I think all of these comments are on topic in the sense that they reflect people's feelings on pretty hot issues. But the basic idea of my post was to see if anybody else had some other info.
A year ago right after the Columbine shootings, there was a lot of well-intentioned but uninformed speculation about why the SWAT team didn't storm the place immediately. Slowly, maybe a week to ten days later, a member of the team gave an interview in which he revealed that they couldn't hear ANYTHING over the alarms and water sprinklers. They were totally in the dark. That seemed to resolve the issue of their performance, at least for most.
My point? We don't know the facts yet on the Elian thing generally or the raid. We need more information.
For instance, where are copies of the supposedly signed agreements that were passed back and forth in the hours before the raid. I mean right up to 3 or 4 am. There have been comments attributed to a Miami attorney, who is a close friend of Reno and who was deeply involved in those negotiations, to the effect that a deal was "in hand" or about to be in hand.
I think we should express our opinions on the basis of the info available but be prepared to acknowledge that all the stuff is not yet out on the table.
FWIW, the New York Times Magazine ran a very detailed article last Sunday on the personal history of all the participants in the Gonzalez family. I commend it to all.
The text of the NYT article follows:
QUOTE
Just Another Cuban Family Saga
The story of Elián González's feuding clan is extreme, but it's not all that different from what most Cuban families divided by Castro's revolution have experienced: bitter feelings, thwarted love and always-painful efforts at reconciliation.
By TIM GOLDEN
Early on the evening of Nov. 22, Juan Miguel González came home from work to find his family in a panic. His mother was trying to tell him something, but couldn't seem to get it out. Finally, she took him into the kitchen and gave him the news: his former wife, Elisabeth, and their 5-year-old son, Elián, were nowhere to be found. The boy had been unaccountably absent from school that day, and one of Elisabeth's friends had told the family there were rumors that she had taken the child on a boat and left for la Yuma, the United States.
Juan Miguel grabbed his younger brother, Tony, and took off across Cárdenas, the town on Cuba's north coast where they have lived all their lives. When they arrived at the apartment Elisabeth and Elián shared with her boyfriend, the door was locked; no one was home. They went on to the apartment where the boyfriend's parents lived, but no one was there either, and neighbors said the family had sold its furniture and disappeared. Everyone assumed that like so many Cubans before them, they had headed for the Florida coast.
At 9:01 that night, Juan Miguel's father, Juan, called collect to relatives in Miami. In the elaborate case put forward by the lawyers and politicians who sought to keep the boy in the United States, the phone bill for the call has been waved about as evidence that Juan Miguel, 31, might have known in advance of plans for the furtive crossing -- that he might actually have given his approval so that his son could live in freedom. But even the relatives who would later fight him for the custody of Elián recall the conversation differently. "They were worried," said Lázaro González, one of Juan Miguel's uncles. "The mother had left with the boy in some sort of boat."
What is, in fact, clear about that first call, and the flurry of others that followed it, is something that was easily lost in the ensuing controversy: Juan Miguel González did not hesitate to turn to his aunts and uncles in Miami for help in the crisis, and they did not hesitate to help him. The next day, Lázaro said, he bought a $10 telephone card and called to reassure the family that such trips often took a few days and that he would look out for the boy. Finally, on Thanksgiving, the Miami relatives phoned Cuba with the news that Elián had been pulled from the sea by a couple of fishermen. Later, after visiting him at a hospital near Fort Lauderdale, Lázaro called again to tell them that the boy's mother had perished but that Elián had survived the ordeal astonishingly well.
On Friday, Nov. 26, Juan Miguel's father spoke to his eldest sister, Caridad, in Miami. Television news crews had already turned up at the hospital, followed by the first Cuban-American politicians offering their support. With all the attention, Caridad had begun hoping for a second small miracle to follow Elián's rescue: that her brother and his family might finally have a reason to leave Cuba and join the rest of the Gonzálezes in the United States.
"I told him he should grab a visa and one for his wife and another for Juan Miguel and come here right away," said Caridad, a slender, elegant looking woman in her late 60's. "It seemed like they wanted to come; he said he would give an answer. I think they started preparing their papers. But then they called back later and said some functionary of the government would be coming to get the boy."
From the moment Caridad hung up the phone, her brother and nephew began to slip from their relatives' view, leaving nothing between Miami and Fidel Castro but a skinny little boy, now 6. Yet even among the quiet minority of Gonzálezes in Miami who tried again and again to persuade their family members to give the boy back to his father, there has always been a charitable explanation for what happened next. They say that starting with Caridad and her brother Delfín, Juan Miguel's aunts and uncles first thought of keeping Elián in the United States partly as a way to pull the family together. "The obsession of her life has been to have the whole family here," one of Caridad's nephews in Miami told me last month. "That has been her reason for living. The idea was to use the boy to bring the others here."
However difficult it may be to think of the struggle over Elián as the product of a misguided effort at family reunification, it might once have been no easier to imagine what it would take to break the Gonzálezes apart. In the 41 years since Castro came to power, the family has held together through political differences and personal tragedies, long, painful separations and assorted family spats. Even now, it is hard to have a conversation in either country without hearing one of the Gonzálezes talk about how things used to be. "Éramos siempre tan unidos," they say. "We were always close."
The Gonzálezes have not been generous with their past. On either side of the fight, they have surrendered only the simplest pieces of their history, sometimes adopting the accounts of their new allies rather than expose something more personal. In Miami as in Cárdenas, there have been party lines. And in the absence of any real change in Cuba, or in Cuba's relationship with the United States, they have been easy proxies for political adversaries that know each other well.
Yet before the men started wearing suits and the women got makeovers and everyone began speaking from prepared texts, the Gonzálezes were like countless other Cuban families, divided by geography and politics but also struggling in endless small ways to bridge the Straits of Florida. Their choices -- even about whether to stay in Cuba or leave -- have often been more personal than ideological. Brothers and cousins a few years apart have seen the country through different eyes, and their loyalties have been shaped as much by their personalities as their ideals. Before Elián, the faults that ran through the González family had less to do with political history than with telephone calls and care packages and things said in anger that were never quite forgotten.
Now, however, the cold war has come to this: in the last bitter days of the struggle over Elián, Juan Miguel's uncle Delfín, 62, stands behind a police line in Bethesda, Md., with one of Juan Miguel's cousins, Alfredo Martell, who is 28. Speaking through a translator, they tell one television news crew after another that they just want a chance to talk to Juan Miguel, to work things out. Delfín mentions that he is Juan Miguel's godfather; Alfredo and Juan Miguel grew up together in the same house.
Juan Miguel may be within earshot of where they stand. But if so, he is somewhere in the residence of the Cuban government's chief envoy to Washington, and if he is watching on television, he is surrounded by Cuban officials who would hurry to point out the man from the Cuban American National Foundation, the most powerful anti-Castro political group in the United States. He is the heavyset guy standing directly behind Delfín and Alfredo, the one translating what they say.
Cárdenas, where the story begins, is in some ways a logical setting: it sits due south of the Florida Keys, in the path of currents that have carried wave after wave of desperate migrants to the United States. Though it is only two and a half hours east of Havana, the town feels more distant. At rush hour, if it can be called that, the main streets are a tangle of horse carts and bicycles and vintage American sedans. When most of its elegant colonial facades were built in the 19th century, Cárdenas was a thriving sugar town, a well-heeled neighbor to the sophisticated port city of Matanzas. But the boom ended before the century was over, a victim of the long fight to evict Spain. By the time Castro and his rebels overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959, the most strategic thing about Cárdenas was probably its rum distillery.
For the most part, Cárdenas was remote from the centers of the uprising. But it was by no means removed from the upheaval that followed. Juan Miguel's grandparents, Luis and Georgina, weathered the revolution relatively well; Luis kept his job as a stevedore at the Cárdenas port. The couple's nine children -- Juan Miguel's father, aunts and uncles -- had a tougher time. Their eldest son, Josá Luis, bought into the best cafeteria in town, the Cosmopolita, only to have it confiscated by the new government. Others struggled to find any work at all.
Delfín, then a dock worker in his early 20's, was among those in the family with great hopes for the revolution. "I think I supported them for about a month," he said of the Communists. "When I saw the injustices that were being committed, I knew that it wasn't going to be the right thing for Cuba." Though many of his friends had joined the new government, he did not hesitate to attack it in their presence. Eventually, he began conspiring against the new regime.
On March 22, 1962, Delfín was arrested and charged with subversion. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and his mother, especially, was devastated. Pina, as everyone called her, took down the large framed photograph of Fidel that she had put up on the living-room wall. She also tried her best to banish politics from the family's crowded home at No. 170 Cossio Street. "When something would happen in politics, my uncles would always want to discuss it," the eldest of Juan Miguel's cousins, José Antonio, recalled. "But anytime things got a little hot, my grandmother intervened. She would say: 'You are brothers. You are a family. Stay away from politics."'
Later, several of Juan Miguel's aunts and uncles would remember 1962 as the year they began thinking about a new life outside of Cuba. One aunt saw her husband hauled off to prison with Delfin. Another uncle, Manuel, or Manolo, as he is known, married and resolved to try to raise his family in the United States. For Caridad, whose husband had divorced her and hopped a boat for Miami, America became a dream of opportunity, freedom and requited love.
It is hard to have a conversation in either country without hearing one of the Gonzálezes talk about how things used to be. 'Éramos siempre tan unidos,' they say. 'We were always close.'
In September 1965, Castro announced that Cubans with relatives in the United States would be free to leave. By Christmas, chartered American planes were flying twice a day out of an airport 16 miles from the González home, near the beach resort of Varadero. In April, Caridad, then a 35-year-old seamstress, boarded one of the so-called freedom flights and flew to Miami by herself, crying the whole way. She was among more than 17,000 Cubans to make the trip that year, one of almost 300,000 who left before Castro halted the flights in 1973.
