NewsMax.com. Tuesday,April 11, 2000
As a crowd of 15,000 gathered outside his Miami home praying he’ll be spared from life in Castro’s Cuba, the relatives of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez dug in their heels and threatened further legal action to prevent the boy from being given to his father before the court cases are
settled.
The Justice Department’s hand-picked mental health experts failed to work out a plan to bring about transfer of custody to Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.
Attorneys for Lazaro Gonzalez, the boy’s great-uncle, said they would react to any government order to hand Elian over by going into federal court and asking for an emergency injunction to prevent the federal government from allowing Juan Gonzalez to spirit his son off to Cuba upon taking
physical custody of him.
The order, if granted, would force Juan Miguel to remain in the US until all court action is concluded, a process DOJ officials say could take as long as ten months.
Said former US Attorney Kendall Coffey, one of the Miami relative’s attorneys: "We are actively considering several legal remedies to prevent removal of Elian to Cuba."
Yesterday Lazaro Gonzalez’s lawyers filed a brief with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta arguing that anyone who reaches US soil can request political asylum no matter what their age.
"Elian is not chattel," they wrote in the brief. "Even though a young child, he is a human being, with his own independent interests, his own rights and a strong, consistent desire not to be returned to Cuba," the attorneys say in the 59-page brief.
Next month, the court is scheduled to hear the family's appeal of a Miami federal judge's ruling that affirmed the decision by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to send Elian back to Cuba. The Miami relatives insist that Elian remain in the US until the case is decided.
Adding their weight to the family’s attempt to stave off any immediate turnover of Elian, Miami city and county officials announced plans to intervene.
Miami Mayor Joe Carollo said he and Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas will fly to Washington this morning to meet with US Attorney General Janet Reno. According to Carollo, they will ask Reno for a "transition period of about 30 days" to lessen any risk of psychological damage to
the boy brought about by an abrupt transfer of custody.
"I’m going to ask her to be fair and make sure this process is done gradually, away from the arms and the strong hands of the Castro security apparatus," Carollo said.
Justice Department spokeswoman Carole Florman says Reno had agreed to meet at her office Tuesday with both mayors.
Meanwhile, government officials said they will send a letter to Lazaro, probably today, ordering him to turn over Elian and telling him when and where to turn the boy over. They said they want the transfer to take place before the end of this week.
If Lazaro refuses to obey the government's instructions for a hand-over, INS officials say they will seek a court order forcing him to hand Elian over. If Lazaro balks at this, they say they could file criminal contempt of court charges and arrest him.
If all else fails, the feds say they are prepared to use force to take custody of the boy and reunite him with his father.
That’s a situation that officials want to avoid "at all costs," Deputy US Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC’s Good Morning America this morning. "It clearly would be traumatic [for Elian]," he said.
According to Holder, once Juan Miguel had physical custody of Elian he would then be free to go back to Cuba with the boy, although Holder said he believes Gonzalez would remain here until the courts reach a final decision in the case.
"It’s in everybody’s best interest for him to stay here while the appeals are pending," he said.
At issue now is Lazaro’s demand that he will only surrender Elian to his father if Juan Miguel comes to his house in Miami’s Little Havana section. The government insists that the transfer of custody take place at some unspecified neutral location. This was at the heart of yesterday’s
negotiations between Lazaro and the team of mental health workers.
It was that condition that prevented any agreement during last evening's meeting between Lazaro Gonzalez and three mental health experts hand-picked by the feds to help work out a plan for a transfer of physical custody that would cause as little psychological damage to Elian as is possible
under the circumstances.
The long-delayed conference – a meeting Attorney General Janet Reno has called a final step in the government’s effort to reunite the boatwreck survivor with his father – took place at Miami’s Mercy Hospital late yesterday afternoon, after several postponements due to Lazaro’s
insistence that his daughter Marisleysis, Elian’s surrogate mother in Miami, be included. She is currently hospitalized suffering from exhaustion and was not present at the meeting.
Attending the conference were Lazaro, Manny Diaz, one of his attorneys, and several Immigration and Naturalization Service officials. The mental health experts were psychiatrists Dr. Jerry Wiener and Dr. Paulina F. Kernberg, and a psychologist, Dr. Lourdes Rigual-Lynch, all considered tops in
their field.
Diaz said later that the meeting, which lasted a bare hour instead of the three hours planned for it, produced no results and no further meetings are scheduled.
"It was just a quick meeting to exchange ideas," he explained. "There was just a lot of discussion about the welfare of the child, no specific conclusion."
A source familiar with the talks told the Miami Herald that government officials were disappointed by Lazaro Gonzalez's absolute refusal to discuss ways to transfer Elian to his father with a minimum of psychological harm to the boy.
"The government once again bent over backwards to accommodate the relatives by agreeing to move the meeting, but Lazaro remained very unwilling to discuss a neutral location for the transfer," the source told the Herald. "He was adamant it happen at his house.
