Levin covers the arts for The Miami Herald.

Enrique Santos, popular radio personality on 98.3 FM, is no fan of Fidel Castro. Once, to exile Miami's amusement, he punked the Cuban president, calling him on the air and pretending to be Hugo Chávez.

But Santos thinks that Colombian singer Juanes has a right to perform in Havana today.

And he objects to being vilified for expressing that view.

``Many in this community have said I'm not a good Cuban,'' he says. ``Just because I think differently than you . . . Why am I considered a bad Cuban?''

Santos had Juanes on his show in August, during which he called for ``respect for Juanes, freedom for Cuba.''

Reaction on the radio show was divided. But Santos said he's been inundated with negative comments on his Facebook page. One person wrote ``Miami made you, Miami will bring you down.''

To Santos, that anger is counter-productive. ``When something like this happens the exile community reacts the same way it always has,'' Santos says. ``There's millions of Cubans in that island who are subject to that tyranny for so many years. If we have an opportunity to talk to them, why shouldn't we?''

The Juanes Peace Without Borders concert has brought out the frustrations of a growing segment of Cuban Miami, many of them young, who are weary of the notion that equates any outreach toward the Cuban people with support for the Castro regime.

To them, this hardline approach has contributed to a 50-year stalemate.

``We continue the embargo, we ban our artists from performing and exhibiting there. It's like keeping the blinders on the community about Cuba,'' says artist Damien Rojo, 46, who came to Miami from Cuba with his parents in 1971. Rojo avoids discussing Cuba or the Juanes concert with them, because he says it always leads to fights.

``Unfortunately the thing that gets the buzz here [in Miami] are the people who are against,'' the Juanes concert, or changes in the relationship towards Cuba, says Juan Carlos Zaldivar, 42, an artist and filmmaker whose documentary 90 Miles looked at the attitudes of different generations of Cuban-Americans towards the island.

``The people who support the concert don't get as much airplay -- the only airplay they get is that they're going against the grain. What bothers me is the way it's framed. It's sexier to talk about the controversy than about change. . . . The way the dialogue is framed there's no room for discussion. That's why it never gets beyond confrontation.''

Juanes has said repeatedly that he hopes the concert, which includes 15 artists from six countries and takes place from 2 to 6 p.m. Sunday in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion, will not only be a moving musical experience for the over half million people expected to attend, but might help change attitudes and ease the tense standoff tensions between exiles and the Cuban government.

``We have to be positive about the future,'' he told The Miami Herald in August. ``We have to change our minds, but not just the Cuban people. No, we all have to change our minds.''

Some commentators on exile television and radio have attacked Juanes as a communist, or as a pop musician clueless about issues and problems in Cuba, whose efforts would be used as propaganda for the Cuban government.

A poll on TV station America TeVé asked whether the Colombian singer was ignorant, a dreamer, or an accomplice of the Cuban government. Paparazzi stalked his Key Biscayne home, and he received a death threat on his Twitter feed that prompted police to patrol his house.

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