Opinion letters

Author: Various Authors

Update 6-28-00

Well the last chapter of the Elián saga may have played out on this date when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively agreed that a Cuban father can come to the U.S. four months after abandoning his son and get the U.S. government to spend $1.4 million in legal expense to insure that the law is upheld in a just manner for Elián and his father and, of course, his mentor, Fidel Castro! The final result is that the boy is now back in Cuba with his grandmothers and his father’s second family.

What did all of this prove? Well, it certainly showed that the media was able to turn a boring story that should have been a routine child custody case into a national ‘best seller’ with the political dimensions leaving the custody matter in the dust.

Nobody has ever asked, “What would have happened if no relatives were in Miami to have come to the hospital and take the frightened ship wreck survivor to a loving home?” Would Janet Reno have volunteered to care for the boy or asked the INS to do it?

More significantly, “what has all of this done to the family that cared for the boy? What is the impact on the boy’s future life? The picture of his arrival in Cuba showed a tiny face full of apprehension, in spite of what must have been an intensive effort in Washington to condition the boy to going back to the heaven he left with his mother so long ago.

Compare these words to the ones that are reported here:

Elian Gonzalez Arrives in Cuba

By ANITA SNOW
.c The Associated Press

HAVANA (June 28) - Seven months after he was cast adrift in the Florida straits, Elian Gonzalez returned to his native Cuba Wednesday evening, bringing to a close an international custody battle laced with Cold War passions.

Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, lifted the 6-year-old boy down the plane's staircase to the tarmac where they were embraced by Elian's tearful grandmothers and other relatives at the small airport in the Cuban capital.

''Elian! Elian! Elian!'' chanted about 800 children from the first-grader's elementary school, waving small red, white and blue Cuban flags.

Elian's return ended the seven-month national campaign to bring the boy home from the United States, where his Miami relatives had fought to keep him. But Fidel Castro's government vowed that the homecoming would not end its massive mobilizations, which will now be aimed at changing U.S. policies that it says encourage the kind of illegal migration that led to Elian's plight.

Castro, who has said Cuba would not hold boastful celebrations of Elian's return, did not attend the homecoming ceremony for the boy, his father, stepmother and baby half brother, who arrived in two planes along with other Cubans after a three-hour journey from Washington.

A military band struck up Cuba's national anthem and the schoolchildren began singing along. The family drove off in a small procession of cars to an undisclosed location, where they will spend the night.

Elian shyly waved at the Cuban television cameras recording the event, broadcast live across the island on state-run television.

The highest ranking Cuban official on hand was Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's National Assembly and the man who served as adviser to Elian's father in his fight to bring his son with him back to Cuba.

Elian was free to return home after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in the international custody dispute between the child's father and his relatives in Miami, who took him in after he was rescued from sea and wanted to keep him in the United States.

Before boarding the plane at Washington Dulles International Airport, Elian's father told reporters through a translator, ''I am extremely happy ... being able to go back to my homeland. I don't have words, really, to express what I feel.''

He grabbed his little boy's hand and led him up the steps of the chartered jet, where Elian said goodbye to America with a wave and a shy smile.

''The legal battle is over,'' the father's attorney, Gregory Craig, said, after the Supreme Court issued its simple 26-word order rejecting an appeal by the boy's Miami relatives.

Elian's family was huddled around a television set when they heard the news they were going home. ''They were elated, absolutely elated,'' said Christina Fitz, spokeswoman for Youth for Understanding International Exchange - a student exchange group that hosted the Gonzalez family during its last month in the United States.

In a farewell message to the exchange group, Elian's father wrote: ''I am leaving you with two Cuban flags - one big one and one little one as a token and the first step in the direction of a human and beautiful relationship between our two countries.''

At a White House news conference earlier in the day, President Clinton was asked whether he had second thoughts about returning Elian to communist Cuba. ''Well, if he and his father decided they wanted to stay here, it would be fine with me,'' the president said.

''Do I wish it had unfolded in a less dramatic, less traumatic way for all concerned?'' he asked rhetorically, ''Of course I do,''

His sentiment was not shared in south Florida. Cuban-Americans, fervently anti-communist, wept, screamed and jeered the Supreme Court's ruling.

Watching Elian's plane take off on television, their sobs and sniffles gave way to keening wails and angry shouts of disbelief. Some jeered the U.S. government, some called for God's help and others collapsed with emotion.

