From Damian Whitworth In Cárdenas, Cuba. The Times, UK. April 3 2000
THE bed, with a Mickey Mouse duvet cover, was in the middle of the room. A child's bicycle stood on one side; a miniature rocking chair on the other. Cowboys and Indians and a Power Ranger were arranged on a shelf and a small guitar lay on top of the bed.
On the pillow was a framed photograph of Elián González, the little boy at the centre of an international tug-of-war who has not slept in this bed for four months.
"These things are here ready for him when he comes back," his father said.
Juan Miguel González is a quietly spoken man with the crushed look and slightly bowed demeanour of someone who has been caught in the middle of a political struggle and whose personal agony is being watched around the world. He leant against the door frame as if he needed its support. "I
hope he will be back soon," he said softly. "This is his home."
Home is in a port town of 70,000 people, two hours' drive east of Havana. The street to which Elián will return if Cuba wins the battle for his custody is a far cry from the Miami suburbs where he is staying. It is unpaved, with stinking open drains. Many of the one-storey houses are
little more than shacks, with families living in one room. A woman came out of one, pulled a pipe up out of the fetid gutter and filled a pan. But it is, as Señor González repeated, "his home".
It had been a surprise to find Señor González there. He has been out of sight in recent weeks, and hasn't talked to journalists, apparently under instruction from President Castro's Government to keep a low profile. His six-year-old son, on the other hand, has been interviewed on
television and paraded in front of the cameras by his Miami relatives at every opportunity: clowning with his uncle, riding a bike, playing on a swing.
Initially, Señor González said that he could not talk. But after a minute or two he led the way into the house.
It is much smarter than many of the others on the street and was spotless. "We are getting things ready," Señor González said as he showed off the shrine that his son's bedroom has become. His tone was of one expressing a slightly desperate optimism.
Negotiations will continue today between immigration officials and Lázaro González, the boy's great-uncle, who has been caring for Elián in Miami since he survived the shipwreck of a migrant smuggling boat in which his mother died. The US authorities have asked the Miami
relatives to sign an undertaking that they will abide by the ruling of an appeal court that is to hear their case next month. If they do not sign by 9am tomorrow Elián's parole will be revoked and proceedings will begin to remove him. But with Cuban-Americans in Miami threatening to die to
stop the boy leaving, it is unclear how long it would take to send him home.
There are doubts, too, about the viability of an offer by Señor Castro to fly Señor González to America to care for the boy while the process is played out. He has insisted that he will not negotiate over the 31-strong entourage to accompany the father which would include a
senior government representative, doctors and psychiatrists as well as Elián's schoolmates.
Lawyers for the great-uncle have said that the boy will leave them only if immigration officials take him away. Señor González would not discuss whether he had been prevented from going to the US. He said only that Señor Castro had been "very supportive, from the
beginning".
"It has been difficult," he said. "But I hope Elián will one day be able to play with his brother." He was referring to his six-month-old son, Hianny, by his new wife Nersy.
No one in the neighbourhood wanted to talk about the politics in all this. Asked if he thought that Señor Castro was controlling the father, one man said nervously: "I am too busy with my own life to think about these things."
Another whispered that even as he was talking, other rafts, with other boys, would be setting out to cross the 90 miles to Florida.
There are daily rallies across Cuba calling for Elián's return. At one at the weekend in the provincial town of Niquero, Raul Castro, Fidel's brother and official successor, said that the "Miami mafia" had achieved only one thing: "They have united us for ever. They do not
know what they have done."
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Ltd. |