Although Caridad promised Pina that she would eventually send for everyone, the others had little choice but to make do. "It's like a chain," said the youngest of Juan Miguel's aunts, Haydee, 56, as she sat in the small home in Cárdenas where she has lived alone since the death of her husband and the departure of two of her three children to Miami. "Your husband has his family. You have children, and then they have their families. You can't leave just like that."
Haydée got a job in a school cafeteria. Manolo trained as a mechanic and found work repairing boat motors for a fishing cooperative -- thinking every day, he said, about how easy it might be to gather his family and disappear in the night. Lázaro emerged as a talented young gymnast just as Cuba began to pour resources into its sports program; early on, he was in some ways the luckiest. Juan Miguel's mother, Mariela, eventually became a clerk in the local courts, and his father, Juan, took a job as a police investigator in the interior ministry. It was a career choice that not all his siblings appreciated. "Think about it," said Delfín, who had at the time just been freed from a nightmarish series of prisons. "I criticized him a lot. I'd ask: 'Why are you doing that? There is other work around. Leave that alone."'
Unable to find a decent job and unwilling to stifle his complaints, Delfín grew rice in the mangrove swamps and waged a long, low-intensity conflict with the state. In 1979, with Caridad's help, he got a visa and came to the United States just months before his mother's death. Not long after, Castro opened the doors again, and thousands of Cubans left for the United States in the Mariel boat lift. Some of the Gonzálezes bought new suitcases and packed up their belongings. But in the chaos, they hesitated and were ultimately unable to leave.
Shortly thereafter, Caridad received United States citzenship, and members of the family got ready again. Even with money sent by Delfín, the passage wasn't easy. One of Juan Miguel's aunts brought her family in 1983, and Luis, the family patriarch, followed her the next spring. Manolo and Lazaro took their families to Costa Rica in August 1984 and applied for American visas there. It was an agonizing trip in which the two brothers had to leave their wives and children behind for months while they went to the United States to establish residency.
Almost all of the Gonzálezes moved at first into the insular world of Little Havana. Speaking almost no English, they shopped at Latin-owned stores, gossiped at Cuban coffee stands and got their news from Spanish-language radio and television stations that mirrored the zealous politics they had left behind in Cuba. The émigré culture that received them had begun to grow more diverse with the influx of the younger, more liberal Marielitos. But at the same time, older anti-Castro exiles were coming into their own as an American political force.
In Cuba, the next generation of Gonzálezes grew up seeing the country differently. Although the oldest of Juan Miguel's cousins was only seven years younger than his uncle Lazaro, none of them knew a world before Fidel. In the late 1960's and 70's, when some of Juan Miguel's uncles were growing bitter, when his aunts felt like outcasts for going to church, some of their children seem to have thrived. What they remember now, more than the uniforms they wore or the revolutionary songs they were made to learn in school, is their life in the crowded house on Cossío Street. "It wasn't just on birthdays and Christmas -- it was every night," Juan Miguel's cousin Lourdes Martell said. "All of us, the cousins, were together all the time."
The opportunities they had varied. Like thousands of other young Cubans of his generation, Juan Miguel's eldest cousin, Jose Antonio, became the first member of his family to attend college, earning a degree from the University of Matanzas that led him to a job with the ministry of agriculture. His sister Milagros had a less successful experience with the educational bureaucracy. Considered for a coveted scholarship to art school, she was rejected after an official came to her home for an interview and saw a picture of Christ displayed on the wall.
But if Castro had chosen among the cousins for one to champion his crusade, he could not have done better than Juan Miguel. Following in his father's path, Juan Miguel joined the Union of Young Communists at 15 and threw himself into the duties it presented: attending political rallies, volunteering to work on the agricultural harvest, keeping an eye on the "revolutionary morale" of his comrades. He became a full member of the Cuban Communist Party at the tender age of 24, an achievement he called "the proudest thing that can happen to you."
Like his father, Juan Miguel also fell in love with a woman who seemed to share his commitment to the revolution. In September 1984, he met Elisabeth Brotons at her friend Ismary Pruneda's quinceañera, the Latin equivalent of a sweet 16 party, and they soon fell in love. Juan Miguel's friends remember him then as a funny, gregarious kid of 15. Elisa, as everyone called her, was 14: a pretty, diffident girl with black hair and a nice smile. "She talked so softly that you always had to tell her to speak up," Ismary said.
In a town that even now feels more country than city, and in a country where sex and love are often the most available freedoms, no one seems to have worried much that the novios might be too young. "They were little kids, but it was different," Elisa's mother, Raquel Rodríguez, said, not quite explaining the difference. "Today, two kids get married that young and it lasts a few months. That didn't happen with them."
When they did marry, Elisa was just shy of 16, Juan Miguel not yet 17. She rented a white dress from the Palace of Brides on the Calle Real, the main drag in Cárdenas, and they borrowed an elegant old car to drive to the ceremony. In the fading black-and-white photographs that Raquel Rodríguez now keeps in a plain cardboard box, they toast each other with Champagne -- Elisa with a shy smile and feathered, Farrah Fawcett hair; Juan Miguel in a dark suit with both buttons buttoned and a wispy teenage mustache.
The couple lived first with Raquel and her second husband, Rolando, in an airy three-bedroom apartment above a pharmacy in the center of town. Elisa, an only child, seemed to thrive among the Gonzálezes. Juan Miguel left school after 10th grade and went to work in a paper factory, training to become an electrician. Before their marriage, Elisa had started a secretarial program at a live-in vocational school in a town an hour away, but she had become homesick and quit. Eventually, Elisa and Juan Miguel went to night school to earn their high school degrees. While he completed his three years of military service with an army firefighting unit near Cárdenas, she enrolled at a vocational school in Varadero that prepared workers for jobs in hotels and restaurants.
Her timing couldn't have been better. Varadero, a long ribbon of white-sand beach that extends out from the coast 10 miles west of Cárdenas, was becoming a centerpiece of Castro's reluctant effort to attract foreign capital after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its hotels, many of them operated or partly owned by foreign companies, offered some of the best-paying jobs in the country. Soon, the resort was providing enough dollars to make Cárdenas one of the most prosperous towns in Cuba. By the time Elisa finished hotel school, the classes were filling up with Cuba's best and brightest, those who could have chosen medicine or physics but realized that the country's most lucrative jobs would be tending bar and carrying tourists' bags.
Like the scratchy signals of A.M. radio stations and the television broadcasts that people in Cardenas pull down from Miami on homemade antennas, Varadero was also a window on the outside world. Kids from Cárdenas would hitchhike just to watch the tourists play Pac-Man or use Coke machines. "You knew there were places called Canada and Spain and New York because you learned about them in geography class," Juan Miguel's cousin, Jose Antonio, 42, said. "But when the tourists started coming, we would go and stand next to them and just sniff. And after all those years of the same soap, they smelled different."
In 1990, Elisa went to work as a chambermaid at the newest Varadero hotel, the Paradiso-Punta Arenas. The job wasn't glamorous, and there was a catch: the all-inclusive resort discouraged tipping and it attracted mostly low-budget tourists on package trips. But the wages were excellent by Cuban standards, and they were augmented by a steady flow of precious gifts from the guests -- half-empty bottles of rum, shampoo and cosmetics and not-so-old clothes.
"She said that job was her salvation," said Ismary Pruneda, who finished the secretarial program they had started together and ended up hawking pork sandwiches at a farmer's market. "She would say to me, 'Do you think I like cleaning floors?' She did it because she could live decently from that. I had struggled so much to finish, and there I was, 9 or 10 hours a day, yelling, 'Pork meat!"'
Juan Miguel also found a job in Varadero, at Josone Park, the converted estate of a Basque immigrant who ran the Havana Club distillery in Cárdenas before the revolution. Starting on the maintenance crew, Juan Miguel worked his way up to the admission booth, and he shared in the tips that the waiters and bartenders pooled. Eventually, he and Elisa did well enough to buy a creaky 1956 Nash Rambler and to build a home for themselves beside the house on Cossio Street. They watched videos on a hard-earned VCR and drove to the beach in Varadero on weekends.
On the surface, at least, the couple remained steadfast fidelistas. Elisa was by all accounts a diligent maid, and although she was more muted about her politics than Juan Miguel, she, too, became a party member and the secretary of the Communist Party committee at her job. It was not coincidental that those working in Varadero (who now include perhaps a fifth of the Cardenas labor force) tended to be loyal revolutionaries. They showed a proud face to foreign visitors and could be trusted to cope with the new economy's darker side: rampant prostitution, petty theft by hotel employees and a kind of tourism apartheid in which ordinary Cubans were often barred from the restaurants and nightclubs where they themselves worked.
Juan Miguel's cousin, Alfredo, became a hotel security guard and earned much of his income from older foreign men who tipped him to let them sneak young Cuban women into their rooms. They were women whose faces he says he cannot forget. "They would come to you sometimes and say, 'Hey, look, I'm only doing this because I have kids to feed or because my mother is sick,"' he said. "That kind of stuff hits you and hits you until you finally say, 'I am getting out of here or I am going to die in the ocean trying."'
After years of growing prosperity in the 1980's, Castro had announced the "Special Period in Time of Peace," an official euphemism for economic disaster. Even with the cushion of their Varadero jobs, the Gonzálezes had to make charcoal or scavenge for crude oil in order to cook their meals. Alfredo, who did his military service in the Cárdenas police, saw the turmoil there through the eyes of his uncle Juan, 54, a proud, easygoing man who had always got along with the regime as he had with his brothers and sisters.
"Anybody who tried to sell things to get by, the cops took it away," Alfredo said. "When the lights went out, people would throw bottles at us. Once upon a time, Juan was one of them. But after the Special Period, he saw that things were not the way Fidel said they were." Alfredo recalled one day when there was nothing to eat and his uncle scrounged up a piece of bread, cut some grass from the yard with a knife and made a sandwich of it. He ate it and then threw up. Without telling his family, Juan Miguel's younger brother, Tony, 25, applied for an American visa. When it was granted, Juan Miguel and his mother talked him out of going, Juan Miguel told me.
uan Miguel and Elisa had other problems as well. From the time she was 16 or 17, they struggled to have a child, losing four pregnancies in succession. In 1989, she was found to have a bacterial parasite that was thought to have caused her recurrent miscarriages. Even after she was treated, she lost three more pregnancies -- one of them at seven months. Under the rationing system that governs the allocation of everything from children's milk to gifts for newlyweds, expectant Cuban women could buy a crib and a mattress in state stores. Elisa bought the items again and again, her friend Ismary said. "Later, she would have to sell them because she couldn't handle the memories."
