long enough for him to make the connection. So he makes it. “Castro wants to divide all Americans,” he says. “Cuban from Cuban. Cuban from Anglo. Cuban from Jew.” His audience stirs in their seats with anticipation. “Castro is the enemy of Israel,” Mas says. “He is the only ally Saddam Hussein has. There are 3,000 Cuban volunteers in Iraq.” But Cuban exiles love Israel. “I pray for Israel every night,” says Mas. “We are the same people. That’s why they call us ‘the Jews of the Caribbean.’ ”

There is laughter among the building applause. Mas doesn’t wait for it to subside before he shouts, not “ Cuba libre !” but rather, “Long live Israel! May democracy be preserved there! And no more SCUD attacks on Tel Aviv!” The applause is thunderous.

THE OFFICES OF MAS’ COMPANY, Church and Tower, are west of Miami in an industrial area of warehouses and auto body shops, not far from Esther’s Cafeteria, where old Cuban men sip cafe con leche while playing dominoes. Mas started his company, now a $60-million firm with about 500 employees, with only a trailer for an office. Bees built honeycombs underneath the trailer. Mas tried to shoo them away with a stick, but they wouldn’t budge. The honeycombs grew apace with his business until Mas finally said to his help, “Goddamn it, leave the bees alone.” Nowadays, Mas bottles his honey and gives it to friends.

Inside, Cuban-American secretaries in tight miniskirts talk in English to handsome young Cuban-American men who could pass for GQ models. They were born here. They grew up on McDonald’s, MTV, Madonna, the Dolphins, Tom Cruise, Calvin Klein, BMWs, Reagan, Bush and the American Revolution. Their parents told them stories of a different world, of congri and lechon , of the bolero and the cha-cha, quincenas and carnavales , of campesino huts and the revolucione of 1898, of lipstick-red Coupe de Ville convertibles and, finally, of Fulgencio Batista and the other revolucione, 26 Julio, that forever changed their lives. Over the years, children listened respectfully to their parents’ stories of a lost homeland those children never knew. They were trying to instill in their children reverence for that homeland and the obsession to reclaim it. But the children missed the point. To them, those stories were not about a lost place, but of a lost time that could never be reclaimed.

“No, Mr. Mas is not in,” Mas’ secretary, Ines Diaz, is saying into the telephone. She repeats this refrain to every caller in a bored monotone. Diaz is in her 50s, a trusted secretary whose job is to protect her boss while remaining invisible herself. Once, though, she had a moment of notoriety. Her name appeared in Oliver L. North’s diaries. So did that of her boss, beside a cryptic notation for $80,000. The Senate committee investigating North’s Iran-Contra dealings never could connect Mas to North. Jack Blum, special counsel to the committee, finally threw up his hands. “We have more loose ends than a plate of spaghetti,” he said. Mas said that maybe the notation referred to another Jorge Mas.

“No, Mr. Mas is not in.” Diaz hangs up. She looks, without expression, across the room. “Mr. Mas will see you now.”

Mas greets his visitor with a handshake and a slap on the back. “Ines!” he calls. “Two Cub . . .” Diaz appears with two cups of Cuban coffee and sets them on a coffee table strewn with copies of Forbes magazine.

Mas is one of those amiable, yet serious men who is not given much to small talk. He says, through furrowed brows, “After the Bay of Pigs I was demoralized. I felt I couldn’t trust our allies. It was a good lesson. I continued a little longer to think I would go back because I was obsessive about Cuba. I ran commando operations against Castro until ‘68, when I realized I was getting nowhere. During that time, I took only menial jobs to support my family. After 1968, I began working toward my own future.”

