I have been blessed with a letter bearing Eduardo J. Padron’s autograph, which I shall send along to my grandchildren so they may keep it with the treasured note from President Clinton.

Mr. Padron, the current president of Miami Dade College, is a distinguished member of Miami’s Cuban-American power elite. His name has appeared in the paper most recently in connection with the Imagine Miami initiative (he is one of fifty civic leaders mutually charged with imagining a better Miami for everybody) and in connection with the 25th anniversary of the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

Notwithstanding Mr. Padron’s modest demeanor and probable embarrassment over the big fuss recently made over his contributions to the community, he is undoubtedly an American hero of the Cuban Mariel Exodus. He has claimed that he did nothing more than his job as a leader. He and other leaders took responsibility and stepped up to the plate during the Mariel crisis - the mayor had disappeared. Mr. Padron’s outstanding leadership over the educational devices employed to assimilate the courageous Cuban refugees into our relatively free society, by teaching them English and providing fast-track job-training at Miami Dade College, serves as a leading example of the possibilities of what he has called “the truly open door society."

To state the enormous intellectual significance of Cuba to the world despite its small body would be an understatement. As a simple-minded student of human affairs, I liken Cuba to Portugal in some respects. I think a Salazar might be an appropriate successor to Fidel Castro, the sort of leader who could pave the way for a stable social democracy. Cuba like Portugal is easier for a student to get his arms around than other countries. The United States, for example, is too vast to grasp; at least I cannot fathom its true nature or submit its diversity to a cogent definition. Of course Portugal is a very old country; Portugal faced the Western future at the end of the Iberian Peninsula long ago, and actually ruled the physical world for a while - or so it seemed to ambitious minds of the day.

Now Cuba is a very young country, yet it has from time to time, particularly in its opposition to Spanish and Yankee domination, ruled the dreams of many independent-minded people throughout the world including truly liberal citizens of the United States of America.

Mr. Padron recently recited the maxim, “If you take one step toward your dream, that dream will come a million miles to meet you,” to introduce his editorial on the Imagine Miami initiative. Fidel Castro took many steps; his blunders as well as those of the Uncle Sam he loves to hate are well known to a few students of history. Castro’s successes are ignored and his missteps are emphasized and frequently reiterated in hopes that the present sovereign state of Cuba will fall. Castro still deserves credit for his dreams of radically expanding the opportunities of ordinary Cubans, and for taking action to realize those dreams. We can daydream of the wide open door of equal opportunity, but if we do not take specific steps to open the real doors, equality of opportunity will be a comforting figment of our imagination, a mere pipe dream, and people will have no more than the right to be homeless and insecure in “our” homeland. Wherefore we might fairly denounce Fidel Castro’s means, yet praise his dreams, such as the right to productive employment, which is expressed in the first clause under Article 9 (b) of the 1992 Constitution of Cuba:

”El Estado como Poder del pueblo, en servicio del propio pueblo, garantiza que no haya hombre o mujer, en condiciones de trabajar, que no tenga aportunidad de obtener un empleo, con el cual pueda contribuir a los fines de la propias necesidades.”

Of course no one has to remind Mr. Padron of the importance of jobs: providing jobs through better education is his destiny. But I must go farther than his statement, “While societal institutions cannot guarantee anyone a better life, a healthy, civil society can strive to expand opportunity,” for I believe a person who is willing to work should be provided with a job if he cannot find one elsewhere.

Mr. Padron’s pronouncement does not guarantee jobs to everyone who wants to work. Politicians of both major parties uphold the old notion today that it is impolitic or politically incorrect for the government to directly create jobs for those who cannot find them elsewhere. It is assumed that private bureaucracies are inherently good while public bureaucracies are inherently evil although a necessary evil. The fact of the matter is this: government and business institutions are directly creating jobs on a daily basis and are often doing so in an unjust manner.