"We sincerely believe that Elian needs to see his primary caregivers are supporting him in this, and they're just not willing to do it."
Another source familiar with the meeting said Lazaro demanded a face-to-face meeting with Elian's father.
"This is a family-to-family matter," the great-uncle allegedly told the government’s experts. "I need to meet with Juan Miguel. We need to find out what's going on with each other."
The government is said to be ready to ask that Elian be taken to a neutral location in Florida where he would be turned over either to his father or a third party. Less likely would be a scenario in which the Miami relatives bring him to his father in Bethesda, Md., where he is staying at the
residence of Cuba’s diplomatic representative.
According to officials at the State Department, more visas may be issued to some of the 22 people Castro had originally wanted to accompany Juan Miguel to Washington as a "support team."
Critics have said that what Castro wants is to use the time needed to sort out the legal situation to subject Elian to brainwashing while he’s still here, and they fear that allowing any of the original support group to come here will bring that about.
The delegation Castro assigned to come to the US with Elián’s father included three teachers, three psychologists, two child psychiatrists, four doctors and two nurses.
Speaking on his government-controlled television station, Castro said the delegation, which would be based at the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, D.C., would establish a "mini-school and mini-hospital for Elián." The team was ready, Castro said, "to proceed, without
losing one minute, with the rehabilitation and re-adaptation [of Elian] to his family and school nucleus."
Earlier, Castro had announced that when he reached Cuba, Elian would be immediately sent to a special state hospital where he would be subjected to psychiatric treatment.
Last night in Miami a crowd estimated at 15,000 demonstrated outside Lazaro’s house, keeping up a peaceful vigil that government officials fear will turn violent if an agreement is not reached to transfer Elian to his father’s custody.
The demonstrators, many of whom made the same dangerous journey to the US that Elian made with his mother and that cost her life, have vowed to form a human chain to stop the government from taking Elian. Ramon Saul Sanchez, the president of the Cuban-exile Democracy Movement, said he is "planning
to exercise whatever influence we have" over demonstrators to assure nonviolence.
"We have been consistently telling the people that we must struggle for Elian to have his day in court," Sanchez said, "but that we must also understand that we have a duty to this community. We have fought the battle, and what Elian is going to remember is that these people here
did not betray him."
Miriam Sanabria, one of the demonstrators, told CBS News, "I think the boy is going to be taken away no matter what we do. I mean, they have their minds set and that boy has to go back to Cuba. They don't care about anything else."
Brainwashing Awaits Elian, Ex-Castro Prisoner Says
NewsMax.com. Monday, April 10, 2000
See Hot Topics for the latest events in the Elian Gonzalez case.
If he is sent back to Cuba, Elian Gonzalez won't be staying with his father. He’ll be put in a psychiatric gulag to be brainwashed, says a nun who spent 18 months in a Castro prison.
In an interview with NewsMax the member of a Roman Catholic religious order, who asked that she not be identified because she fears retaliation should she ever visit Cuba, stressed that in her homeland, children are considered to be the property of the state.
Her comments were confirmed only days after she spoke to NewsMax, when the Cuban government arrogantly announced that Elian, like all children in Cuba, is indeed the property o the Communist government.
In an interview on ABC’s "This Week" TV program Sunday, Spencer Eig, an attorney for Elian’s Miami relatives, made the same point.
Eig predicted that once the boy is handed over to his father Juan Miguel Gonzalez, both father and son would both be pawns of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. "Evil will laugh at good," he said.
Juan Gonzalez, a self-described dedicated member of Cuba’s Communist Party, awaits the return of his son while living with Cuba’s chief diplomat in Bethesda, Md. He has said that once the boy is turned over to him he is willing to remain in the United States until pending court action
is completed, a process deputy Attorney General Eric Holder says could take as long as ten months,
But, Holder adds, there is no way the United States could prevent Gonzalez from scooping up his son and whisking him off to Cuba within hours of gaining physical custody of Elian, an eventuality Cuban exiles in Miami believe to be a real and present threat.
Members of Miami’s Cuban exile community insist that the entire affair has been orchestrated by Cuban dictator Castro, They point to the admission made yesterday by Gregory Craig, Juan Miguel’s Washington lawyer, that the statement read by his client upon his arrival in Washington was
not written by Juan Miguel but instead by his Cuban superiors.
They also stress that Juan Miguel is not a free agent, since his relatives in Cuba are hostages. They say that the two grandmothers who came to the United States are now being held by Cuba authorities in an unknown location to guarantee that Juan Miguel will obey his Communist Party bosses.
Ricardo Alarcon, the leader of Cuba’s parliament and Fidel Castro’s lead negotiator with the United States on the Elian matter, denied reports that the Cuban relatives of Elian were being kept in a compound and insisted they were free to travel throughout the country. |