By Deborah Hastings, .c The Associated Press
MIAMI, 19 (AP) - Bending over flattened tobacco leaves, Eneida Quintana shakes her head, sympathy shining in her eyes.
``That poor boy,'' says Quintana, who came here from Cuba 20 years ago during the infamous Mariel boatlift. ``The father deserves the boy.''
A murmur rises from coworkers studiously hand-rolling cigars at the El Credito Cigar store in Little Havana. A clear, female voice drifts across rows of wooden tables.
``In Cuba, he has no future,'' the voice says.
Quintana begins to backtrack. ``All the Cubans living here know what he's going back to and all the restrictions. He should stay here.''
On television and in newspapers and opinion polls, nearly all of Miami's Cuban-American population appears to want 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez to stay right here.
It could be that many emigres are afraid to open their mouths.
``The leadership of the Cuban community doesn't believe in free speech,'' said David Abraham, an immigration law professor at the University of Miami.
``They are still fighting a 40-year-old civil war against Fidel Castro. And when you're at war like that, there isn't too much room for dissent.''
Cuban exile leader Ramon Saul Sanchez was indignant.
``That is not true,'' he said, sighing heavily. ``It hurts very deeply that the truth gets twisted. All we have been saying is that even a child deserves his day in court.''
Elian has become the poster boy for a cause predating his birth by decades ever since he was rescued from an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day in the Florida Straits.
His mother had whisked him out of Havana on a boat piloted by her boyfriend. In raging seas with a dead engine, the boat sank. Eleven passengers drowned, including Elian's mother and her boyfriend.
Elian and two adults survived.
What to do with him has become the-story-with-no-end-in-sight. His great uncle wants to keep him in Miami. Life without communism, he says, is better than any life in Cuba.
Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, wants his son to come home and U.S. immigration authorities have ruled in his favor. But politicians have stepped in and hundreds have protested here against returning Elian to Cuba, where there have been huge government-led rallies calling for the boy's
return.
It has been left to the federal courts to decide the child's fate.
In Miami, the scene in the cigar store was repeated in restaurants and shops frequented by Cuban-Americans.
At an outdoor cafe, Antonio Valdes, 54, tipped his Panama hat and said Elian should stay in Cuba ``until he's 18 and then he can make up his own mind.''
From more than 10 feet away, Santiago Allende, 74, pricked up his ears, then strode over and stuck his face into Valdes's. Allende called Valdes a communist and insulted Elian's father, whom he's never met.
``The father is a dog,'' Allende said.
Valdes rolled his eyes and nodded toward the shouting man, as if to say, ``What am I supposed to do?''
But then Valdes changed his story, telling Allende the boy should stay in Miami. ``His mother decided he should come here,'' Valdes said.
The men continued to shout at each other in Spanish, with Allende still calling Valdes a communist - a supreme indignity to someone who fled Cuba - roughly the equivalent of calling an Israeli a Nazi.
Blocks away in Coral Gables, clerk Daine Rojas, 18, shyly arranged wedding favors in a bridal shop. She came here seven years ago, a young girl put aboard a big boat by her fleeing parents.
``I think he should be with his father, whether it's here or in Cuba or in Europe,'' she said in a voice barely above a whisper. ``He should live with his father.''
It's what she would have chose, even if her parents had tried to put her on the boat alone, which thousands have done.
Bernard Perlmutter, director of the University of Miami's Children and Youth Law Clinic, said he was disheartened that a question of law had disintegrated into threats and name-calling.
``I find the statements of some of the lawyers chilling. Statements such as `We're not going to turn the child over,''' he said, referring to attorneys hired by Elian's relatives in south Florida.
Said Perlmutter: ``Parents have the right to take care of their children, even if they live in Cuba.''
AP-NY-01-19-00 0718EST
Copyright 2000 The Associated Press |