MIAMI — It did not matter that it was the middle of the night, or that it began to drizzle. When this city’s Cuban-American residents heard the news, they sprinted to Little Havana. They banged pots and pans. They sang the Cuban national anthem and waved the Cuban flag. They danced and hugged, laughed and cried, shouted and rejoiced.
The seemingly eternal vigil for the death of Fidel Castro, a man who had profoundly changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people here — dividing their families, taking their property, imprisoning and sometimes shooting their friends and relatives, wrenching them from their homes and their country — was over. Finally.
“Castro dying represents the end of something awful that happened to us,” said one Cuban exile. “It’s actually him — not anybody else — who caused this. It’s because of him that we lost our opportunity to have a life in our country.”
Waves of Cubans also came, transforming not just their own lives but the city itself, gradually turning it into the unofficial bilingual capital of Latin America. With the goal of ousting Mr. Castro and establishing democracy in Cuba, early exiles built a degree of political and economic clout that outstripped their relatively small numbers.
Focusing first on local politics and business in the 1970s and 1980s, the exiles and their children, led by the powerful Cuban American National Foundation, catapulted into national politics and influence. They gained the power to tilt presidential elections toward Republicans and sway American foreign policy against appeasement with Mr. Castro.
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