By Lizette Alvarez. The New York Times. April 11, 2000
MIAMI, April 9 -- "Libertad. Libertad. Libertad."
The word lords over the house where Elián González is staying in Little Havana. It is scribbled on posters, scrawled on T-shirts, shouted over megaphones and whispered in prayers. It is the first word that rolls off people's tongues as they try to answer the questions so many
outside the Cuban community have been asking: Why so much outrage? Why so much consternation over the fate of a little boy whom most of them have never met? Why keep a boy from his father?
"All we want is for this child to live in liberty," said Miriam Millares, 64, who stood outside of the home of Elián's great-uncle, Lázaro González, where the boy is staying. Then Mr. Millares asked a question, one that has cut deeply among Cuban exiles, even those
who would never turn up in front of the house to pray or chant for Elián. "Why do Americans have so much hatred for us?"
For most Americans, the feeling is not hatred so much as bewilderment, and the scene outside the house, with religious images and Spanish slogans, has made the drama seem all the more baffling. But Cuban exiles here say there are good reasons for their anger; it is just that few people outside
Miami bother to listen or to understand their point of view.
"Fidel is a dictator," said Nibia Rodriguez, 50, who left Cuba in 1961. "Have people forgotten that?"
Is it so wrong, they ask, that the boy be given his day in family court, where a judge can say, independently of the federal government, what is really in his best interest.
They know that Elián's father wants him home. And if home were Guatemala or France or even Haiti, most Cuban exiles would not have raised an eyebrow. But home is Cuba, and Cuba, exiles mostly agree, is no place for a boy to grow up, not if they can help it, not after 40 years of butting
heads with Fidel Castro.
"If he were a good father, he would know that," said Norma Blanco, about Juan Miguel González, Elián's father.
In Miami, Communism is something personal and familiar. It is a city crowded with people whose families were severed, cut in half, after Communism took root in Cuba, and for decades since. People lost their homes and businesses in the name of ideology. Some lost their lives.
There are older expatriates, a number of whom stand outside Elián's house, who pine for what could have been: the house they could have lived in, the sister they could have shared their years with, the lives they could have led, had Castro not turned it all upside down.
And there is a younger generation, the newer arrivals, who hold a different kind of grudge, the kind nurtured by staying behind and living Communism firsthand.
And, while most of the rest of the United States rarely gives Communism a passing thought, at least not since the Soviet Union fell apart, Miami is immersed in every twist and turn of one of its final outposts. Radio shows crackle with stories about Cuban political prisoners and jailed
dissidents. They are heroes here, but unknown to most everyone else.
Stop an exile on the street, and chances are that the person will rail that God is frowned upon in Cuba. Then they will point out that doctors in Cuba get paid about $5 a month, that girls turn to prostitution to buy a pair of jeans and that some 7-year-old children go without milk.
Many here remember that Cuban government agents attacked a tugboat loaded with 63 people, none of them carrying weapons, who were trying to leave the island for the United States in 1994. At least 12 children were killed. Some women at Elián's house carry mimeographed copies of
photographs of some of those children.
And no one here has forgotten that Cuban jet fighters shot down two planes piloted by the members of the exile group, Brothers to the Rescue, which patrolled the Florida Straits for Cubans trying to escape Cuba on rafts.
"He destroys people the way you would destroy bugs," said Marien Collazo, 39, who left Cuba when she was 12 years old.
Above all, they will talk about freedom, or libertad: the freedom to hate, love, write, shout, eat, buy and think what they want, without worrying about going to jail, losing their jobs or ostracizing their children. It is not the kind of thing most people in this country have ever had to think
about, they say.
"Communism is an experience," said Angel Blanco, 53, who arrived from Cuba in 1962. "It is not a doctrine. You can't experience what people feel under Communism until you have lived it, and that is the problem. It's a society based on hate. It's a society without a God. But it's
all disguised with rhetoric."
When he looks back on his years in Cuba, Luis Labori, 31, said he feels as if he had been inside a room where the oxygen level dropped so slowly a person barely realized it, until it was too late. People ended up living a kind of double life, he said, complacent on the outside, infuriated on the
inside.
"You can't think for yourself," said Mr. Labori, who arrived here in 1994. "You have to obey and agree with their ideology. You are against your country, but you can't express that."
And there is a new tide of resentment, he said, among Cubans there who feel the island does not even belong to them anymore. It belongs to the tourists with hard cash, a system Castro created to save the regime after the fall of the Soviet Union.
"There is no future there," Mr. Labori said.
And for the crowd outside Mr. González's home, the future is what they say they worry about most of all: what will become of Elián.
Most agree that Elián will go home a hero of the revolution, entitled to the perks of the elite -- more food, the best hospitals, a car, gas, a nice job. But that, they are convinced, will doom him.
They say they fear Elián will be "brain-washed" by the system. They point to Mr. Castro's own words, comments he has made about the boy's "re-entry" into Cuban society.
"He will be deprogrammed," said Norma Blanco outside Elián's house.
And what happens not if, but when, he grows disillusioned, they ask. Then, they say, he will be trapped with two million sets of eyes watching his every move. Fallen revolutionary heroes are not treated as generously as vaunted ones.
"Privilege doesn't matter in the face of oppression," Mr. Labori said.
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