Portrait of a family, Cuban branch. Back row, Juan González and Mariela Quintana (Juan Miguel's parents) and Raquel Rodriguez (Elisabeth's mother) and her husband, Rolando Betancourt; front row, Juan Miguel and his wife, Nersy, with their infant son, Hianny. Photograph by Marc Pokempner/Impact Visuals, for The New York Times.
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After several years of marriage, Elisa and Juan Miguel had also begun to drift apart. Friends saw them as having less and less in common: she loved clothes and perfume and romantic movies; he liked hanging out with friends. "When they met, it was all dreamy, but at that age, the same things don't matter that matter later on," said Marta Elena Hidalgo, the wife of one of Juan Miguel's closest friends. "Years later, they weren't alike at all. He is this playful, outgoing guy, and she was a girl who was very low key, very reserved."
Juan Miguel, who liked to spend some of his comfortable salary at bars and discothèques, began to go with other women. Sitting around the dining-room table recently with his parents, his second wife, Nersy, 23, and their infant son, Hianny, Juan Miguel spoke uneasily about the breakup of his first marriage, mentioning the long, stressful effort to have a child. His mother reminded him of another issue. "Yeah, it was mostly because of the way I was," he said. "How to put it? It was probably my fooling around with other women, being on the street." Finally, in May 1991, they divorced. Then, several months later, they were living together again.
"We had always wanted to have a child," Juan Miguel said. "We got together again to see if we could do it. And finally we did." After months of bed rest and prenatal checkups, Elisa gave birth on Dec. 6, 1993. The couple had known from the sonograms that they were expecting a boy, and they made up their own name for him, using the first three letters of Elisa and the last two of Juan. In his excitement, Juan Miguel couldn't wait for Elisa to return from the hospital to start celebrating. "I told them to wait," her mother, Raquel, 51, said. "But he couldn't stop himself. Elisa's half-brother had gotten this pig, and he slaughtered it right then, and they started frying pork rinds and drinking beer and rum with their friends. They had the party without us."
Now, at least, it is impossible to find anyone who knew the couple well who does not describe both young parents as having cherished Elián. The games and toys that fill his rooms at Raquel's apartment and on Cossío Street might not look like much to a kid now hooked on Nintendo, but they must have looked extravagant to his playmates. "Other kids around here may be in a difficult situation," said Juan Miguel's cousin, Lourdes, who is Elián's godmother. "But there was nothing that boy wanted that he didn't have."
For a while, some of their friends said, the little boy with his father's eyes and his mother's nose seemed to hold the couple together. But after a while, the relationship buckled again. As much as Elisa cared for Juan Miguel, she told her girlfriends, she was tired of his running around. Juan Miguel, for his part, said he felt different, too. "She was like a sister to me," he said. In February 1997, 11 years after they were married and two months after Elián's third birthday, they separated for good. "It was the same as before," Juan Miguel's mother, Mariela, 51, said, looking sadly at her son. "The same motive."
Elisa moved back in with her mother and Rolando, in the apartment above the pharmacy, a short walk from Cossío Street. According to several of her friends and several of Juan Miguel's, she not only shared custody of the boy but also remained close to her former in-laws. And she had a significant example: her mother, Raquel, had remained on such good terms with Elisa's father that she would go to parties with her husband and ex-husband on either arm. Elisa's close friend Lisbeth Garcia said that Elisa and Juan Miguel sometimes fought over Elián but that they generally did an admirable job of remaining friends after the split. "Sometimes I told her that they got along better as friends than they did at the end of their marriage," she said.
Still, Lisbeth and others remember the months after the divorce as a deeply lonely time for Elisa. She and Lisbeth worked long hours at the hotel, often arriving home after 8 p.m., and Elisa seemed to miss the bustle and warmth of Cossío Street. It made it worse that Juan Miguel seemed to meet lots of other women and that his job gave him a little more time to spend with Elián. On Saturdays and school holidays, Juan Miguel would take the boy with him to the park, and on the mornings after Elián stayed over at Cossío Street, they had a long ritual of "little hugs" to mark their goodbyes. "There were times we almost missed the bus because Juan Miguel would spend 10 minutes saying goodbye, doing those little hugs," said his friend Fidel Ramirez, who has worked with him at the park for a decade.
Elisa's life began to turn on an evening in August 1997, her friend Lisbeth said. They had gone out after work to a Varadero nightspot, the Havana Club. As they danced, several women together, a young man approached them and asked if he could join. Lisbeth agreed; she recognized him as El Loco, a guy she had seen around in Cardenas. After a while, Lisbeth and another friend went to the bathroom, leaving Elisa and the man, Lázaro Rafael Munero, on the dance floor. By the time they got back, Lisbeth said, Elisa had found a new friend.
Rafa, as they called him, showed no sign of the temper that apparently earned him his nickname. When the group decided to continue on to a second nightclub, he offered to pay for a taxi. Then he drove them home in his own car, first dropping off Lisbeth, her sister and her cousin and then leaving Elisa at the apartment above the pharmacy. "I don't think a week went by before they got together," Lisbeth said. "Within about two months, he went to live with her at Raquel's house."
To her mother and some of her friends, that seemed too fast. But Elisa insisted that she had found a good man. The son of an oil worker, Munero had dropped out of school in 10th grade; at age 18, he was imprisoned for more than a year for breaking into a hotel room with a friend and stealing $236.55 from a German tourist. When he met Elisa, he was 22; his steadiest job had been selling soft drinks and beer to tourists on the beach in front of one of the Varadero hotels. Mostly, he made his living as a taxi driver, shuttling between Cárdenas and Varadero without a license in a country that makes a very big thing of licenses. But Munero was also a master in the Cuban art of resolviendo, or getting hold of things, and he had little trouble winning Elisa's heart. "He knew how to work her," Lisbeth recalled. "He was always very close to her, very affectionate, very attentive. And little by little, she fell for him."
n the storm of propaganda that began soon after Elián's rescue, no one has been hit harder than Munero, who also died in the crossing. Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, described him this way: Munero was a bad kid. When he dropped out of school, after picking fights with all sorts of classmates, it was "to undertake a criminal career." When he was with Elisa, the paper quotes a friend of hers, she would turn up with a black eye one day, a swollen wrist the next. "Munero," the report says, "with his dominating and violent personality, exerted a strange and fatal influence over Elisabeth."
But as with much of the story, some of the same people cited in the official account later described Munero in softer, more complex terms. Dayana Oceguera, his jilted former girlfriend and another bright Young Communist in excellent standing, described him as a guy who came on strong and was very sure about things, like his desire for her to quit her studies (which she refused to do) and have his child (which she did). He was a lousy father, she said, but could be helpful in emergencies.
"He wasn't such a terrible person," she said. "He had a strong character and a lot of complexes. If somebody looked at him crosswise, he got mad about it." But she added: "He was a very family-oriented guy. If I got sick, he would take care of me. He could resolver anything -- things that were possible and things that were impossible." Even Juan Miguel seemed reluctant to pile on. "He would come by here sometimes to pick up the boy or drop him off," he said of Munero. "We got along with him all right."
Less than a year after Munero had moved in with Elisa, he left Cuba in a small boat with three friends. Elisa's relatives say that he tried to persuade her to go with him but that she refused. In Miami, Munero lived with an aunt and worked 12-hour days at a car wash for $5 an hour. He passed again and again on invitations to go out after work, to the movies to meet girls, and no one seems to have been impressed by his enthusiasm for America.
Milagros Garcia, the aunt with whom he stayed, thought it was the loneliness, more than the hard work, that Munero couldn't take. She recalled the day when Munero received a letter from Elisa with three photographs. On the back of one, she wrote in a loopy, girlish script: "My Love: Keep this photo which is sent to you with all of the affection that you deserve. From your Little One." On another, in which Elián stares out at the camera with his eyes still wide, she wrote, "For Munero, with all the affection of his little boy, Elián." Munero was thrilled, his aunt said, but she kidded him mercilessly. "I said, 'Ay, Rafa, she's so ugly!' But he couldn't hear that. He told me: 'Auntie, don't say that! I'm in love!' I think he was obsessed with her."
Four months after his arrival in Florida, Munero asked his aunt to hold some of his clothes and most of the $3,000 he had saved and used the remainder to buy a motorized rubber raft. His relatives tried repeatedly to dissuade him but could not. On Oct. 26, 1998, he and another man were picked up by the Cuban Coast Guard as they made their way into a bay in the central province of Villa Clara. Munero spent the next two months there in prison, and Elisa's friends said she visited him at least five times.
Munero was released on New Year's Eve, and he appears to have spent the following weeks telling anyone who would listen that his trip north had been a terrible mistake. Several people who saw him then said they believed him; in Miami, his aunt would later say she had heard that he was badly beaten by his jailers. For a time, Munero moved back in with Elisa at her mother's apartment, but the arrangement did not last.
Raquel Rodriguez says now that he was abusive to her daughter and she would not stand for it. But while her views could be tinted by both the loss of her daughter and pressure from the government, she seems to have been clear, long before her daughter's death, of her distaste for Elisa's young boyfriend. Not long after Munero's return, the couple rented an apartment of their own and took Elián with them. Months later, they set off before dawn in a homemade boat with a balky 50-horsepower motor: Elisa and Elián; Munero, his two brothers and their parents; a friend of Elisa's, her husband and his family; and a young couple with a 5-year-old girl. When engine trouble forced the group back to shore for repairs, the young couple had second thoughts and left the girl behind. Elisa kept Elián aboard.
ive months later, there is nothing about Elisa's decision to leave that is not contested in some way. In Miami, lawyers for the González family claim that she and Munero had been hounded by the authorities because of his troubles with the law. In Cuba, officials insist that Munero must have coerced Elisa into making the trip. But if Elisa confided her thoughts to anyone who is still alive, they have kept them to themselves.