The business of government in this neo-gilded age is business. Restraints on greed are to be removed hence taxes must be cut to the bone no matter what the social consequences might be for the masses, who tend to act against their welfare when promised tax cuts and less general welfare. Business dominates government and educational institutions, yet we do not vote for business administrators and executives; most our workdays are devoid of democracy and smack of dictatorship. The doors of many corporations are barred to merit and are prone to empty ritual. The truth - that mammoth corporations have become virtual prisons to those within and without - may not be told by the business-dominated press.

True, happiness in itself may not be guaranteed by formal social organization. Nevertheless, a genuine opportunity to pursue happiness (Jefferson substituted “happiness” for the French “property ”) can be guaranteed by affording all with the political right to a job - if they want to work and cannot find subsistence elsewhere. Louis Blanc, for one, had several sound notions about creating jobs to ameliorate the horrendous poverty of his gilded age - Blanc was not the make-work “communist” he was presumed to be, and some of his productive workshops lasted for many years.

Mr. Padron as held up the open doors of Miami Dade College as a leading example for a truly open door civil society in Miami. Speaking selfishly, I regret to say that the doors of his college are technically closed to me. And, as absurd as this might seem to comfortable people, I have not found a single open door in Miami through which I might enter and find the means to pay my rent and food bill next month since my immigration to Miami. Although I enjoy many of the advantages so dearly wanted by the poor Mariel refugees who slept in tents under the Interstate 95 overpass and in the Orange Bowl parking lot, Miami’s doors have shut fast against me. Even the Miami branch of Robert Half International, which has a market capitalization of $4.63 billion, has been unable to produce a single lead for me in this white-hot job market, insisting for a month now that I am overqualified and that the hyped heat about the local labor market is due to the growth of “low-level, low-paying jobs”, not suitable for me although I have repeatedly stated that I do not mind starting at the bottom since I am on the bottom!

An FIU labor economist verified the RHI claim, which implies a further widening of the gap between rich and poor. Even the relatively highly paid construction workers I encounter as they move from downtown crane to downtown crane on the free Metromover say that no matter how much overtime they might work, they would never qualify for the purchase of the condominium units they are building.

Apparently we are witnessing the spectacular swarming behavior of an underclass whose expectations might be much more severely disappointed than those of the well-appointed investors funding the boom, if boom turns to bust. People might endure dire poverty for ages rather than risk being further denigrated, but suddenly lowered expectations might not leave the people so tame; particularly if they are educated people, for there will be no reasonable excuse for not preventing a disaster that can be foreseen. However that might be, my personal predicament in Miami is teaching me the true meaning of Camus’ remarks about being lucid in an Absurd world, meaning a world deaf (surd) to the individual – perhaps even the more so for someone who takes the gilded cult of individualism too seriously.

While Mr. Padron enjoys the plush quarters he deserves, I might find myself under a bridge unless I get a break pretty soon. I do not drink or smoke or use drugs. Given my independent thinking and excellent communication skills, qualities which are not as much in demand as the advertisements would have us believe, I suppose I might start talking out loud to my imaginary alter ego. My introjected social representative might respond to me in kind, as did that coconut the man on the deserted island befaced and befriended. The parking lot and overpass lodging was no shame on the courageous Cuban refugees who survived the boatlift, but for me and others like me the scourge of “homelessness” is such a terrible shame, by virtue of my bourgeois conditioning, that I imagine myself, in sheer desperation, robbing banks, or dressing in fatigues ala Fidel Castro and seeing if I can raise arms around Miami for the Revolution. The alternative for me would not be welfare, but what any sane person would do if he really knew what was going on.

Ironically, now that the Cuban refugees have been assimilated by the bourgeois Yankee culture, many of them have become so fearful of homelessness that they follow the suits and attach a stigma to not having had a place to sleep and a private pot to micturate in. Jim Defede of The Miami Herald reports that $24 million in state funding for housing for “formerly homeless”, elderly and other low-income persons in Little Havana might go to waste because of a stipulation that the new mixed-use building include a Hispanic library; certain commissioners believe it would be an insult to the Hispanic community to put a cultural center in a building with “a bunch of poor people,” wrote Mr. Defede. Furthermore, “Being formerly homeless has a stigma to it,” said Miami-Dade County Commissioner Bruno Barreiro, without mentioning the fact that many Cuban refugees are formerly houseless and jobless persons.