The Miami of the early ‘60s was a clean, quiet, Anglo city whose inhabitants were at first indifferent to the early exiles, and then resentful. “We were loud, emotional,” says Mas. “We came with our own customs, language, habits--and we kept them. Certain adjustments had to be made by the Anglos.” The exiles forced those “adjustments” because they were united on every front. They settled close to one another. They insisted on speaking Spanish. They had come from the same social background, had the same aggressive “work ethic,” the same dreams, the same disdain for their land of exile, which to them was only a way station on their way back to Cuba. Later Cuban exiles, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, came from more impoverished backgrounds, and for them America was only a land of opportunity. “They did not have the same degree of enthusiasm about Cuba we did,” says Mas. “They were more realistic than us.”

Mas’ exile activities brought him to the attention of other, wealthier exiles, who became his patrons. In 1964, Jose M. Bosch, then president of Bacardi rum, gave Mas $10,000 to start up Cuban Representation in Exile (RECE), a group founded to give the exile community a voice that currently publishes an anti-Castro newsletter. In the early ‘70s, Mas used his RECE connections to get Vicente Rubiera, who had been the head of the telephone workers’ union in Cuba, to get him a job with Iglesias y Torres, a construction company on the verge of bankruptcy. Rubiera then introduced Mas to Southern Bell executives, who liked his aggressiveness. Shortly afterward, Mas persuaded exile Aristides Sastre, president of Republic National Bank, to loan him $50,000 to buy Iglesias y Torres, which he promptly renamed Church and Tower, its English translation. Within a year, C & T was doing more than a million dollars’ worth of business with Southern Bell, and Mas was on his way to becoming a multimillionaire on the strength of his exile connections.

Mas used that money and the power it brought him to start Radio Marti, then CANF, and later TV Marti. His exile critics claim he uses those organizations solely to advance his own political aims and that CANF only supports wealthy exiles. They point out that CANF has had little interest in the plight of the Mariel boat people, many of whom are still in detention centers. Mas’ response is that CANF only concerns itself with exiles who can help achieve its aim of getting rid of Castro, and that the quality of exiles’ lives in America is their responsibility, as his was for him.

Other critics claim that Mas’ exile activities have lined his pockets. “TV Marti costs $20 million to run,” says Wayne Smith. “Where’s all that money going?” Answers Mas: “My activities have cost me money.” And further, that Mas has a history of shady connections, from Oliver North to Orlando Bosch, a convicted terrorist, described by Mas as “a good friend” who “selected the wrong methods to fight” Castro. But Mas has never denied that he would make a pact with the devil (the Kennedys, the former Soviet Union) to help get rid of Castro. “I am a pragmatist,” he says.

The one criticism Mas doesn’t like to hear is that he’s become Americanized. “My lifestyle has changed drastically,” he says, despite his attempts to retain “a Cuban life.” He skis at Vail. He has a season box seat for Dolphin games. He lives in a million-dollar Spanish-style mansion surrounded by tropical foliage and a towering wall with an electronically controlled gate.

He still rises at 6 a.m., still speaks only Spanish in his “Cuban house” with his wife, Irma (“very much a Cuban wife”), and his three sons, as he did with his father, Ramon Emilio Mas Cayado, who died in 1990. His father was a veterinarian for Batista’s army until he fled into exile. “Until his death he was still waiting to go back to Cuba,” said Mas’ sister, Nancy. “When people asked his address he always gave it in Cuba . . . the corner of Anacoana and Mambi.”

Mas tried to maintain his tight-knit Cuban family even at the office of C & T, where his father as well as 28-year-old Jorge Jr., and Mas’ younger brother, Ricardo, all worked. But after Mas turned over control of C & T to Jorge Jr. in 1985, Ricardo and Mas had the famous fistfight, and Ricardo left the company. When Mas denounced Ricardo in two letters to a prospective employer as an extortionist and liar, Ricardo sued and won a $1.2-million libel judgment in 1990. Ricardo also accused his brother of getting Southern Bell contracts through bribes but dropped that charge when he couldn’t prove it.

