PATRICK MAY Herald Columnist

It's a sad statement, but I had a hunch you couldn't offer a class in Miami about Cuban Miami without offending somebody's twisted sense of national pride. We arrive tonight for our second class to find a campus security guard posted outside the door.

"It seems there've been some vague threats called in," our professor, Lisandro Perez , tells us. "There are a few people who apparently don't think the university should be offering this course."

Low-key as ever, Perez launches into his lecture. There are no incidents and we pick up two new students. Last week, through a two-hour blitz of dates and places, Perez brought us a capsulized history of Cuba. Tonight, he zeroes in on Havana in the 1950s, setting the stage for the mass exodus to Miami of much of that city's middle class between 1959 and 1961.

"Someday, someone will write a history of Havana in the '50s," he tells us. "Havana then was an extraordinary place. In many ways it resembled a city you were more likely to find in the U.S. than anywhere else in Latin America."

He reiterates what to date has been the theme of his course: "Cubans are not strangers in Florida," says Perez, chairman of the sociology and anthropology departments at FIU. "From the deposed Cuban dictators buried in cemeteries along Southwest Eighth Street to the barrel tile in the older homes of Coral Gables, you see a great deal of historical contact between Cuba and Miami."

Those connections reached their height in the '50s in Havana, where a large middle class could buy automobiles by the score; where automobiles and other trappings of American culture helped to mold Havana into a thriving cosmopolitan capital, unique in Latin America. And running all through those trends was an insidious Americanization of Havana, soon to be followed by a Cubanization of Miami that continues unabated.

The birthrate was low in Havana back then, Perez says. American schools and liberal thought flourished. There were casinos. American corporations permeated Cuban society. "It didn't seem unnatural at all to me to be learning two languages at once," says Perez, who attended one of the dozen or more American schools in Havana at the time. "Without a doubt, Cuba was the major metropolitan center in all of the Caribbean. And,
needless to say, it was bigger and brighter and grander than Miami was at that time."

With cultural and corporate bridges spanning the distance between the two cities, the time, in retrospect, seemed perfect for many Cubans to make their move North.

"Cubans in Miami are not the group that came from halfway around the world," he tells us. "They already knew the American system."

Herald Staff Writer Patrick May is attending the five-week course offered by Florida International University and reporting on the class.