By Larry Copeland. USA Today. March 30, 2000
MIAMI -- Elian Gonzalez lives with his great-uncle and other relatives in a single-story, cream-colored house in Little Havana. Their home is in a neighborhood of pastel-colored homes that sit quietly behind privacy fences and palm trees. An occasional cat scampers out of traffic, and dusk is
welcomed by the alluring beat of salsa music.
In normal times, it would seem to be a nice enough place for a little boy to live. But with Elian at the center of an escalating, international custody fight, these times are anything but normal.
So, Wednesday afternoon outside the house, scores of protesters chanted the boy's name and practiced forming a human chain. Television news trucks lined the streets, their satellite towers sprouting skyward.
At each end of the block, Friendly Johns -- portable toilets -- offered their services, and on one corner, a vendor sold hot dogs, sugar cane and 75-cent canned sodas from a cart.
The late-afternoon air was shattered by the sounds of a news helicopter hovering overhead and the honking of dozens of horns from a caravan of dump trucks surrounding the block. Neighbors returning home from work had to wait for media people camped out on the sidewalk to move before they could
turn into their driveways.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has demanded that Elian's temporary guardian, his great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez, sign an agreement to turn the 6-year-old over to federal authorities if the relatives lose their court appeals. If he did not sign, the INS said it would take Elian at some
point.
By late Wednesday, Gonzalez had not signed, and the INS pushed its deadline back 24 hours.
For many Americans, the saga stirs conflicted feelings: The boy's mother, who drowned along with 10 others as they fled Cuba, desperately wanted him to live in the USA. But the INS has decided -- and a judge has affirmed -- that the boy belongs with his father.
For many of south Florida's 780,000 Cuban-Americans, though, the boy has acquired near-icon status. Many of those who have gathered outside his home each day this week said they will do whatever it takes to help keep him here.
''I'm here because I had to do something for my conscience,'' said Dario Rosendo, 48. He is the father of a 3-year-old boy and is a certified public accountant and teacher. He said he took Wednesday off from both jobs to be at the house.
''I came here as a 10-year-old boy myself. Elian came to this country against all odds,'' Rosendo said. ''He survived 48 hours in the dangerous ocean with all the odds against him. After all that suffering, he should be allowed to stay here.''
Vanessa Beltran, 53, who has protested outside the house several times, said Elian's case resonates with Cuban-Americans. ''This is important to us because this represents the history of us Cubans,'' she said. ''I would like for Elian to stay here.''
Some of those gathered in the street outside the boy's home, near Northwest 23rd Avenue and 2nd Street, carried the Cuban and U.S. flags. They held signs that said, ''Love is Great. Freedom is Greater.'' They chanted, in Spanish, ''Elian, my friend, the exiles are with you!''
The protests were organized by the Democracy Movement, an anti-Castro organization. The group's president, Ramon Saul Sanchez, has said demonstrators would form a human chain around Elian's house if INS authorities tried to take him from the family.
Throughout the afternoon Wednesday, one rumor after another ran through the crowd. At one point, Sanchez told the crowd of about 100 demonstrators behind police barricades the latest rumor. He said he had heard that Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, and ''a group of Cuban military'' were
stationed at nearby Homestead Air Force Base, waiting to take Elian home. |