By Anita Snow, .c The Associated Press
HAVANA, 18 (AP) - If Fidel Castro seems to be taking the case of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez personally, it may be because he was party himself to a custody battle involving his first-born son more than four decades ago.
Like Elian, Fidelito Castro Diaz had parents with very different visions of their child's future. Then, as now, the situations underscore the politics and passions that for more than two generations have torn apart Cuban families living on both sides of the Florida Straits.
While Castro recently blamed ``the extremist and terrorist mafia of South Florida'' for keeping Elian in Miami and blocking his return ``to his legitimate family and homeland,'' the battle over Elian is not between the Cuban and U.S. governments. It is a fight within the Cuban family - one that
has even touched Castro's.
According to biographers, Castro's ex-wife, Mirta Diaz-Balart, filed for divorce in the mid-1950s, when he was imprisoned in Cuba for an attack on a Santiago military barracks that launched the Cuban revolution.
Before the divorce was final, Mirta Diaz left for the United States with Fidelito, who was then 5.
During the divorce battle, the mother was granted custody, but Castro insisted that the child be returned to Cuba, Tad Szulc writes in ``Fidel: A Critical Portrait,'' a biography published in 1986.
Castro's wife's brother, Rafael Diaz-Balart, was an official in the government of President Fulgencio Batista, which Castro was trying to overthrow. Castro worried about the influence the Diaz-Balart family would have on his son, one of eight children Castro is known to have fathered.
``I refuse even to think that my son may sleep a single night under the same roof sheltering my most repulsive enemies and receive on his innocent cheeks the kisses of those miserable Judases ... To take this child away from me, they'll have to kill me ... I lose my head when I think about these
things,'' Castro wrote in a letter to his elder half-sister, Lidia.
After leaving prison, Castro continued to fight for custody, saying that if he lost in court ``it would reaffirm my principles and my determination to fight until death to live in a more decent republic.''
After being released from prison, Castro went to Mexico to prepare for a guerrilla war against the Batista government.
While there, Castro persuaded Mirta Diaz-Balart to send him the boy for a two-week visit. He never sent him back, Robert E. Quirk writes in the 1993 biography ``Fidel Castro.''
Instead, Castro turned the boy over to a couple in Mexico he trusted, with instructions to sign him up for piano lessons.
Later, when Castro's sisters visited and took Fidelito for a stroll in Mexico City's Chapultepec Park, three armed men jumped from a car and grabbed the boy, Quirk wrote. Then Mirta Diaz-Balart flew to Mexico to pick the child up.
Despite protests from Castro's sisters, the Mexican government said the mother had custody rights to the boy.
By then, Castro was in eastern Cuba, fighting against Batista's troops. After his successful 1959 revolution, the boy returned to live in Cuba with his father, studied nuclear science in the former Soviet Union, and lives in Havana today with his own family. He is 50.
Most of the Diaz-Balart family eventually emigrated to Miami, with the exception of Mirta Diaz-Balart, who was last known to be living in Spain.
Her nephew, U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., has been instrumental in the battle to keep Elian in the United States.
``It's ... ironic that Castro's talking about having the interests of a small child at heart when he kidnapped even his own son from his mother who had custody in 1956,'' Diaz-Balart told CNN on Sunday.
Elian was found clutching an inner tube off the Florida coast on Nov. 25. His mother died in the fateful ocean crossing to the United States, and his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, is waging a fierce battle to repatriate the boy to Cuba.
AP-NY-01-18-00 0102EST
Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. |