Translated material
Boy in the ocean
Leonid Velekhov
The story of Elian Gonzalez: there is no peace between Fidel Castro's Cuba and the almost two million Cuban emigration settled in the United States
The story of Elian Gonzalez: there is no peace between Fidel Castro's Cuba and the almost two million Cuban emigration settled in the United States
(Photo: Fotobank/SIPA )
So, perhaps, for six-year-old Cuban Elian Gonzalez, his not-so-wonderful adventures in the United States have ended. Even if not soon - apparently, more than one week will pass before all the legal formalities are settled - but he will return with his father to his home, in Cuba, in the town of Cardenas, which is on the very shore of the Caribbean Sea, a few kilometers from one of the best beaches in the world, Varadero. After all, what else does a person of his age need besides fatherly care, an eternally blue sky above his head, clean, powder-fine coastal sand and clear, warm sea water to the bottom, from which you can go ashore for hours?
However, Eliana’s mother apparently decided that this was not enough, and five months ago, at the end of November last year, she and her son decided to illegally leave their homeland in a smuggler’s motor boat and cross the Strait of Florida to relatives in Miami. The short, but not short for a boat, route, about 90 kilometers, has been mastered over the past forty years by tens of thousands of Cubans who no longer wanted to live in their homeland, spending their lives fighting for “socialist ideals” and not having the opportunity to feed and clothe and put shoes on yourself and your children.
The boat in which Elian and his mother and twelve other fugitives were sailing seemed to have exhausted its resource over many previous raids, the engine stalled in the open sea, it sank to the bottom, everyone died, and only little Elian, like the Cuban prince Guidon, miraculously survived, clinging to the inflatable bladder and holding on to it for more than two days. The barely alive find was caught by fishermen - a truly biblical plot twist. The biblical pathos was reduced by the fact that the exhausted child, finding himself in the hands of his saviors, repeated only one word: “Lollipop!” The memory of the coveted candies, which you can’t find in Cuba during the day (and which, apparently, the mother promised her son in unlimited quantities upon arrival in Miami), only glimmered in the poor overheated head.
In Miami, which has long been a refuge for almost a million Cubans who emigrated from the Castro regime (another million are scattered throughout the rest of the United States), Elian’s relatives - cousins and uncles - immediately made themselves known. However, the father who remained in Cuba immediately showed up. He and Elián’s mother had been divorced for a long time, he did not know about her escape, but the boy, who, having recovered, discovered a rare intelligence for his age, while still in the hospital, dictated his father’s phone number in Cardenas to the doctor, and he contacted Juan Miguel, “a tourism worker.” service" in Varadero. A tourist service worker is always a state security officer in Cuba.
However, even if Juan Miguel were not so closely connected with the support of the Cuban regime, there is no doubt that Fidel Castro would have intervened in this story. He never misses the chance to settle scores with the “second Cuba” - the emigration entrenched in Miami, which, in turn, has been sleeping for five decades and sees how the Castro regime is collapsing, and they, the emigrants, are sailing and flying back to the paradise island to to regain everything that they left there - some people’s homes, others a restaurant, a hotel, a factory, a plantation...
Already on the third day after the boy’s miraculous rescue, Cuba officially demanded that he be returned to his father. The litigation between Elian's Miami relatives and his father dragged on for five months. Castro, with his characteristic temperament, drew the entire population of the island under his control into the struggle: for five months, non-stop, demonstrations, demonstrations, marches and rallies took place throughout Cuba, at which people, tired of poverty, but still not despondent, demanded that the six-year-old be returned to his homeland fellow citizen. Local wits joked bitterly: how much paper, ink and paint were wasted on posters, and in schools for several years now children have had nothing to write on, homework has to be done on scraps of wrapping paper." In turn, the Cuban community in Miami, as one, rose to the occasion protection of the rights of Elian’s relatives and demanded that the authorities allow them to take custody of the boy and prevent his return to the “prison island”, from where his mother rescued him at the cost of her own life.
From the very beginning it was clear: the child would have to be returned, all laws were on the father’s side. However, a number of circumstances complicated the situation and delayed its resolution for several months. For example, the strange indecisiveness shown at the beginning of events by US Secretary of Justice Janet Reno and the Immigration and Naturalization Service subordinate to her. Having left the child even under the temporary guardianship of his American relatives, Rino, herself a native of Miami, well aware of the customs of the Cuban emigration and its relationship with the Castro regime, should have understood how difficult it would be to “extract” the boy from Miami. Why didn’t the all-powerful Immigration and Naturalization Service immediately take the boy under its guardianship and enter into direct negotiations with the father, but limited itself to the rather strange role of an intermediary? It can be assumed that initially the authorities gave in to the Cuban diaspora, or more precisely, its elite, which plays an important role in the political and financial life of the United States, has a powerful lobby in Congress and is capable of influencing the outcome of the upcoming presidential elections.
