Posted on Tue, Aug. 28, 2007

Cuban history weighs heavily on Miami, but in few places does it figure more poignantly than at the Casa Linda Apartments on U.S. 1, a squat building of subsidized homes where Fidel Castro's contemporaries count their nemesis' final days, and their own.

Portraits of dead heroes line the lobby of the gently worn building: José Martí, Máximo Gómez. Upstairs, Millo Ochoa, last surviving signer to the Cuban constitution of 1940 and the building's most illustrious resident, sits by his television set in a corner apartment on the fifth floor.

Ochoa, who just celebrated his 99th birthday on July 4, finds himself suddenly making plans for Castro's demise. "I'm on the first plane back, " he said, emphatically reiterating what he'd told me a few months ago. "I have a farm near Holguin, and I'm going to go plant yuca and boniato."

Ochoa's neighbors at Casa Linda are almost all elderly Cubans in their 80s and beyond. In many ways, they represent Cuba's lost generation - those men and women who were middle-aged when Castro came to power, too old to start over fully and too young to retire on memories. Today, they sit in their small apartments and wait. This is the generation most likely to be derided as "dinosaurs." But there's been no celebrating at Casa Linda, no aping for the cameras, no calls for blood, just wary expectation. "I knew he'd have to die eventually, " said Ochoa, matter-of-factly. "And I knew I'd live to see the day." Regarded as Cuba's most honest politician, Ochoa remains a life-long defender of the rights of the disenfranchised. He's a fierce foe of Fidel's, but is also just as likely to blame his rise on Batista's illegal grab for power.

Today, his mind occasionally drifts into blank spaces, but he's firm on the need for forgiveness. "The past is past, " he said. "What we need to work for is the unity of all people."

Next door lives Yolanda Viera, 69, who shares her apartment with the saints, including a life-sized statue of Santa Barbara with long, black curly hair.

When I visited, the saints stared passively ahead as Viera fidgeted in front of the television set, nervously parsing the meaning of the broadcast.

"It's all theater, all lies. In Cuba, there's been 47 years of terror, " she shouted, growing more and more frustrated with the lack of news coming out of the country. "There is no reality!"

But during a commercial break she relaxed and said that the future of Cuba should be left entirely to "the people of Cuba." "The embargo has to go, " she said. "What has the embargo done? Nothing except give Fidel excuses."

A while later, the artist behind the lobby paintings drifted in. Santiago Llobet, also Cuban-born, turned out to be more militant a vegetarian than he was anti-Castro. He, too, wished for change in Cuba but was circumspect about Castro's death.

"I don't wish anyone's death. Death is just a passage."

Llobet, at 81, is just one year older than Fidel. When I suggest he looks far healthier, he waves me away: "Some days I wake up with my blood pressure at 200."

Many of their friends have died waiting for Fidel to die, and today the question that hangs over Casa Linda is: Who will survive whom? Everyone may wish for Fidel's passing. But with death so near, there seems to be a reluctance to make a spectacle of it.

Viera herself is prepared to celebrate the end of Fidel's rule.

But for now, too much uncertainty remains. On Monday night, Viera called her relatives in Cuba. After countless rings, they finally picked up.

"Just to give you my condolences on Luis' passing, " Viera said, using improvised code. There was a pause on the other end. Then the brief response: "We'll have to see. We'll have to see."