In her silence, it didn't take long for Cubans on either side of the Straits to seize on Elián as a metaphor for the country's future. Juan Miguel remembers how quickly Cuban-American politicians seemed to appear at his uncle's modest stucco home, picking the boy up and holding him like a trophy. Only in their first conversation after Elián was released from the hospital did the boy ever speak about what had happened. "Papa, my mama got lost in the sea,"' Juan Miguel remembers his son saying. "I told him: 'Don't worry. You will be right back here with me."'
Later that night, Juan Miguel said, his aunt Caridad called. "She told me: 'With all this, your life is set here. With him having come on Thanksgiving and all that, they have all kinds of money collected. They'll give you a house; they'll give you a car. You won't have to work another day in your life. The whole family can come with you."' None of it was very specific, Juan Miguel said, but several of his other aunts and uncles called with similar pleas.
"Then Lázaro and Delfín called, and they started to offend me," Juan Miguel said. "They started telling me how bad the government here is, all that. And me -- I have my ideals. I told them, 'There's nothing to talk about with you guys,' and I hung up on them. They never said a thing about the boy staying there -- they were just insisting that we should go there." Caridad called back again and again, Juan Miguel said, and he hung up on her every time.
Delfin said he was the first of the Gonzálezes in Miami to insist that Elián should not be sent home and that Lazaro and his 21-year-old daughter, Marisleysis, were the first to back him up. "At the beginning, the father and the family there probably thought about coming here and meeting up with the child in a free country," Delfín said. "But then things got out of their hands. We saw that the government was getting mixed up in something that is none of its business." Caridad told her nephew, "I came to this country to bring Cubans here, not to send them back."
Whatever their politics, none of the Gonzálezes were wrong to suspect that their relatives were being swept up by forces bigger than themselves. On Nov. 24, the day before Elián was found, Juan Miguel's mother, Mariela, had already gone for help to her boss at the city tribunals. He, in turn, had spoken to the first secretary of the Communist Party in Cardenas, Ricardo Chapelin, who called Juan Miguel in the next day. "He was desperate," Chapelin said. "He said the mother had taken the boy, and he was completely against it."
By the time Elián was rescued on the 25th, Juan Miguel had been put in touch with the foreign ministry in Havana, which two days later sent the United States a diplomatic note seeking the boy's return. Soon after that, Juan Miguel González of No. 170 Cossío Street, Cárdenas, found himself face to face with the Comandante en Jefe.
Castro asked him how he felt about the situation and what he wanted to do. "He told me I could do what I pleased," Juan Miguel said. "If I wanted to leave, I could leave. Nonetheless, I told him no. My decision was clear."
Having taken the measure of his man, Castro was quick to recognize the episode's political potential. Only two weeks before, he had been embarrassed by criticism of his human rights record from some of the Latin American leaders who attended a regional summit in Havana. Now, he had an issue with the power to galvanize not only the party faithful but also every Cuban parent and child and millions of people abroad. It was an issue, as Cuban officials were soon noting privately, that also had the potential to isolate Miami's Cuban exiles from other Americans.
It is probably fair to assume that Juan Miguel would have been willing to swim to Miami to pick up his son. Still, he may have been stopped from going right away not so much to prevent his defection (whatever the strength of his principles, his family could always have been kept behind) but also because the Cuban government was in no great hurry for the drama to end. Castro told visitors as early as December that he expected the case to drag on in American courts for months, and he has managed it accordingly, ordering up protest rallies, television programs and "Free Elián" T-shirts on a massive scale. Within weeks of his rescue, Elián had become the biggest revolutionary symbol since Che.
Castro's enemies were just as quick to recognize a poster child when they saw one. Elián was not yet out of Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital before the first Cuban-American politicos were on the scene, led by a Sharpton-esque political strategist and public-relations man named Armando Gutierrez. "We met with the family, and I told them, 'You're going to need help,"' said Gutierrez, who rushed over with a couple of local Cuban-American politicians. "I didn't want to make it into a political thing. When I saw Elián's face, I knew it was something special."
As in Cuba, it has grown steadily more difficult in Miami to untangle the thoughts of Elián's relatives from those of their advisers, lawyers and political hangers-on. The $600-a-month rental where Lázaro lives with his wife and two grown children has been a magnet for politicians of various anti-Castro stripes, and it has been infused from the beginning with their mixed feelings of victimization and entitlement. According to people working with the family, the cause has been dominated by the Cuban American National Foundation, which has sponsored most of the Gonzálezes political activities, advised them on strategy and helped arrange what has thus far been a largely no-show job for Lázaro, who had been unemployed, at the Ford dealership of one of its directors. The foundation, with a team of lawyers, also helped to assemble its own narrative of Elián's flight to freedom. Their method was not entirely unlike that of Castro's state-security operatives, who, according to several Cubans, moved systematically through the González family's world, interviewing people, sifting their stories and picking out the parts that might be most useful.
Castro told visitors as early as December that he expected the case to drag on for months, and he has managed it accordingly. Within weeks of his rescue, Elián had become the biggest revolutionary symbol since Che.
Lázaro, who brought Elián home from the hospital, became the most ardent crusader for the boy's continued stay. But while he has worked closely with the politicians in Miami and Washington, his own politics have remained vague. Many of his relatives say they had thought of him as one of the least politically minded of his brothers, and his life in Cuba was not marked by open conflict with the government. In 1977, he followed his brother Juan into the Cuban National Police and then resigned suddenly four years later, returning to his previous work as an athletic coach. Officials of the Cuban government -- which has a clear interest in maligning Lázaro's reputation -- said he had been forced out after an investigation found him to have associated with "homosexual elements," and they provided copies of police files purportedly documenting the inquiry. Lázaro denied the assertions as libelous propaganda.
The television crews have also gravitated to Lázaro's daughter, Marisleysis, an assistant bank-loan processor with a remarkable capacity to summon her anguish for the cameras. (She has been hospitalized eight times since November for what have been vaguely described as anxiety and stress-related illnesses.) But while Marisleysis quickly stepped forward as a surrogate mother for Elián, her own mother, Angela, has kept almost entirely out of sight. Nor has the media seen much of Jose and Luis Cid, another set of Juan Miguel's cousins, who both have long records of problems with the law. (Luis Cid is awaiting trial in the strong-arm robbery of a tourist in Little Havana last year)
Among the González cousins who have been most important to the story told in Miami is one who came from Cuba little more than a year ago, Alfredo Martell. As a latter-day émigré, Alfredo might have been expected to take a more nuanced view of the events surrounding Elián. His mother and sister, who remain in Cardenas, cannot understand why their own family in Miami has put Juan Miguel through such agony. Instead, Alfredo has been a font of assertions meant to undermine Juan Miguel: that Elián's father wanted to move to America himself; that he sometimes beat up Elisa; that he, too, felt betrayed by what has happened to Cuba over the last decade.
A little more than a year after Alfredo arrived in Florida on his own small boat, he views the case with the clarity of a convert. "Sometimes, you think it would be better for the boy to be with his father," said Alfredo, whose own son, Lázaro, 5, has once again been playing with his cousin Elián. "But his father knows he is probably better off here. And the kid tells you constantly that he doesn't want to go. You also have to think -- the boy would not be sent back to Juan Miguel; he would go back to Fidel."
Senior Cuban officials deny this, of course. They have always maintained that as soon as Elián arrived in Cárdenas, they would stop the demonstrations, take down the posters and end the daily two-hour television blocks devoted to the case. The houses on Juan Miguel's block, which the government painted over in bright colors, would be allowed to fade; the little shrine in Elián's classroom would go back to being a desk. "He needs to recover his privacy," said Ricardo Alarcon, the Cuban official who has managed the case for Castro. "We are going to have to work on that, but with time, it will happen."
But if Elián will be missed by "Nightline" and "Crossfire," his resonance in Cuba will be more lasting. "What is clear is that he is going to continue to be a boy symbol, a boy hero," Ricardo Chapelín, the Communist Party chief in Cárdenas, said. "This battle did not begin with Elián. Our struggle has been one of challenging the government of the United States for its attacks against our country. And we will continue with this struggle, which is one that strengthens us in every way."
Elián has strengthened a lot of those who have fought over his welfare. Fidel Castro hasn't looked so energetic in years. His adversaries in Miami, while out of step with most Americans, managed to seize hold of the presidential campaign, bring the United States attorney general to their doorstep and reassert their once-fading influence on Capitol Hill. Juan Miguel's uncle, Lázaro, is said to be weighing movie and book deals of various sorts.
It is hard to see most of the other Gonzálezes as anything but traumatized. And but for Elián and Juan Miguel, none seem to have suffered more than Juan Miguel's uncle Manolo and aunt América, who happened to be in Spain on a long-planned trip in the days after Elián was found. Of all the family members in the United States, they are the ones who have remained closest to their relatives in Cuba, and they are the ones who have tried hardest to persuade the others to give Elián back to Juan Miguel. Manolo says he cannot think about the boy now without remembering the loss of his own son, Manuel Antonio, who died of cancer 10 years ago at the age of 14. He has been hurt by the shouts of "Communist" that he sometimes hears when he is recognized on the street. But he said the worst of it came last month on the last of his several trips to Lazaro's house, when his brothers would not speak to him, Elián would not kiss him and no one even tried to help him when he had to be rushed to the hospital with chest pains. "What has happened, here I don't know," he said tearfully. "I never wanted that boy to go back to Cuba. I only wanted him to be with his father."
Manolo's wife, who sat beside him, started to try to explain what he meant, but she, too, found herself at a loss. "From the beginning, this has been a family problem," she said. "Why could it not be resolved within the family?"
