John Perez has been sending $300 every three months to his extended family in Cuba, the maximum permitted under U.S. law.
"It's absolutely all that they live on," he says.That support from the Cuban-American community in the United States, more than $400 million a year, was cut off Saturday as President Clinton moved to put pressure on Fidel Castro. He said gifts to relatives would be limited to medicine, food and humanitarian items.
Perez says he'll play by the new rules only if the United States follows through with the tough talk about ending Castro's 35-year communist rule.
Others charge that the change in U.S. policy is cruel, considering Cuba's existing economic crisis.
"My mother will die," said Bertran Perez, a florist at Pepito Flowers. He sends his sick mother hundreds of dollars a month to pay for medicine. "In Cuba there's nothing," he said. "Dollars are what they need."
Perez said he would keep sending money "any way I can. There's always a way."
Clinton broke a 28-year open-arms policy Friday, charging that Castro was provoking a rising tide of new refugees. From now on, Cubans picked up at sea are to be taken to the U.S. Navy's Guantanamo Bay base on Cuba's southeastern tip. Cuban refugees who reach Florida will be detained indefinitely.
On Saturday, Clinton announced the end to the cash lifeline, cuts in charter flights linking the two countries, plans to seek punitive U.N. action against Cuba and "beefed-up" U.S. radio broadcasts to Cuba.
The Coast Guard had intercepted 468 Cubans at sea by Saturday afternoon, bringing the total so far this month to nearly 3,800.
A leaking boat with 30 to 40 Cubans aboard was spotted a quarter-mile from shore Saturday near the Gulf coast community Naples, about 125 miles north of Key West, said Collier County sheriff's spokesman Damian Housman.
Some 336 Cubans were being detained Saturday at the Krome detention center west of Miami.