The course of the case was delayed and complicated by the behavior of Juan Miguel, Elian’s father, who appeared in the United States only on April 6, although the American authorities offered him to fly for the child almost from the very first days of the conflict. Of course, it’s not the “tourist service worker”’s fault here. Despite all his trustworthiness, the Cuban authorities clearly feared that, having set foot on US soil, he would ask for political asylum there. When Juan Miguel finally arrived, he was surrounded by more than twenty people, some “psychologists” in civilian clothes, and this self-proclaimed delegation was headed by nothing less than the chairman of the Cuban Assembly of People's Power (analogous to the Supreme Council of the USSR), the former minister of foreign affairs and representative of Cuba in UN Ricardo Alarcon. Elian's father was placed in the residence of the Cuban plenipotentiary in Washington, and he refused to fly to Miami to meet with his son, although Elian's guardians there guaranteed that the meeting would take place one-on-one, without any interference on their part.
One can name a number of other reasons why a simple story from a legal point of view turned into almost a casus belli (in one of his speeches at rallies in defense of little Eliana, Fidel said that for the sake of the return of its young citizen, Cuba was even ready to fight with the United States ). However, there is little point in listing them; the underlying reason for all these reasons that turned the story of Elian into a protracted international scandal is the same: fierce, pathological enmity and hatred between the “two Cubes”.
Elian Gonzalez, this is how he was caught on November 25 last year by fishermen in the open sea after two days of drifting on an inflatable boat. (Photo: AP )
And it is symbolic that, although Castro threatened war against the United States, due to his natural tendency to exaggerate, the i's in Elian's story, as we know, had to be dotted by army special forces, who on Saturday, April 22 stormed the house of Elian's relatives in Miami, literally words, snatching the boy from their hands and flying him on a military plane to Washington, where he finally met his father. The boy, they say, was happy, and the father cried with joy. However, Elian was happy, judging by numerous photographs, videos and human testimonies, and in Miami with his relatives, who kissed, fed and gave him such toys, the existence of which he, poor thing, did not even suspect in Cuba, where a child was previously entitled to one toy per year on “cards”, but now they don’t rely on any. That's why he's a child, to enjoy life - especially since it was given to him anew. Let's hope that out of everything that happened to him during these five months, only the death of his mother will leave a deep imprint on Elian's soul. The rest of the experiences will be forgotten.
It's not about the boy. That's the trouble, it's not the boy. The participants in this story, who constantly insisted that they were fighting for the interests of the young Elian Gonzalez, were lying about their souls. After the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, in the early 60s, thousands of young Cubans arrived in Miami without parents: for those, the Iron Curtain had already fallen, and they could not leave to reunite with relatives in Miami, but for children there was still a some kind of legal loophole. And parents saved their children from the encroaching difficulties and repressions, sometimes separating from them for many years, and sometimes forever. After placing a name tag around the neck of their young son or daughter, the parents put them on a plane at the Havana airport - scenes they say were heartbreaking - and 40 minutes later they were met in Miami by a new family. For some reason, then Fidel’s government was not going to “fight” for its young citizens; it did not need them. It did not fight for them in the future, when tens of thousands of people were illegally transported from the Cuban coast to Florida. And if they fought, it was against them. More than one boat carrying fugitives with children on board was shot by the Cuban coast guard.
There is no reason to believe in the absolute sincerity of Elian’s relatives in Miami. That is, it is quite possible that the uncles and aunts fell in love with their great-nephew and sincerely wished for him a better fate than that which is the lot of most Cubans in Cuba. However, they essentially speculated on the boy, not allowing him to meet his father on the terms on which he insisted - outside of Miami - and teaching him, like a little parrot, to repeat that he did not want to return to Cuba. All this, first of all, shows how unsure they were of their moral rightness.
In this struggle, Elian was not just Elian to anyone - an orphaned six-year-old child in need of human participation. For some, he was a banner, a symbol, an amulet in the fight against Castro, for others - the same weapon in the fight against the enemies of the Cuban regime. No one wanted to give in, and if King Solomon had intervened in the matter with his famous method of testing parental feelings, then he would not have recognized the rights to paternity to anyone - neither the Miami uncles, nor Juan Miguel. Each one pulled the boy in his own direction and was ready to tear him in half, but not let him out of his hands.
The father, who came to the States under close supervision, was held hostage by Castro, and the son was held hostage by Castro’s Miami opponents. One slave came to rescue another, to transport him from a gilded cage to another, poorer one. One lack of freedom challenged another. In the story of Elian Gonzalez, the two Cubas faced each other like armies on a battlefield. Boy? Who remembered the boy “in this dull and stubborn battle”?
Split in two and destroyed to its very foundations - to the family where brother goes against brother, and a small child is forced to renounce his father - is modern Cuban society. Cuba's present is difficult, but what does the future hold? The story of Elián González leads to gloomy predictions.