END QUOTE
[This message has been edited by abruzzi (edited April 27, 2000).]
A year ago right after the Columbine shootings, there was a lot of well-intentioned but uninformed speculation about why the SWAT team didn't storm the place immediately. Slowly, maybe a week to ten days later, a member of the team gave an interview in which he revealed that they couldn't hear ANYTHING over the alarms and water sprinklers. They were totally in the dark. That seemed to resolve the issue of their performance, at least for most.
My point? We don't know the facts yet on the Elian thing generally or the raid. We need more information.
For instance, where are copies of the supposedly signed agreements that were passed back and forth in the hours before the raid. I mean right up to 3 or 4 am. There have been comments attributed to a Miami attorney, who is a close friend of Reno and who was deeply involved in those negotiations, to the effect that a deal was "in hand" or about to be in hand.
I think we should express our opinions on the basis of the info available but be prepared to acknowledge that all the stuff is not yet out on the table.
FWIW, the New York Times Magazine ran a very detailed article last Sunday on the personal history of all the participants in the Gonzalez family. I commend it to all.
The text of the NYT article follows:
QUOTE
Just Another Cuban Family Saga
The story of Elián González's feuding clan is extreme, but it's not all that different from what most Cuban families divided by Castro's revolution have experienced: bitter feelings, thwarted love and always-painful efforts at reconciliation.
By TIM GOLDEN
Early on the evening of Nov. 22, Juan Miguel González came home from work to find his family in a panic. His mother was trying to tell him something, but couldn't seem to get it out. Finally, she took him into the kitchen and gave him the news: his former wife, Elisabeth, and their 5-year-old son, Elián, were nowhere to be found. The boy had been unaccountably absent from school that day, and one of Elisabeth's friends had told the family there were rumors that she had taken the child on a boat and left for la Yuma, the United States.
Juan Miguel grabbed his younger brother, Tony, and took off across Cárdenas, the town on Cuba's north coast where they have lived all their lives. When they arrived at the apartment Elisabeth and Elián shared with her boyfriend, the door was locked; no one was home. They went on to the apartment where the boyfriend's parents lived, but no one was there either, and neighbors said the family had sold its furniture and disappeared. Everyone assumed that like so many Cubans before them, they had headed for the Florida coast.
At 9:01 that night, Juan Miguel's father, Juan, called collect to relatives in Miami. In the elaborate case put forward by the lawyers and politicians who sought to keep the boy in the United States, the phone bill for the call has been waved about as evidence that Juan Miguel, 31, might have known in advance of plans for the furtive crossing -- that he might actually have given his approval so that his son could live in freedom. But even the relatives who would later fight him for the custody of Elián recall the conversation differently. "They were worried," said Lázaro González, one of Juan Miguel's uncles. "The mother had left with the boy in some sort of boat."
What is, in fact, clear about that first call, and the flurry of others that followed it, is something that was easily lost in the ensuing controversy: Juan Miguel González did not hesitate to turn to his aunts and uncles in Miami for help in the crisis, and they did not hesitate to help him. The next day, Lázaro said, he bought a $10 telephone card and called to reassure the family that such trips often took a few days and that he would look out for the boy. Finally, on Thanksgiving, the Miami relatives phoned Cuba with the news that Elián had been pulled from the sea by a couple of fishermen. Later, after visiting him at a hospital near Fort Lauderdale, Lázaro called again to tell them that the boy's mother had perished but that Elián had survived the ordeal astonishingly well.
On Friday, Nov. 26, Juan Miguel's father spoke to his eldest sister, Caridad, in Miami. Television news crews had already turned up at the hospital, followed by the first Cuban-American politicians offering their support. With all the attention, Caridad had begun hoping for a second small miracle to follow Elián's rescue: that her brother and his family might finally have a reason to leave Cuba and join the rest of the Gonzálezes in the United States.
"I told him he should grab a visa and one for his wife and another for Juan Miguel and come here right away," said Caridad, a slender, elegant looking woman in her late 60's. "It seemed like they wanted to come; he said he would give an answer. I think they started preparing their papers. But then they called back later and said some functionary of the government would be coming to get the boy."
From the moment Caridad hung up the phone, her brother and nephew began to slip from their relatives' view, leaving nothing between Miami and Fidel Castro but a skinny little boy, now 6. Yet even among the quiet minority of Gonzálezes in Miami who tried again and again to persuade their family members to give the boy back to his father, there has always been a charitable explanation for what happened next. They say that starting with Caridad and her brother Delfín, Juan Miguel's aunts and uncles first thought of keeping Elián in the United States partly as a way to pull the family together. "The obsession of her life has been to have the whole family here," one of Caridad's nephews in Miami told me last month. "That has been her reason for living. The idea was to use the boy to bring the others here."
However difficult it may be to think of the struggle over Elián as the product of a misguided effort at family reunification, it might once have been no easier to imagine what it would take to break the Gonzálezes apart. In the 41 years since Castro came to power, the family has held together through political differences and personal tragedies, long, painful separations and assorted family spats. Even now, it is hard to have a conversation in either country without hearing one of the Gonzálezes talk about how things used to be. "Éramos siempre tan unidos," they say. "We were always close."
The Gonzálezes have not been generous with their past. On either side of the fight, they have surrendered only the simplest pieces of their history, sometimes adopting the accounts of their new allies rather than expose something more personal. In Miami as in Cárdenas, there have been party lines. And in the absence of any real change in Cuba, or in Cuba's relationship with the United States, they have been easy proxies for political adversaries that know each other well.
Yet before the men started wearing suits and the women got makeovers and everyone began speaking from prepared texts, the Gonzálezes were like countless other Cuban families, divided by geography and politics but also struggling in endless small ways to bridge the Straits of Florida. Their choices -- even about whether to stay in Cuba or leave -- have often been more personal than ideological. Brothers and cousins a few years apart have seen the country through different eyes, and their loyalties have been shaped as much by their personalities as their ideals. Before Elián, the faults that ran through the González family had less to do with political history than with telephone calls and care packages and things said in anger that were never quite forgotten.
Now, however, the cold war has come to this: in the last bitter days of the struggle over Elián, Juan Miguel's uncle Delfín, 62, stands behind a police line in Bethesda, Md., with one of Juan Miguel's cousins, Alfredo Martell, who is 28. Speaking through a translator, they tell one television news crew after another that they just want a chance to talk to Juan Miguel, to work things out. Delfín mentions that he is Juan Miguel's godfather; Alfredo and Juan Miguel grew up together in the same house.
Juan Miguel may be within earshot of where they stand. But if so, he is somewhere in the residence of the Cuban government's chief envoy to Washington, and if he is watching on television, he is surrounded by Cuban officials who would hurry to point out the man from the Cuban American National Foundation, the most powerful anti-Castro political group in the United States. He is the heavyset guy standing directly behind Delfín and Alfredo, the one translating what they say.
Cárdenas, where the story begins, is in some ways a logical setting: it sits due south of the Florida Keys, in the path of currents that have carried wave after wave of desperate migrants to the United States. Though it is only two and a half hours east of Havana, the town feels more distant. At rush hour, if it can be called that, the main streets are a tangle of horse carts and bicycles and vintage American sedans. When most of its elegant colonial facades were built in the 19th century, Cárdenas was a thriving sugar town, a well-heeled neighbor to the sophisticated port city of Matanzas. But the boom ended before the century was over, a victim of the long fight to evict Spain. By the time Castro and his rebels overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959, the most strategic thing about Cárdenas was probably its rum distillery.
For the most part, Cárdenas was remote from the centers of the uprising. But it was by no means removed from the upheaval that followed. Juan Miguel's grandparents, Luis and Georgina, weathered the revolution relatively well; Luis kept his job as a stevedore at the Cárdenas port. The couple's nine children -- Juan Miguel's father, aunts and uncles -- had a tougher time. Their eldest son, Josá Luis, bought into the best cafeteria in town, the Cosmopolita, only to have it confiscated by the new government. Others struggled to find any work at all.
Delfín, then a dock worker in his early 20's, was among those in the family with great hopes for the revolution. "I think I supported them for about a month," he said of the Communists. "When I saw the injustices that were being committed, I knew that it wasn't going to be the right thing for Cuba." Though many of his friends had joined the new government, he did not hesitate to attack it in their presence. Eventually, he began conspiring against the new regime.
On March 22, 1962, Delfín was arrested and charged with subversion. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and his mother, especially, was devastated. Pina, as everyone called her, took down the large framed photograph of Fidel that she had put up on the living-room wall. She also tried her best to banish politics from the family's crowded home at No. 170 Cossio Street. "When something would happen in politics, my uncles would always want to discuss it," the eldest of Juan Miguel's cousins, José Antonio, recalled. "But anytime things got a little hot, my grandmother intervened. She would say: 'You are brothers. You are a family. Stay away from politics."'
Later, several of Juan Miguel's aunts and uncles would remember 1962 as the year they began thinking about a new life outside of Cuba. One aunt saw her husband hauled off to prison with Delfin. Another uncle, Manuel, or Manolo, as he is known, married and resolved to try to raise his family in the United States. For Caridad, whose husband had divorced her and hopped a boat for Miami, America became a dream of opportunity, freedom and requited love.
It is hard to have a conversation in either country without hearing one of the Gonzálezes talk about how things used to be. 'Éramos siempre tan unidos,' they say. 'We were always close.'
In September 1965, Castro announced that Cubans with relatives in the United States would be free to leave. By Christmas, chartered American planes were flying twice a day out of an airport 16 miles from the González home, near the beach resort of Varadero. In April, Caridad, then a 35-year-old seamstress, boarded one of the so-called freedom flights and flew to Miami by herself, crying the whole way. She was among more than 17,000 Cubans to make the trip that year, one of almost 300,000 who left before Castro halted the flights in 1973.
Although Caridad promised Pina that she would eventually send for everyone, the others had little choice but to make do. "It's like a chain," said the youngest of Juan Miguel's aunts, Haydee, 56, as she sat in the small home in Cárdenas where she has lived alone since the death of her husband and the departure of two of her three children to Miami. "Your husband has his family. You have children, and then they have their families. You can't leave just like that."
