By Laurie Goering, Tribune Foreign Correspondent. Chicago Tribune. January 17, 2000
MIAMI Everything about Elian Gonzalez's astonishing tale of survival seems a miracle to the Cuban exile community.
A half-page drawing this week in La Verdad, a Little Havana newspaper whose name means The Truth, shows Elian afloat in the sea, cradled in an inner tube.
Around him leap schools of dolphins. Overhead float two angels. Elian, his face grim, grips the inner tube with one hand but with the other reaches to the angels.
Jose Marmol, a columnist in another Little Havana journal, compares the boy to Moses, set adrift by a mother who hoped to spare his life.
"The daughter of the pharaoh took in Moses and this changed the history of the Hebrews," Marmol wrote. "Moses lived to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land of Israel, an exodus that lasted 40 years--about the same as our exile from Cuba."
Elian's survival, he hints, is as much a miracle as that of Moses and perhaps--just perhaps--the boy who landed on Thanksgiving Day is meant to play a similar role for his new community.
"All these coincidences have contributed to create a commotion never before seen among the exiles," Marmol wrote. "Many see (the boy) as the messenger of a miraculous mission to return to liberty the suffering Cuban people."
Messianic fever is building in some portions of Miami's exile community, and that is certain to complicate efforts to resolve the future of 6-year-old Elian, who lost his mother, Elisabet Broton Rodriguez, on the boat trip from Cuba.
Juan Miguel Gonzalez, the boy's father in Cuba, insists he wants Elian back, and the Immigrant and Naturalization Service has ruled in his favor.
And on Sunday, Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, said from Havana that Elian's relatives on the island should travel to Florida to bring him back.
But many of Miami's Cuban exiles can't help but believe that returning the boy would hand Fidel Castro a victory and violate Elian's mother's dream.
"His mother died to bring him here where we have more opportunities. It would be a crime to send him back," said Zulma Alfaro, 19, a Cuban-American waitress at the Versailles Bakery on Little Havana's Calle Ocho, the neighborhood's main street.
Elian's arrival is a boost for a right-wing Cuban exile faction weakened in recent years by the death of Jorge Mas Canosa, the leader of the Cuban American National Foundation.
"The community has changed considerably. That's why the right wing is making such a fight out of this," said Alfredo Duran, a leader of moderate Cuban exiles in Miami. "They hope to get back some of the ground they've lost. . . . The kid is a rallying point for them to exert
influence and power. There's no real interest in him. It's an ulterior motive."
Ninoska Perez, a spokeswoman for the Cuban American National Foundation, said that is anything but the case.
"We have said from the beginning we feel the boy's place is with his father. But why isn't the father here?" she said. "The father initially said he would come but now he is practically held hostage by the Cuban government. Castro won't let him come. He won't risk the
embarrassment of having him stay."
Clearly, anti-communist politics remain at the heart of the struggle over Elian.
"Miami is in many ways the last front line of the Cold War," said David Abraham, a University of Miami law professor. "This place has replaced Berlin as the front-line city."
While Elian's fate remains unsettled, journalists and investigators in Miami are trying to piece together the details of the boy's tragic voyage.
Given his family's two-day ordeal at sea once their boat sank, the boy--dubbed the "Miracle Child" by supporters--arrived in Florida in remarkably good condition, doctors say.
Dr. Gerald Lavandosky, an emergency room physician at Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital in Hollywood, where the boy was initially taken, said Elian arrived suffering from mild hypothermia, mild dehydration, a few scratches and a bit of sunburn--conditions consistent with spending less than 24
hours in the water and perhaps as few as 12 hours.
What happened in the sea off Florida? Did his slowly weakening mother and stepfather lift him onto the inner tube they clung to, the better to protect him? Did they shade him from the burning sun?
All that's clear is that two other survivors say Elian's mother gave her son her last drops of drinking water, shortly before slipping away into the depths. |