''He's not going back, he's not going back,'' Anais Acuna said, praying with a rosary in her hand.

Estrella Martinez wept, ''Oh my God, my God we love him.''

Elian's great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez and cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, who took Elian into their home for five months, had no immediate comment.

But a parade of attorneys and activists, speaking for the Miami family, lamented Elian's return to the same place that his mother and so many others risked their lives to flee.

Family spokesman Armando Gutierrez cited human rights abuses in Cuba and asked, ''How many more women and children must die before the world hears the cries of the Cuban people?

''Elian's mother brought him to this great country seeking the promises of our Statue of Liberty,'' he said. ''She and her son were among the huddled masses yearning ... to be free.''

“The Supreme Court's order ends Elian's life in limbo, said Attorney General Janet Reno, head of the Justice Department, which through June 11 had spent $1.8 million on the case. ''All involved have had an opportunity to make their case - all the way to the highest court in the land,'' she said. ''I hope that everyone will ... join me in wishing this family, and this special little boy, well.''

The Elian drama began on Nov. 22 when Elian, his mother and a dozen others left Cuba in a 16-foot motor boat bound for America. The boat sank off the Florida coast, and his mother and 10 others drowned. Elian bobbed on an inner tube in the Atlantic Ocean for two or three days before he was rescued on Thanksgiving Day.

Lazaro Gonzalez was granted temporary custody of the boy. Elian's father demanded his son's return to Cuba.

A tug-of-war ensued.

In Cuba, Elian was an overnight folk hero, a pint-sized symbol of Cuban pride and allegiance to Fidel Castro, the self-described ''daddy of all Cubans.'' Castro orchestrated protests, one of them drawing 2 million chanting demonstrators, the largest in Castro's 41-year rule.

In America, the Miami relatives turned him into a symbol of Cuban-Americans' long struggle against Castro's hard-line government.

Ironically, both Castro's communist regime and the U.S. government, arch enemies during the Cold War, were on the same side of the Gonzalez drama. Both wanted Elian to live in Cuba with his father. And the case helped nudge the House on Tuesday to cut a deal to ease the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba for the first time in four decades.

Albeit weary of media coverage of his plight, Americans embraced Elian, who celebrated his sixth birthday in America and learned to ride a two-wheeler. They watched him wave a miniature Star-Spangled Banner for television cameras and visit Disneyworld.

Americans watched, too, as he wagged a finger and exclaimed, in a videotaped message to his father: ''I do not want to go to Cuba.''

The photo of a frightened little boy being grabbed by a Border Patrol agent holding an MP-5 submachine gun will be forever etched in America's conscience. Street riots followed the pre-dawn raid at the Miami relatives' home in Little Havana. Protesters chanted:
''Clinton, coward, Miami is on fire!''

But the pictures of seething demonstrators were quickly replaced by snapshots of an emotional father-son reunion that began with a bear hug in the aisle of an airplane that whisked Elian from Florida to Washington.

Side-by-side, their resemblance was unmistakable. Father and son's eyebrows arch over the same deep-brown eyes; their smiles nearly identical.

The ordeal, though, was not yet over.

In June, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled for Elian's father, yet ordered the boy to remain in the United States pending appeal. The Miami relatives appealed to the Supreme Court.

When the high court declined to hear the case, Elian was free at last.

In the eyes of many Cuban-Americans, though, Elian's real freedom ends when he steps back onto Cuban soil and begins to wave another red-white-and-blue flag - the one representing Castro's Cuba.

Commentary of 6-28-2000:

Yes, now the real story can begin...

What impact did the months in Washington, D.C. have on Juan Miguel Gonzalez? Did the father see anything in Washington that gave him any reason to wonder why his village in Cuba is so far out of touch with the rest of the world?  Or does his devotion to Fidel blind him to see only evidence of decadent capitalism?

How about the future of his life as well as that of his two sons and second wife? Will he sink back into obscurity as a low level employee toiling at his old job, just wearing a small badge to show that he is a hero of the state for having gotten Washington to pay attention to Fidel?

Will Fidel continue to have the media ‘fan the flames’ of throwing out the odious embargo that was Fidel’s award for having tried to launch nuclear tipped missiles at the U.S. until Khrushchev stopped him? Or will the people of Cuba ever find the way to win the kind of freedom that came to the Soviet Union from an internal bloodless revolution against the revolution?

Well,stay tuned. I don’t think this story is over.