Haydée got a job in a school cafeteria. Manolo trained as a mechanic and found work repairing boat motors for a fishing cooperative -- thinking every day, he said, about how easy it might be to gather his family and disappear in the night. Lázaro emerged as a talented young gymnast just as Cuba began to pour resources into its sports program; early on, he was in some ways the luckiest. Juan Miguel's mother, Mariela, eventually became a clerk in the local courts, and his father, Juan, took a job as a police investigator in the interior ministry. It was a career choice that not all his siblings appreciated. "Think about it," said Delfín, who had at the time just been freed from a nightmarish series of prisons. "I criticized him a lot. I'd ask: 'Why are you doing that? There is other work around. Leave that alone."'
Unable to find a decent job and unwilling to stifle his complaints, Delfín grew rice in the mangrove swamps and waged a long, low-intensity conflict with the state. In 1979, with Caridad's help, he got a visa and came to the United States just months before his mother's death. Not long after, Castro opened the doors again, and thousands of Cubans left for the United States in the Mariel boat lift. Some of the Gonzálezes bought new suitcases and packed up their belongings. But in the chaos, they hesitated and were ultimately unable to leave.
Shortly thereafter, Caridad received United States citzenship, and members of the family got ready again. Even with money sent by Delfín, the passage wasn't easy. One of Juan Miguel's aunts brought her family in 1983, and Luis, the family patriarch, followed her the next spring. Manolo and Lazaro took their families to Costa Rica in August 1984 and applied for American visas there. It was an agonizing trip in which the two brothers had to leave their wives and children behind for months while they went to the United States to establish residency.
Almost all of the Gonzálezes moved at first into the insular world of Little Havana. Speaking almost no English, they shopped at Latin-owned stores, gossiped at Cuban coffee stands and got their news from Spanish-language radio and television stations that mirrored the zealous politics they had left behind in Cuba. The émigré culture that received them had begun to grow more diverse with the influx of the younger, more liberal Marielitos. But at the same time, older anti-Castro exiles were coming into their own as an American political force.
In Cuba, the next generation of Gonzálezes grew up seeing the country differently. Although the oldest of Juan Miguel's cousins was only seven years younger than his uncle Lazaro, none of them knew a world before Fidel. In the late 1960's and 70's, when some of Juan Miguel's uncles were growing bitter, when his aunts felt like outcasts for going to church, some of their children seem to have thrived. What they remember now, more than the uniforms they wore or the revolutionary songs they were made to learn in school, is their life in the crowded house on Cossío Street. "It wasn't just on birthdays and Christmas -- it was every night," Juan Miguel's cousin Lourdes Martell said. "All of us, the cousins, were together all the time."
The opportunities they had varied. Like thousands of other young Cubans of his generation, Juan Miguel's eldest cousin, Jose Antonio, became the first member of his family to attend college, earning a degree from the University of Matanzas that led him to a job with the ministry of agriculture. His sister Milagros had a less successful experience with the educational bureaucracy. Considered for a coveted scholarship to art school, she was rejected after an official came to her home for an interview and saw a picture of Christ displayed on the wall.
But if Castro had chosen among the cousins for one to champion his crusade, he could not have done better than Juan Miguel. Following in his father's path, Juan Miguel joined the Union of Young Communists at 15 and threw himself into the duties it presented: attending political rallies, volunteering to work on the agricultural harvest, keeping an eye on the "revolutionary morale" of his comrades. He became a full member of the Cuban Communist Party at the tender age of 24, an achievement he called "the proudest thing that can happen to you."
Like his father, Juan Miguel also fell in love with a woman who seemed to share his commitment to the revolution. In September 1984, he met Elisabeth Brotons at her friend Ismary Pruneda's quinceañera, the Latin equivalent of a sweet 16 party, and they soon fell in love. Juan Miguel's friends remember him then as a funny, gregarious kid of 15. Elisa, as everyone called her, was 14: a pretty, diffident girl with black hair and a nice smile. "She talked so softly that you always had to tell her to speak up," Ismary said.
In a town that even now feels more country than city, and in a country where sex and love are often the most available freedoms, no one seems to have worried much that the novios might be too young. "They were little kids, but it was different," Elisa's mother, Raquel Rodríguez, said, not quite explaining the difference. "Today, two kids get married that young and it lasts a few months. That didn't happen with them."
When they did marry, Elisa was just shy of 16, Juan Miguel not yet 17. She rented a white dress from the Palace of Brides on the Calle Real, the main drag in Cárdenas, and they borrowed an elegant old car to drive to the ceremony. In the fading black-and-white photographs that Raquel Rodríguez now keeps in a plain cardboard box, they toast each other with Champagne -- Elisa with a shy smile and feathered, Farrah Fawcett hair; Juan Miguel in a dark suit with both buttons buttoned and a wispy teenage mustache.
The couple lived first with Raquel and her second husband, Rolando, in an airy three-bedroom apartment above a pharmacy in the center of town. Elisa, an only child, seemed to thrive among the Gonzálezes. Juan Miguel left school after 10th grade and went to work in a paper factory, training to become an electrician. Before their marriage, Elisa had started a secretarial program at a live-in vocational school in a town an hour away, but she had become homesick and quit. Eventually, Elisa and Juan Miguel went to night school to earn their high school degrees. While he completed his three years of military service with an army firefighting unit near Cárdenas, she enrolled at a vocational school in Varadero that prepared workers for jobs in hotels and restaurants.
Her timing couldn't have been better. Varadero, a long ribbon of white-sand beach that extends out from the coast 10 miles west of Cárdenas, was becoming a centerpiece of Castro's reluctant effort to attract foreign capital after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its hotels, many of them operated or partly owned by foreign companies, offered some of the best-paying jobs in the country. Soon, the resort was providing enough dollars to make Cárdenas one of the most prosperous towns in Cuba. By the time Elisa finished hotel school, the classes were filling up with Cuba's best and brightest, those who could have chosen medicine or physics but realized that the country's most lucrative jobs would be tending bar and carrying tourists' bags.
Like the scratchy signals of A.M. radio stations and the television broadcasts that people in Cardenas pull down from Miami on homemade antennas, Varadero was also a window on the outside world. Kids from Cárdenas would hitchhike just to watch the tourists play Pac-Man or use Coke machines. "You knew there were places called Canada and Spain and New York because you learned about them in geography class," Juan Miguel's cousin, Jose Antonio, 42, said. "But when the tourists started coming, we would go and stand next to them and just sniff. And after all those years of the same soap, they smelled different."
In 1990, Elisa went to work as a chambermaid at the newest Varadero hotel, the Paradiso-Punta Arenas. The job wasn't glamorous, and there was a catch: the all-inclusive resort discouraged tipping and it attracted mostly low-budget tourists on package trips. But the wages were excellent by Cuban standards, and they were augmented by a steady flow of precious gifts from the guests -- half-empty bottles of rum, shampoo and cosmetics and not-so-old clothes.
"She said that job was her salvation," said Ismary Pruneda, who finished the secretarial program they had started together and ended up hawking pork sandwiches at a farmer's market. "She would say to me, 'Do you think I like cleaning floors?' She did it because she could live decently from that. I had struggled so much to finish, and there I was, 9 or 10 hours a day, yelling, 'Pork meat!"'
Juan Miguel also found a job in Varadero, at Josone Park, the converted estate of a Basque immigrant who ran the Havana Club distillery in Cárdenas before the revolution. Starting on the maintenance crew, Juan Miguel worked his way up to the admission booth, and he shared in the tips that the waiters and bartenders pooled. Eventually, he and Elisa did well enough to buy a creaky 1956 Nash Rambler and to build a home for themselves beside the house on Cossio Street. They watched videos on a hard-earned VCR and drove to the beach in Varadero on weekends.
On the surface, at least, the couple remained steadfast fidelistas. Elisa was by all accounts a diligent maid, and although she was more muted about her politics than Juan Miguel, she, too, became a party member and the secretary of the Communist Party committee at her job. It was not coincidental that those working in Varadero (who now include perhaps a fifth of the Cardenas labor force) tended to be loyal revolutionaries. They showed a proud face to foreign visitors and could be trusted to cope with the new economy's darker side: rampant prostitution, petty theft by hotel employees and a kind of tourism apartheid in which ordinary Cubans were often barred from the restaurants and nightclubs where they themselves worked.
Juan Miguel's cousin, Alfredo, became a hotel security guard and earned much of his income from older foreign men who tipped him to let them sneak young Cuban women into their rooms. They were women whose faces he says he cannot forget. "They would come to you sometimes and say, 'Hey, look, I'm only doing this because I have kids to feed or because my mother is sick,"' he said. "That kind of stuff hits you and hits you until you finally say, 'I am getting out of here or I am going to die in the ocean trying."'
After years of growing prosperity in the 1980's, Castro had announced the "Special Period in Time of Peace," an official euphemism for economic disaster. Even with the cushion of their Varadero jobs, the Gonzálezes had to make charcoal or scavenge for crude oil in order to cook their meals. Alfredo, who did his military service in the Cárdenas police, saw the turmoil there through the eyes of his uncle Juan, 54, a proud, easygoing man who had always got along with the regime as he had with his brothers and sisters.
"Anybody who tried to sell things to get by, the cops took it away," Alfredo said. "When the lights went out, people would throw bottles at us. Once upon a time, Juan was one of them. But after the Special Period, he saw that things were not the way Fidel said they were." Alfredo recalled one day when there was nothing to eat and his uncle scrounged up a piece of bread, cut some grass from the yard with a knife and made a sandwich of it. He ate it and then threw up. Without telling his family, Juan Miguel's younger brother, Tony, 25, applied for an American visa. When it was granted, Juan Miguel and his mother talked him out of going, Juan Miguel told me.
uan Miguel and Elisa had other problems as well. From the time she was 16 or 17, they struggled to have a child, losing four pregnancies in succession. In 1989, she was found to have a bacterial parasite that was thought to have caused her recurrent miscarriages. Even after she was treated, she lost three more pregnancies -- one of them at seven months. Under the rationing system that governs the allocation of everything from children's milk to gifts for newlyweds, expectant Cuban women could buy a crib and a mattress in state stores. Elisa bought the items again and again, her friend Ismary said. "Later, she would have to sell them because she couldn't handle the memories."
