MIAMI (Reuters) - When Fidel Castro handed power to his brother, Miami’s Cuban exile community was confronted with a terrible realization -- the eventual death of the man they have loved to hate for 49 years may not result in the collapse of his communist government.

A woman shouts as she waves a Cuban flag in front of Versailles restaurant in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami February 24, 2008. REUTERS/Eric Thayer

For many Cuban exiles, it is a difficult pill to swallow. Through five decades they have sustained the dream that one day Fidel Castro would be gone and they could quickly return to their beloved homeland.

Now they have to adapt to another reality.

“The expectation here was always that the change is going to happen from one day to the next, that we were going to wake up one morning and find that the boss is gone and church bells are ringing. That hasn’t happened,” said sociologist Lisandro Perez.

The exile community, who number about 650,000 in south Florida, is not a monolith. Polls have shown older exiles are more likely to hold on to the idea of eventually returning to Cuba than younger ones who grew up in the United States.

But Cuba still dominates Cuban-American life to a remarkable degree, which psychiatrist Eugenio Rothe blames on what he calls “unresolved mourning.”

“One thing very observable here, especially among older people, is the nostalgia about Cuba, the idealized remembrance of the lost country,” Rothe said.

“There is a constant yearning to reunite with it. But in the end there is the realization that those times are gone, and what you have is only memory.”

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HATRED

Anger at Castro, who seized power in a 1959 revolution and recast what had been a free, though troubled Cuba into a one-party communist country, also feeds the dream of returning.

Anti-Castro militants, many now as elderly and infirm as the 81-year-old Fidel Castro, still train in the Florida swamps for a long-awaited confrontation. A Little Havana store sells toilet paper imprinted with Castro’s image.

At a Florida International University conference last week, noted Cuban architect Nicolas Quintana did not hide his contempt for Castro nor his dismay at being an exile.

“I call Fidel ‘el innombrado’ (the unnamed). I don’t like to name him, it so dirties my mouth,” Quintana said with a look of distaste.

“I left Cuba when I was 35. I’ve lived 35 years in Cuba, 47 years outside of Cuba. It traumatizes me,” he said.

Even as Miami faces the fact that the “big bang” theory of Cuban change it embraced for so long now looks unlikely, the exile community prepares for what it believes is inevitable.

Quintana is heading up the formulation of a redevelopment plan for Havana and its environs that he said will restore the beauty of the now-decrepit city.

The proposal is funded in part by a Miami developer who said a million new homes will need to be constructed to alleviate a chronic housing shortage in a free Havana.

Not losing hope is a big part of the Cuban exile experience, said Juan Antonio Bueno, an architect involved in the Havana restoration plan.

“When I left Cuba, I remember saying ‘Goodbye, see you in six months.’ That was in 1960, I was 13,” he said.

“We just got on the plane and I’ve still got my return ticket. I tell people one of these days I’m going to use it.”