By Bart Jones
Newsday

July 22, 2002

It's 8 p.m. on a Wednesday in late June, and Maria de Lourdes Duke is doing something that could get her waterfront house in East Hampton picketed, or worse: She is hosting a reception in honor of one of Cuba's hottest salsa musicians, Issac Delgado.

The crowd of 75 people is nibbling on nachos and sipping rum and mint mojitos, Ernest Hemingway's favorite drink when the Nobel Prize winner livedin Cuba. Duke, 55, a Cuban-American exile who married into one of this country's bet- ter-known, old-money families, is dressed in blue jeans and mingling with the guests as they gather around the swimming pool.

Delgado is nowhere to be seen, so Duke rings a ship's bell on the porch and announces that everyone should head to the Stephen Talkhouse, a club in Amagansett, where the musician and his crew are arriving direct from Manhattan.

A couple of hours later, the club is throbbing with Delgado's music, and the dance floor is packed. At the foot of the stage is Duke, who left Cuba in 1960 but is showing she hasn't lost her rhythm.

The event may look like a typical Hamptons summertime party, but it's all part of her campaign to tear down the wall that has separated the United States and Cuba for four decades.

Duke, known to her friends as Luly, is one of the most prominent Cuban-Americans to come out against the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and a ban on Americans traveling to the Caribbean island. She is helping to lead a national campaign to lift the embargo, open Cuba to Americans and increase ties between the estranged nations.

Her stance is heresy to the conservative Cuban-Americans in Miami who consider Fidel Castro evil incarnate and who many experts say have virtually dictated U.S. policy toward the island since the early 1960s. In Miami, events like the one hosted by Duke have ended in protests, boycotts and firebombings.

Duke, who has never felt personally in danger, says she is no apologist for Castro and her work is aimed at helping the Cuban people. But as a self-described moderate Cuban-American she asserts that the Miami exiles have failed in their mission to bring democratic change to Cuba.

"The policy has failed for over 40 years and it's time for a change," she said. "It's insane."

She also notes that under Castro's government Cuba has achieved a 96 percent literacy rate according to CIA figures - as good as the United States - and a health system recognized by the World Health Organization as a model for Third World nations.

Five years ago, she founded the nonprofit Fundacion Amistad (Friendship Foundation), an East Hampton-based group that has sent scores of doctors, teachers, scientists, librarians, artists and others to Cuba to give conferences, study the environment and help preserve museums. The group also brings its Cuban counterparts to the United States. Fundacion Amistad has taken off, growing from a few founding members to about 1,200 people today.

But Duke's work is provoking stinging criticisms from the conservative Miami exiles who believe Castro should be isolated. Her group "doesn't recognize the Castro regime for what it is," said Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban-American National Foundation, the most powerful anti-Castro organization. "This is a group that pretends that Fidel Castro's horrors have not existed in 43 years of lack of democracy.

"They bring artists from Cuba and that makes them moderate," he added. "While the torture's going on, there's salsa music in the background."

Duke says the embargo is merely hurting the Cuban people, and that the United States should engage Cuba like it has China, Russia and other formerenemies. "I'm a Cuban-American breaking the myth that all Cuban-Americans are pro-embargo," she said proudly.

Her activism reflects a growing trend of Cuban-Americans who want the embargo to end and are taking on the powerful Miami faction in a battle that could help determine the future of U.S. relations with the island nation, said Dan Erikson of the Inter American Dialogue, a policy forum in Washington, D.C. One poll by Florida International University in 2000 showed that by 52 percent to 48 percent even Cuban-Americans in the Miami area favored allowing American companies to conduct at least some business in Cuba, although far fewer were willing to say the embargo should be lifted entirely.

"The Cuban-American community itself is beginning to change its mind," Erikson said. "It used to be seen as a monolithic opinion throughout the Cuban-American community, the need to keep these sanctions on Castro. You're starting to see prominent Cuban- Americans really for the first time say, 'That's not necessarily how I feel.'"

The fact that a person of Duke's stature would join in, he said, is significant. With embargo supporter George W. Bush in the White House, changing U.S. policies won't be easy, Erikson said. But former President Jimmy Carter, U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Donohue and others are calling for the embargo's end, giving Duke and her allies hope.

Duke was born in Havana in 1946, and fled with her upper-middle-class family in 1960 at age 14 after Castro rose to power. An uncle of hers living in Cuba helped support the U.S.-orchestrated Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 aimed at overthrowing Castro, and was later executed by a firing squad.

Duke and her family settled in Miami, where she attended a Catholic high school and Miami-Dade Community College. In the mid-1970s, she met Anthony Drexel Duke, and the couple married in 1975. They made their home first in Manhattan, then in exclusive Old Brookville, and today in East Hampton. They have 10 children, including seven from Tony Duke's previous marriages.

The Duke dynasty, built on wealth acquired from the tobacco industry in the late 1800s, donated millions of dollars to what by 1924 became known as Duke University in North Carolina, establishing the family as major philanthropists.

Luly Duke has slipped easily into high society, enjoying memberships in the Maidstone Club in East Hampton and the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley. But she makes clear that a life limited to the golf course and yacht club isn't enough for her.

For years she has helped run the Boys and Girls Harbor School for disadvantaged children in East Harlem and its summer camp in East Hampton. Duke's husband, now 83, founded the school in 1937. While working there in the 1980s and raising a family, Luly Duke also earned a bachelor's degree in art history from the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville.

In the early 1990s, her brother-in-law, the late Angier Biddle Duke, a former U.S. ambassador to Spain and other nations, traveled to Cuba as part of a special team of former American ambassadors.

That was the last in a series of events that pushed Luly Duke to decide to reconnect with her long-lost homeland. She made her first trip back in 1995, and it was, she says, a life-transforming experience. She returned determined to devote herself to increasing ties between the two nations and ending the animosity.

"Our family suffered a lot, too," she said, "but it's time to move on."

Besides Fundacion Amistad, a sub-group, Voices of Change, has emerged. It provides a forum for progressive Cuban-Americans and others who feel overshadowed by the powerful Miami groups to exchange views and information, and push for changes in U.S. policy. About 400 Cuban-Americans have joined Voices of Change, which now has chapters in Boston, Washington, D.C., West Palm Beach, Fla., Chicago and New Orleans. They even hope to open a chapter in Miami.

Late last year, the United Nations Development Program agreed to collaborate with Fundacion Amistad in Cuba. Duke's group has a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department that allows it to work on the Caribbean island. She travels there often, visiting five times so far this year. She runs the group out of an office in her home, with her husband serving as vice president and treasurer. Its annual budget, funded by individual donations and foundations, has soared from $10,000 in 1997 to $400,000 in 2001.

Duke also lobbies members of Congress, networks with anti-embargo groups and serves on the influential Council of Foreign Relations' Cuba Task Force.

"If she was one of these Miami Cubans, she wouldn't do what she is doing," said Isabel Sepulveda de Scanlon, a Southampton resident, Chilean exile and Fundacion Amistad member who traveled with the group to Cuba last year. "They don't want to open doors. They want Castro out of there, period," she said. "I think it is beautiful what she does."