Jose Cardenas Fights Castro on Capitol Hill

                  By Sylvia Moreno and Lonnae O'Neal Parker
                  Washington Post Staff Writers

                  It's the morning after Elian's Miami relatives left Washington, and in the tiny
                  Georgetown suite of the Cuban American National Foundation, business is
                  back to some semblance of normal for Jose Cardenas.

                  The telephone rings nonstop. A pager buzzes. A cell phone beeps. The fax
                  spews out the latest anti-Clinton and anti-Reno propaganda, and the
                  computer announces e-mail after incoming e-mail. Someone is asking the
                  CANF--the leading anti-Castro group--to endorse a poster depicting a
                  weeping Statue of Liberty ("Give me your tired, your poor . . . EXCEPT
                  ELIAN GONZALEZ"). A congressman's office calls. The deadline for a
                  television taping is looming.

                  All in a day's work during these recent months of controversy over Elian
                  Gonzalez.

                  But for Cardenas, head of the Miami-based group's Washington office,
                  handling the visit of Elian's cousin Marisleysis was a different story.

                  This is Washington, home of dispassionate politics, where buttoned-down
                  lobbyists like Cardenas schmooze and plan strategy. Where staid
                  congressmen make measured, sonorous pronouncements, and partisan
                  matters are often worked out behind closed doors.

                  The U.S. Gonzalezes--Marisleysis, her father, Lazaro, and uncle
                  Delfin--brought the raw emotion of Little Havana to the nation's capital,
                  and put Cardenas, a man known for his low-profile style--in the eye of the
                  family hurricane.

                  They are people who for months have condemned the Clinton
                  administration and, in the hours after federal agents seized Elian from their
                  home, sobbed and screamed and threatened for all the world to see on live
                  television.

                  "What are they going to do here?" Cardenas recalled wondering when he
                  learned at midday Saturday that the Gonzalezes were flying to Washington.

                  They wanted to visit Elian, they said, arriving just hours after the boy had
                  been reunited with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at Andrews Air Force
                  Base.

                  The assignment fell upon Cardenas and his deputy, Emilio Vazquez--who
                  make up the CANF's Washington staff--to help support the Gonzalezes in
                  their quest.

                  "The reality is that Washington is a conservative town and basically it
                  doesn't really comprehend people that--" and here Cardenas pauses, then
                  squeezes his eyes shut as he rubs his temples with his fingers and casts
                  about for a politic description of Marisleysis and her kin "--doesn't
                  comprehend people that justifiably wear their emotions on their sleeves."

                  "This was going to be totally on the fly," he predicted. And he was right.

                  There was the tearful Capitol Hill news conference. The accusations that
                  the photographs of Elian hugging his father were fake. Lazaro Gonzalez's
                  insinuations that the boy had already been taken back to Cuba by
                  Communist agents. The four futile trips to Andrews. The impromptu calls
                  to a sparsely populated Capitol, since Congress is still in recess.

                  Through it all, Cardenas flinched from the sidelines.

                  "If you want to see the boy, let's do this in a serious way. I don't think you
                  make ultimatums at a press conference," he says now. "Let's step back and
                  open up a channel of communication and see how we can make that
                  happen.

                  "But I'm not the one who's going to tell them to calm down. This family has
                  been very, very hurt by what happened," he says. "Their house was
                  trashed, and they've been vilified by the Clinton administration. . . . I felt a
                  lot of empathy for them."

                  It's an empathy that he learned as a child. He may sound as anti-Castro
                  and anti-Communist as the Gonzalez family, but the secret, as Cardenas
                  likes to say, is he is Colombian American.

                  Now 40, married and the father of four, he was raised in the area around
                  Baileys Crossroads, where his parents, immigrants from Medellin, settled
                  in 1958, when his father came to serve his residency in surgery at
                  Georgetown University Hospital. By 1960, Cuban exiles fleeing the Castro
                  regime started moving in, establishing a strong Latino presence in the area
                  and at the local Catholic church, St. Anthony's. These were the families
                  that Cardenas's parents socialized with, and their children were his
                  classmates.

                  "I'd always heard the political horror stories about fleeing Cuba," he says.
                  "People burying the family silver in the back yard so Communists wouldn't
                  take it.

                  "They came with nothing, and they were able to reestablish themselves. I
                  just have tremendous admiration and respect for this community. That's
                  why I will go to the mat again and again to defend them."

                  He was also grateful to have grown up among Latinos.

                  "We were just one more family with another Spanish surname," he says.

                  Cardenas graduated from Catholic University with an
                  international-relations degree and earned a master's in government from
                  Georgetown.

                  The CANF was founded in 1981 by Cuban American businessmen led by
                  Jorge Mas Canosa, and opened its Washington office that year. In 1986,
                  Cardenas saw a job notice at Georgetown's placement office, applied and
                  was hired. There were a lot of "unhyphenated Americans" on staff at the
                  time, he says. He's been there ever since.

                  Cardenas had grown up politically conservative and joined the CANF
                  during the national debate over U.S. policy toward Central America.

                  "I wanted to get into the fight, and I didn't buy into the campaigns against
                  Ronald Reagan's policies toward Central America, policies that have now
                  been vindicated by history," he said. "I wanted to get into the fight, and I
                  wanted to get in on the right side."

                  In the protracted fight against Castro's Cuba, the Elian episode has been
                  one of the hardest for CANF, Cardenas says.

                  "It's been very difficult to touch a broader American public because most
                  Americans have not had to deal with the issues of those who know tyranny
                  and its destructive impact on people's lives," he says.

                  Those who have worked with Cardenas, or squared off against him, say he
                  brings a valuable voice to the debate.

                  "He feels strongly about the issues, and the two of us have disagreed on
                  many occasions, but always respectfully," says Wayne Smith, a senior
                  fellow at the Center for International Policy who favors opening a dialogue
                  with Cuba.

                  "He does understand what democratic debate is all about: that there are
                  various sides to an issue [and] that the various sides should be debated."

                  Cardenas's is an on-message, no-nonsense comportment that has aided his
                  reputation as a thoughtful, dedicated advocate. And it has helped counter
                  hotheaded Latin stereotypes, says Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), a
                  Cuban American whose district includes Little Havana. She has worked
                  with Cardenas for nearly a dozen years.

                  He's got the "right combination of practical know-how, coupled with
                  strong convictions of wanting a free Cuba," Ros-Lehtinen says. "He's not
                  just a wild-eyed idealist, but has a practical sense of how to move
                  legislation--how to work the process."

                  Cardenas's office is filled with art and books from pre-Castro Cuba. Just
                  above his desk is a large mounted poster of a Chinese student facing down
                  the tanks at Tiananmen Square. For him, he says, it is a symbol of one
                  man's unflinching stand for democracy--and of his own resolve.

                  "You do not have to be Cuban American to have a profound love of
                  freedom and an outward aversion to tyranny."