From David Adams In Miami. The Times, UK. March 28, 2000
LAWYERS for the Miami relatives of Elián Gonzalez, the Cuban castaway, yesterday capitulated to a government ultimatum requiring a quicker appeal process in the custody dispute over the boy.
Government lawyers were threatening to remove the six-year-old boy from the family's care if they did not agree to a two-to-three week appeals process, far faster than the normal months-long procedure.
But with the family seemingly losing its battle in court, this week they are taking their case to the public, with a media blitz to try to win sympathy for their effort to keep Elián from being returned to his father in Cuba.
It began yesterday with Elián featured on the breakfast television show, Good Morning America, as he played in school. The boy, whose mother drowned when the boat smuggling them out of Cuba sank last November, drew a picture of himself floating in the sea on an inner-tube protected by
dolphins.
Speaking through an interpreter, a cousin who is among those fighting to keep him here, he said: "My mother is not in heaven, not lost. She must have been picked up here, Miami, somewhere. She must have lost her memory, and just does not know I am here."
Before it was aired, Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, blasted the programme on Sunday calling it a "monstrous" and "sickening" spectacle which violated the father's wishes to protect his son from media hype. In a 90-minute speech Dr Castro also told a group of students that he
had received many letters asking him to send a team of armed Cuban commandos to "rescue" the boy from his Miami "kidnappers."
Legal experts and child psychologists say the television exposure is a questionable tactic at best, unlikely to sway the opinion of judges who must rule on the technical legal grounds of US immigration law. "I would not do it with my six-year-old son," said Bernard Perlmutter, a family
law expert at the University of Miami. "I do not think the father would permit this. He is still a father and has parental rights."
In broadcasting what it says will be a series of segments on Elián this week, the ABC network said it had debated "long and hard" about the pros and cons of putting such a small boy before the cameras. It justified the highly publicised move as an attempt to show the child to
American viewers to promote discussion of the most "sensitive" way to handle his future.
But critics accused the station of exploiting the boy in a stunt to boost rating. The sight of Elián on national news is also likely to fuel the hysteria brewing in the Cuban exile community in Miami.
Although many better-educated exiles believe the boyshould be sent back to Cuba, others allow their hatred of the Castro regime to overcome any sympathy they might have for the father.
Ever since he arrived in Miami, Elián has been viewed by some exiles as a "miracle" child, likened to the baby Moses plucked from the rushes. When a fuzzy image appeared last week on the window pane of a bank near the Little Havana home where Elián is staying, crowds
flocked to see what some have described as an apparition of the Virgin Mary come to bless Elián.
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Ltd. |