BEHIND THE WALLS OF THE MAS mansion, Irma Mas, a soft, pretty, blue-eyed blonde dressed in silk, summons her servant in Spanish as she sits in darkness at the outdoor bar overlooking the teardrop-shaped swimming pool. She is a reticent woman, either because she is not comfortable with English or because she is “very much a Cuban wife.” The servants, dressed in white uniforms, appear with trays of Russian caviar on crackers.

Mas is giving a guest a tour of his sprawling grounds in the soft, warm Miami night. He makes a sweeping gesture with his arm to encompass the six towering Royal Palm trees planted beyond the swimming pool. “For the six provinces of Cuba,” he says, just as the automatic lawn sprinkler spouts up, drenching his pants. He quickly leads his guests to an open-air hut at the far end of the grounds. “It’s always cooler here,” he says. “I had it built by Seminole Indians. It’s a campesino house, a poor man’s house in Cuba.” He sits in a lawn chair underneath the thatched roof. “When I come home from work, I relax here first. I fantasize that I’m back in Cuba. I’d give it all up for a house on a hill overlooking the bay in Santiago, where I was born.”

Mas says his most immediate dream is to return triumphantly to Santiago and live like a gentleman farmer. “Some horses, cattle,” he says. “I’ll grow every vegetable I can eat. I’ll have peace of mind. Tranquility.” He laughs. “Maybe in six months I’ll be bored. I don’t really know Cuba anymore. I only know the Cuba of my memories.

“I had planned to live a peaceful, middle-class life in Santiago as a lawyer until Castro took over,” says Mas. “I want to know Cuba now. To see its countryside, touch its people, provide them with the opportunities I had in this country. The Cuban people are hard-working, passionate, fun-loving, with great moral fiber. Castro has stolen their personality. Maybe it will be hard for me to go back. I will feel out of place. The toilets and phones won’t work. Maybe I’ll throw up my hands and say, ‘I wanna go home.’ Maybe it’ll take three years to adjust. But I’ll make the toilets work. I’ll make Cuba the richest country in the Americas.” Then he smiles. “Of course, if I go back now they will take me from the plane to the firing squad.”

After dinner of fried plantains and pork, served by silent servants, Mas and his guests retire to his living room, tastefully furnished with Mediterranean furniture and French and Spanish antiques. It is dominated by a huge oil painting of Irma as a younger woman. Irma appears with a bottle of Spanish brandy.

“1866,” says Mas. “A gift from the King of Spain.” Irma hands him the bottle along with his digestion pill, which he takes first.

Later, Mas insists on driving his guests to the airport. “A taxi! Forget it!” he says, with a wave of his hand. He drives and Irma sits beside him. As they drive through Little Havana, they hold hands over the gearshift, clasping and unclasping their fingers like young lovers. Mas’ fingernails and cuticles, illuminated by the dashboard’s light, are bitten to the quick.

Mas mentions that this is the neighborhood of a friend from the old days in Santiago--whom he refers to as Tony Forte, although that isn’t his real name. Each December, Tony tells Mas, “We’ll spend this Christmas in Santiago, eh, Jorge? I’ll drink to you in the Presidential Palace.” When they were younger, Tony lived next door to Irma. He introduced the two lovers when they were teen-agers, and later, in Miami, Mas and Irma became engaged at Forte’s house.

Forte was a rebel with Castro--a tough, handsome, muscular man with a Thompson machine gun always at his side. When he fell out of favor with Castro because he wouldn’t join the Communist Party, he fled to Miami, where he got a job managing a bodybuilding gym. Today, in his 60s, Forte is still tough and muscular and, more than Mas, has retained his Cuban past. He speaks accented English, still favors only frijoles negros , and still has an eye for the ladies. When three youths recently ran his car off the road, he pulled over and challenged all three to a fight. His face was bruised and swollen at his gym the next day. “You should see the other guys,” he said, smiling.

Mas laughs at this story, and shakes his head. “Tony, he still only exercises his muscles.” He taps his head.

Irma speaks for the first time. “Tony only wants to love the girls,” she says.

Her husband says, “Tony never did adapt to America.”