To bar a man from a job if he wants one, under the excuse that society cannot directly create jobs, is immoral: it is social homicide. The very idea that all who want work cannot work because many would-be workers must be kept desperately poor and unemployed in order to keep wages low and thus provide the few who are in the business of creating false shortages with fatter profits, is in fact un-American if Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were Americans. Teddy did not take many progressive steps, but his persuasive voice caused many to dream until FDR did what had to be done. And that is what we must have now, in our perverse neoconservative gilded age of asocial individualism: we must have generative or general progress, or else be doomed by our degeneration.

Of course much can be done privately to provide productive employment to those who would have it. For example, hire people; and train them on the job instead of foisting the burden onto the public educational institutions, which makes it cheap and easy for corporations to be irresponsible in their employment practices.

President Bush has occasionally aired the maxim that the strong have a duty to help the weak. The strong have always had good reason to help the weak, for there is Power in numbers. When the suffering man has cause to cry, “My Power, my Power, why hast Thou forsaken me?” the gods of heaven and earth are moved to intercede. Perhaps the patrons of Mr. Padron’s Imagine Miami initiation will intercede with certain steps contrary to the declining status quo.

A young Cuban-American friend of mine has made a cynical remark about my pun on Mr. Padron’s name: I called the “fifty community leaders” who met to imagine a better Miami for the community, ”Los Cinquentas Padrones”, or The Fifty Patrons. My friend suggested they might be called “Los Cinquentas Ladrones,” or The Fifty Thieves. I must admit that my imagination is somewhat selfish, and I am not beyond dreaming of patronage or theft when I am in desperate circumstances. Most of all, I hope I may become a patron like Mr. Padron some day and not a thief to boot.

Again Cuba speaks. I understand that the great majority of the Cuban refugees were law-abiding people. When Fidel Castro truly opened the doors of his prisons, a goodly number of criminals flocked to Florida. Given Mr. Padron's remarkable leadership in the field of education, I am not surprised that many of them turned their backs on crime and became productive members of society instead of social liabilities. My imagination runs wild now that our society cannot seem to build enough prisons and hold prisoners long enough, but I imagine that Mr. Padron the educator might not only keep people out of prison but also find a way to open the doors of prisons so that prisoners become productive members of society instead of liabilities. Amongst other things, he might sponsor job-training programs in prisons and profit-sharing prison workshops to compete with private producers.

It is said, “If you cannot fight them, join them.” But when a man cannot join his society, he may revert to the natural law of the jungle and revolt against society. An expansion of opportunities under the creative guidance of persons as Mr. Padron goes a long way towards liberating people from the vicious and brutal aspects of the war of all against all and from the worst crime against humanity and greatest threat besides ignorance to democracy: the organized mass terrorism called War. Lesser crimes are in fact political crimes now that we have abandoned our clannish blood feuding and handed over our weapons to the states. Indeed, all crimes against the state are political crimes. And when the state does not suit us because it has fallen into a few unjust hands, people revert to the natural right of treason against that state.

Many criminals were transported to the American colonies, where they became productive members of society and were eventually united under the leadership of traitors to revolt and form their own independent union. Australia is another remarkable result of the virtues of criminal transportation in contrast to imprisonment. Catherine the Great’s consort, Gregory Potemkin, imagined that populating the Crimean Peninsula with English convicts would have a utopian result, but his dream was in vain.

I hope our dreams are not in vain. I dream of peace and prosperity for me and for everybody else, for how might I have peace when mine is not secure from the dire need of others? Mr. Padron’s Imagine Miami initiative gives me some cause for hope. I look forward to taking the necessary steps to realize our dreams, keeping past blunders in mind.