Portrait of a family, Cuban branch. Back row, Juan González and Mariela Quintana (Juan Miguel's parents) and Raquel Rodriguez (Elisabeth's mother) and her husband, Rolando Betancourt; front row, Juan Miguel and his wife, Nersy, with their infant son, Hianny. Photograph by Marc Pokempner/Impact Visuals, for The New York Times.
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After several years of marriage, Elisa and Juan Miguel had also begun to drift apart. Friends saw them as having less and less in common: she loved clothes and perfume and romantic movies; he liked hanging out with friends. "When they met, it was all dreamy, but at that age, the same things don't matter that matter later on," said Marta Elena Hidalgo, the wife of one of Juan Miguel's closest friends. "Years later, they weren't alike at all. He is this playful, outgoing guy, and she was a girl who was very low key, very reserved."
Juan Miguel, who liked to spend some of his comfortable salary at bars and discothèques, began to go with other women. Sitting around the dining-room table recently with his parents, his second wife, Nersy, 23, and their infant son, Hianny, Juan Miguel spoke uneasily about the breakup of his first marriage, mentioning the long, stressful effort to have a child. His mother reminded him of another issue. "Yeah, it was mostly because of the way I was," he said. "How to put it? It was probably my fooling around with other women, being on the street." Finally, in May 1991, they divorced. Then, several months later, they were living together again.
"We had always wanted to have a child," Juan Miguel said. "We got together again to see if we could do it. And finally we did." After months of bed rest and prenatal checkups, Elisa gave birth on Dec. 6, 1993. The couple had known from the sonograms that they were expecting a boy, and they made up their own name for him, using the first three letters of Elisa and the last two of Juan. In his excitement, Juan Miguel couldn't wait for Elisa to return from the hospital to start celebrating. "I told them to wait," her mother, Raquel, 51, said. "But he couldn't stop himself. Elisa's half-brother had gotten this pig, and he slaughtered it right then, and they started frying pork rinds and drinking beer and rum with their friends. They had the party without us."
Now, at least, it is impossible to find anyone who knew the couple well who does not describe both young parents as having cherished Elián. The games and toys that fill his rooms at Raquel's apartment and on Cossío Street might not look like much to a kid now hooked on Nintendo, but they must have looked extravagant to his playmates. "Other kids around here may be in a difficult situation," said Juan Miguel's cousin, Lourdes, who is Elián's godmother. "But there was nothing that boy wanted that he didn't have."
For a while, some of their friends said, the little boy with his father's eyes and his mother's nose seemed to hold the couple together. But after a while, the relationship buckled again. As much as Elisa cared for Juan Miguel, she told her girlfriends, she was tired of his running around. Juan Miguel, for his part, said he felt different, too. "She was like a sister to me," he said. In February 1997, 11 years after they were married and two months after Elián's third birthday, they separated for good. "It was the same as before," Juan Miguel's mother, Mariela, 51, said, looking sadly at her son. "The same motive."
Elisa moved back in with her mother and Rolando, in the apartment above the pharmacy, a short walk from Cossío Street. According to several of her friends and several of Juan Miguel's, she not only shared custody of the boy but also remained close to her former in-laws. And she had a significant example: her mother, Raquel, had remained on such good terms with Elisa's father that she would go to parties with her husband and ex-husband on either arm. Elisa's close friend Lisbeth Garcia said that Elisa and Juan Miguel sometimes fought over Elián but that they generally did an admirable job of remaining friends after the split. "Sometimes I told her that they got along better as friends than they did at the end of their marriage," she said.
Still, Lisbeth and others remember the months after the divorce as a deeply lonely time for Elisa. She and Lisbeth worked long hours at the hotel, often arriving home after 8 p.m., and Elisa seemed to miss the bustle and warmth of Cossío Street. It made it worse that Juan Miguel seemed to meet lots of other women and that his job gave him a little more time to spend with Elián. On Saturdays and school holidays, Juan Miguel would take the boy with him to the park, and on the mornings after Elián stayed over at Cossío Street, they had a long ritual of "little hugs" to mark their goodbyes. "There were times we almost missed the bus because Juan Miguel would spend 10 minutes saying goodbye, doing those little hugs," said his friend Fidel Ramirez, who has worked with him at the park for a decade.
Elisa's life began to turn on an evening in August 1997, her friend Lisbeth said. They had gone out after work to a Varadero nightspot, the Havana Club. As they danced, several women together, a young man approached them and asked if he could join. Lisbeth agreed; she recognized him as El Loco, a guy she had seen around in Cardenas. After a while, Lisbeth and another friend went to the bathroom, leaving Elisa and the man, Lázaro Rafael Munero, on the dance floor. By the time they got back, Lisbeth said, Elisa had found a new friend.
Rafa, as they called him, showed no sign of the temper that apparently earned him his nickname. When the group decided to continue on to a second nightclub, he offered to pay for a taxi. Then he drove them home in his own car, first dropping off Lisbeth, her sister and her cousin and then leaving Elisa at the apartment above the pharmacy. "I don't think a week went by before they got together," Lisbeth said. "Within about two months, he went to live with her at Raquel's house."
To her mother and some of her friends, that seemed too fast. But Elisa insisted that she had found a good man. The son of an oil worker, Munero had dropped out of school in 10th grade; at age 18, he was imprisoned for more than a year for breaking into a hotel room with a friend and stealing $236.55 from a German tourist. When he met Elisa, he was 22; his steadiest job had been selling soft drinks and beer to tourists on the beach in front of one of the Varadero hotels. Mostly, he made his living as a taxi driver, shuttling between Cárdenas and Varadero without a license in a country that makes a very big thing of licenses. But Munero was also a master in the Cuban art of resolviendo, or getting hold of things, and he had little trouble winning Elisa's heart. "He knew how to work her," Lisbeth recalled. "He was always very close to her, very affectionate, very attentive. And little by little, she fell for him."
n the storm of propaganda that began soon after Elián's rescue, no one has been hit harder than Munero, who also died in the crossing. Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, described him this way: Munero was a bad kid. When he dropped out of school, after picking fights with all sorts of classmates, it was "to undertake a criminal career." When he was with Elisa, the paper quotes a friend of hers, she would turn up with a black eye one day, a swollen wrist the next. "Munero," the report says, "with his dominating and violent personality, exerted a strange and fatal influence over Elisabeth."
But as with much of the story, some of the same people cited in the official account later described Munero in softer, more complex terms. Dayana Oceguera, his jilted former girlfriend and another bright Young Communist in excellent standing, described him as a guy who came on strong and was very sure about things, like his desire for her to quit her studies (which she refused to do) and have his child (which she did). He was a lousy father, she said, but could be helpful in emergencies.
"He wasn't such a terrible person," she said. "He had a strong character and a lot of complexes. If somebody looked at him crosswise, he got mad about it." But she added: "He was a very family-oriented guy. If I got sick, he would take care of me. He could resolver anything -- things that were possible and things that were impossible." Even Juan Miguel seemed reluctant to pile on. "He would come by here sometimes to pick up the boy or drop him off," he said of Munero. "We got along with him all right."
Less than a year after Munero had moved in with Elisa, he left Cuba in a small boat with three friends. Elisa's relatives say that he tried to persuade her to go with him but that she refused. In Miami, Munero lived with an aunt and worked 12-hour days at a car wash for $5 an hour. He passed again and again on invitations to go out after work, to the movies to meet girls, and no one seems to have been impressed by his enthusiasm for America.
Milagros Garcia, the aunt with whom he stayed, thought it was the loneliness, more than the hard work, that Munero couldn't take. She recalled the day when Munero received a letter from Elisa with three photographs. On the back of one, she wrote in a loopy, girlish script: "My Love: Keep this photo which is sent to you with all of the affection that you deserve. From your Little One." On another, in which Elián stares out at the camera with his eyes still wide, she wrote, "For Munero, with all the affection of his little boy, Elián." Munero was thrilled, his aunt said, but she kidded him mercilessly. "I said, 'Ay, Rafa, she's so ugly!' But he couldn't hear that. He told me: 'Auntie, don't say that! I'm in love!' I think he was obsessed with her."
Four months after his arrival in Florida, Munero asked his aunt to hold some of his clothes and most of the $3,000 he had saved and used the remainder to buy a motorized rubber raft. His relatives tried repeatedly to dissuade him but could not. On Oct. 26, 1998, he and another man were picked up by the Cuban Coast Guard as they made their way into a bay in the central province of Villa Clara. Munero spent the next two months there in prison, and Elisa's friends said she visited him at least five times.
Munero was released on New Year's Eve, and he appears to have spent the following weeks telling anyone who would listen that his trip north had been a terrible mistake. Several people who saw him then said they believed him; in Miami, his aunt would later say she had heard that he was badly beaten by his jailers. For a time, Munero moved back in with Elisa at her mother's apartment, but the arrangement did not last.
Raquel Rodriguez says now that he was abusive to her daughter and she would not stand for it. But while her views could be tinted by both the loss of her daughter and pressure from the government, she seems to have been clear, long before her daughter's death, of her distaste for Elisa's young boyfriend. Not long after Munero's return, the couple rented an apartment of their own and took Elián with them. Months later, they set off before dawn in a homemade boat with a balky 50-horsepower motor: Elisa and Elián; Munero, his two brothers and their parents; a friend of Elisa's, her husband and his family; and a young couple with a 5-year-old girl. When engine trouble forced the group back to shore for repairs, the young couple had second thoughts and left the girl behind. Elisa kept Elián aboard.
ive months later, there is nothing about Elisa's decision to leave that is not contested in some way. In Miami, lawyers for the González family claim that she and Munero had been hounded by the authorities because of his troubles with the law. In Cuba, officials insist that Munero must have coerced Elisa into making the trip. But if Elisa confided her thoughts to anyone who is still alive, they have kept them to themselves.
