If Elian had wandered across the U.S. border from Canada or Mexico, he would have been sent right back to his sole surviving parent. Instead, he became a hot international issue the moment he was found bobbing in an inner tube off the Florida coast on Thanksgiving Day, one of three survivors of a sinking that had drowned his mother, her boyfriend and nine other escaping Cubans.
On both sides of the Straits of Florida, the boy quickly became a political symbol. Day after day last week, the Cuban government sent hundreds of thousands of citizens into the streets to demand his return. Elian’s school desk was turned into a shrine, with a visitors’ book signed by Fidel Castro himself. Castro claimed that the boy’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, had been offered $2 million by the “extremist Cuban-American mafia” if he would move to Miami and live there with Elian.
In Florida Elian was swamped with gifts, and Cuban-American hard-liners mounted a campaign to keep him in the country. “The boy will have far greater opportunities here than in Cuba,” said Lazaro Gonzalez, 49, the great-uncle who took him in. Visiting Miami’s Little Havana, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said the child should “be able to live in freedom and not in slavery.” Democratic Sen. Bob Torricelli of New Jersey, which has the country’s second largest Cuban-American community, said Elian’s future should be settled in U.S. courts under U.S. law. And lawyers for the Florida branch of the Gonzalez family filed a petition with the Immigration and Naturalization Service seeking political asylum for Elian.
The INS was trying to resolve the case by following its usual procedures. It asked Juan Miguel to provide a birth certificate and proof of the claim that he shared custody with Elian’s mother, Elisa Rodriguez, after their divorce in 1996. If the father cooperates, the INS would probably send the boy back. In that case, the relatives in Florida might ask a state court for a restraining order. But the case for keeping Elian in Florida didn’t look strong. His mother’s voyage violated immigration rules agreed to by Washington and Havana. The trip was a people-smuggling operation organized by her boyfriend, Lazaro Munero, who charged some of the adult passengers $1,000 each for the ride, according to U.S. law-enforcement officials. And Florida courts didn’t appear to have jurisdiction. “If the father’s custody is challenged, it has to happen in a Cuban court,” said David Abraham, a professor of immigration law at the University of Miami.
The court of public opinion also seemed to favor the boy’s return. Bill Clinton said “all fathers would be sympathetic” to Juan Miguel’s demand for his son. Even in Little Havana, a quiet minority thought Juan Miguel should have the final say. “Only one person can decide the boy’s fate, and that is the father,” said Manuel Gonzalez, 59, another of Elian’s great-uncles in Florida. He said Juan Miguel, a parking attendant at a beach resort, is “a hardworking, responsible and irreproachable young man, and no one can take that away from him.” But Elian’s mother did take his son away, and now it may require a temporary ceasefire between Castro and Clinton to reunite a little boy with his Poppy.
