By Laurie Goering. Chicago Tribune Staff Writer. January 24, 2000
MIAMI -- With his great-uncle's hand on his shoulder, 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez emerged from the little cream-colored house where he has been living, his arms flung overhead and fingers extended in victory signs.
He did not smile. Looking somber and a little scared, he held the pose a few long seconds for the photographers and the cheering crowd of supporters jammed against the home's chain-link fence.
Then, when his great-uncle removed the guiding hand, the little boy in the blue sweatsuit raced around the corner of the house with a cousin and disappeared.
Clearly, weeks at the center of a politicized tug of war is wearing on Elian, the miracle Cuban shipwreck survivor who for all his international notoriety Sunday was just a small child who did not get to see his grandmothers.
Outside the home of the boy's extended family in a modest section of Little Havana, Miami church leaders shouted over a homemade public address system, promising a peaceful and safe welcome for the women they had hoped would fly to Miami on Sunday. Leaders of the city's powerful Cuban exile
community had offered a private plane for the trip.
"We have invited them and they have not answered us," said Rev. Ovidio Amaro, of Little Havana's United Methodist Church. "We have told them we would be responsible for their security."
Raquel Rodriguez and Mariela Quintana, however, remained in New York City, where, bundled against the unaccustomed cold, they prayed tearfully at Manhattan's interdenominational Riverside Church for the boy's return to Cuba.
Quintana said in a television interview that while they wanted to see Elian they did not trust Miami's ardently anti-communist exile community.
"Going down there while (this) `kidnapping in the open' continues I think is too much to ask of them," said Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, in a television interview from Havana.
"It is high time for the U.S. authorities to simply enforce their law and their decision. It's as simple as that," he said.
The grandmothers were expected to return to Cuba on Monday without seeing the child, much less taking him back as they had hoped.
"I'm sure they want to come and everyone here wants to see them," said Pepe Reales, 70, one of several hundred Cuban exiles gathered on the street outside Elian's house Sunday. "The problem is Fidel (Castro) hasn't given them permission to come. This is political, that's all."
Others in the crowd, waving homemade placards reading "Let's Save Elian!" weren't so generous.
"If the grandmothers really cared, they'd be here," insisted Eduardo Gonzalez, 40, a Miami businessman whose family fled communist Cuba when he was 9 years old.
"Only misery awaits Elian in Cuba," he insisted. "Just think. If this kid goes back he will have to denounce his mother and be constantly reminded that she's a counterrevolutionary. What kind of life is that?"
Elian's mother, Elizabet Brotons, drowned after the boat carrying her, Elian and 12 other people sank on its way to Florida. Elian was found at sea Thanksgiving Day, clinging to an inner tube, one of just three survivors.
His father, who was separated from Brotons, has asked for him to be returned to Cuba, a position the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service supports but has not yet enforced.
The boy's U.S. relatives and Miami's politically powerful Cuban exile community insist he should stay in the U.S.
They hope Congress, which returns to work this week, will grant the boy citizenship--a move that would make the INS decision null--or that a federal court hearing also set this week might grant him asylum.
"I think the dying wishes of a person should be valid in court, but frankly there are no good legal grounds to overturn the (INS) decision," admitted Alberto Chirino, 58, one of the exiles gathered in Little Havana. "This is all about delaying until Congress gets back."
On the once-quiet street in front of the home where Elian lives, mostly gray-haired Cuban exiles have been gathering for more than a month now, determined to show the family their support and to act, if necessary, as a human chain around the boy.
On Sunday they jammed the narrow concrete strip, holding hands and praying as lawyers flipped through legal papers on the well-worn grass of the front yard.
Cary Villalonga, a 58-year-old accountant in the crowd Sunday, insisted that the Clinton administration's warming relationship with Cuba was the real reason the boy was being sent back.
"Also, I think even the American government fears Castro, that he could send another Mariel," she said, referring to the mass 1980 exodus of rafters from Cuba.
The crowd, which had gathered in anticipation of a possible visit by the child's grandmothers, ended the afternoon with a march to a small park along Little Havana's Calle Ocho.
Hefting a huge red-white-and-blue Cuban flag, they chanted "Let him stay!" and sang the island's national anthem.
"Elian already lost his mother. Don't let him lose his freedom!" read one placard in the throng.
"Americans who aren't Cuban can't begin to understand what this is all about," said Daniel Medina, one of the marchers. "In Cuba you're the property of the state. You have none of the beautiful freedoms we have here.
"This is not about the Cuban community here," he insisted. "This is about the child, and his opportunities and possibilities." |