In her silence, it didn't take long for Cubans on either side of the Straits to seize on Elián as a metaphor for the country's future. Juan Miguel remembers how quickly Cuban-American politicians seemed to appear at his uncle's modest stucco home, picking the boy up and holding him like a trophy. Only in their first conversation after Elián was released from the hospital did the boy ever speak about what had happened. "Papa, my mama got lost in the sea,"' Juan Miguel remembers his son saying. "I told him: 'Don't worry. You will be right back here with me."'
Later that night, Juan Miguel said, his aunt Caridad called. "She told me: 'With all this, your life is set here. With him having come on Thanksgiving and all that, they have all kinds of money collected. They'll give you a house; they'll give you a car. You won't have to work another day in your life. The whole family can come with you."' None of it was very specific, Juan Miguel said, but several of his other aunts and uncles called with similar pleas.
"Then Lázaro and Delfín called, and they started to offend me," Juan Miguel said. "They started telling me how bad the government here is, all that. And me -- I have my ideals. I told them, 'There's nothing to talk about with you guys,' and I hung up on them. They never said a thing about the boy staying there -- they were just insisting that we should go there." Caridad called back again and again, Juan Miguel said, and he hung up on her every time.
Delfin said he was the first of the Gonzálezes in Miami to insist that Elián should not be sent home and that Lazaro and his 21-year-old daughter, Marisleysis, were the first to back him up. "At the beginning, the father and the family there probably thought about coming here and meeting up with the child in a free country," Delfín said. "But then things got out of their hands. We saw that the government was getting mixed up in something that is none of its business." Caridad told her nephew, "I came to this country to bring Cubans here, not to send them back."
Whatever their politics, none of the Gonzálezes were wrong to suspect that their relatives were being swept up by forces bigger than themselves. On Nov. 24, the day before Elián was found, Juan Miguel's mother, Mariela, had already gone for help to her boss at the city tribunals. He, in turn, had spoken to the first secretary of the Communist Party in Cardenas, Ricardo Chapelin, who called Juan Miguel in the next day. "He was desperate," Chapelin said. "He said the mother had taken the boy, and he was completely against it."
By the time Elián was rescued on the 25th, Juan Miguel had been put in touch with the foreign ministry in Havana, which two days later sent the United States a diplomatic note seeking the boy's return. Soon after that, Juan Miguel González of No. 170 Cossío Street, Cárdenas, found himself face to face with the Comandante en Jefe.
Castro asked him how he felt about the situation and what he wanted to do. "He told me I could do what I pleased," Juan Miguel said. "If I wanted to leave, I could leave. Nonetheless, I told him no. My decision was clear."
Having taken the measure of his man, Castro was quick to recognize the episode's political potential. Only two weeks before, he had been embarrassed by criticism of his human rights record from some of the Latin American leaders who attended a regional summit in Havana. Now, he had an issue with the power to galvanize not only the party faithful but also every Cuban parent and child and millions of people abroad. It was an issue, as Cuban officials were soon noting privately, that also had the potential to isolate Miami's Cuban exiles from other Americans.
It is probably fair to assume that Juan Miguel would have been willing to swim to Miami to pick up his son. Still, he may have been stopped from going right away not so much to prevent his defection (whatever the strength of his principles, his family could always have been kept behind) but also because the Cuban government was in no great hurry for the drama to end. Castro told visitors as early as December that he expected the case to drag on in American courts for months, and he has managed it accordingly, ordering up protest rallies, television programs and "Free Elián" T-shirts on a massive scale. Within weeks of his rescue, Elián had become the biggest revolutionary symbol since Che.
Castro's enemies were just as quick to recognize a poster child when they saw one. Elián was not yet out of Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital before the first Cuban-American politicos were on the scene, led by a Sharpton-esque political strategist and public-relations man named Armando Gutierrez. "We met with the family, and I told them, 'You're going to need help,"' said Gutierrez, who rushed over with a couple of local Cuban-American politicians. "I didn't want to make it into a political thing. When I saw Elián's face, I knew it was something special."
As in Cuba, it has grown steadily more difficult in Miami to untangle the thoughts of Elián's relatives from those of their advisers, lawyers and political hangers-on. The $600-a-month rental where Lázaro lives with his wife and two grown children has been a magnet for politicians of various anti-Castro stripes, and it has been infused from the beginning with their mixed feelings of victimization and entitlement. According to people working with the family, the cause has been dominated by the Cuban American National Foundation, which has sponsored most of the Gonzálezes political activities, advised them on strategy and helped arrange what has thus far been a largely no-show job for Lázaro, who had been unemployed, at the Ford dealership of one of its directors. The foundation, with a team of lawyers, also helped to assemble its own narrative of Elián's flight to freedom. Their method was not entirely unlike that of Castro's state-security operatives, who, according to several Cubans, moved systematically through the González family's world, interviewing people, sifting their stories and picking out the parts that might be most useful.
Castro told visitors as early as December that he expected the case to drag on for months, and he has managed it accordingly. Within weeks of his rescue, Elián had become the biggest revolutionary symbol since Che.
Lázaro, who brought Elián home from the hospital, became the most ardent crusader for the boy's continued stay. But while he has worked closely with the politicians in Miami and Washington, his own politics have remained vague. Many of his relatives say they had thought of him as one of the least politically minded of his brothers, and his life in Cuba was not marked by open conflict with the government. In 1977, he followed his brother Juan into the Cuban National Police and then resigned suddenly four years later, returning to his previous work as an athletic coach. Officials of the Cuban government -- which has a clear interest in maligning Lázaro's reputation -- said he had been forced out after an investigation found him to have associated with "homosexual elements," and they provided copies of police files purportedly documenting the inquiry. Lázaro denied the assertions as libelous propaganda.
The television crews have also gravitated to Lázaro's daughter, Marisleysis, an assistant bank-loan processor with a remarkable capacity to summon her anguish for the cameras. (She has been hospitalized eight times since November for what have been vaguely described as anxiety and stress-related illnesses.) But while Marisleysis quickly stepped forward as a surrogate mother for Elián, her own mother, Angela, has kept almost entirely out of sight. Nor has the media seen much of Jose and Luis Cid, another set of Juan Miguel's cousins, who both have long records of problems with the law. (Luis Cid is awaiting trial in the strong-arm robbery of a tourist in Little Havana last year)
Among the González cousins who have been most important to the story told in Miami is one who came from Cuba little more than a year ago, Alfredo Martell. As a latter-day émigré, Alfredo might have been expected to take a more nuanced view of the events surrounding Elián. His mother and sister, who remain in Cardenas, cannot understand why their own family in Miami has put Juan Miguel through such agony. Instead, Alfredo has been a font of assertions meant to undermine Juan Miguel: that Elián's father wanted to move to America himself; that he sometimes beat up Elisa; that he, too, felt betrayed by what has happened to Cuba over the last decade.
A little more than a year after Alfredo arrived in Florida on his own small boat, he views the case with the clarity of a convert. "Sometimes, you think it would be better for the boy to be with his father," said Alfredo, whose own son, Lázaro, 5, has once again been playing with his cousin Elián. "But his father knows he is probably better off here. And the kid tells you constantly that he doesn't want to go. You also have to think -- the boy would not be sent back to Juan Miguel; he would go back to Fidel."
Senior Cuban officials deny this, of course. They have always maintained that as soon as Elián arrived in Cárdenas, they would stop the demonstrations, take down the posters and end the daily two-hour television blocks devoted to the case. The houses on Juan Miguel's block, which the government painted over in bright colors, would be allowed to fade; the little shrine in Elián's classroom would go back to being a desk. "He needs to recover his privacy," said Ricardo Alarcon, the Cuban official who has managed the case for Castro. "We are going to have to work on that, but with time, it will happen."
But if Elián will be missed by "Nightline" and "Crossfire," his resonance in Cuba will be more lasting. "What is clear is that he is going to continue to be a boy symbol, a boy hero," Ricardo Chapelín, the Communist Party chief in Cárdenas, said. "This battle did not begin with Elián. Our struggle has been one of challenging the government of the United States for its attacks against our country. And we will continue with this struggle, which is one that strengthens us in every way."
Elián has strengthened a lot of those who have fought over his welfare. Fidel Castro hasn't looked so energetic in years. His adversaries in Miami, while out of step with most Americans, managed to seize hold of the presidential campaign, bring the United States attorney general to their doorstep and reassert their once-fading influence on Capitol Hill. Juan Miguel's uncle, Lázaro, is said to be weighing movie and book deals of various sorts.
It is hard to see most of the other Gonzálezes as anything but traumatized. And but for Elián and Juan Miguel, none seem to have suffered more than Juan Miguel's uncle Manolo and aunt América, who happened to be in Spain on a long-planned trip in the days after Elián was found. Of all the family members in the United States, they are the ones who have remained closest to their relatives in Cuba, and they are the ones who have tried hardest to persuade the others to give Elián back to Juan Miguel. Manolo says he cannot think about the boy now without remembering the loss of his own son, Manuel Antonio, who died of cancer 10 years ago at the age of 14. He has been hurt by the shouts of "Communist" that he sometimes hears when he is recognized on the street. But he said the worst of it came last month on the last of his several trips to Lazaro's house, when his brothers would not speak to him, Elián would not kiss him and no one even tried to help him when he had to be rushed to the hospital with chest pains. "What has happened, here I don't know," he said tearfully. "I never wanted that boy to go back to Cuba. I only wanted him to be with his father."
Manolo's wife, who sat beside him, started to try to explain what he meant, but she, too, found herself at a loss. "From the beginning, this has been a family problem," she said. "Why could it not be resolved within the family?"
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[This message has been edited by abruzzi (edited April 27, 2000).]
