An excellent piece by Vanessa Garcia that explains the Cuban American perspective on Elian Gonzalez so many in the U.S. have failed to understand.
The Myth of Elián, the Boy Who Was Plucked From the Sea
I was 20 years old on Thanksgiving Day 1999 when little Elián González, surrounded by dolphins, was found drifting off the Fort Lauderdale coast.
The name “Elián González” may ring a bell for some Americans. But for Cuban-Americans and American-born Cubans like me, “Elián” is more than a memory. It’s an indelible moment in our recent history.
Elián had escaped Cuba on a makeshift raft with his mother and 13 other refugees. Only three survived the journey: 5-year-old Elián, 22-year-old Arianne Horta, and 33-year-old Nivaldo Fernández-Ferra. Elián’s mother, swallowed by the sea, died during the crossing. Toward the end, Elián found himself alone, adrift and dehydrated. He would later say dolphins helped him survive by keeping his inner tube from sinking.
When two fishermen — Donato Dalrymple and his cousin Sam Ciancio — found Elián, they saw a pod of dolphins nearby.
The cousins weren’t supposed to have been fishing that day — there was an advisory for small boats like theirs — but they went anyway because they wanted to spend time together. When Dalrymple spotted the dolphins and the raft, he insisted they get closer. He thought he saw something inside. Ciancio thought it was a “cruel joke,” a doll someone had attached to a raft. But it was a boy. “I believe it was my destiny… [that we] ran right into that inner tube,” Dalrymple would tell reporters years later.
It was the stuff of myth.
Many thought it was a miracle. But Elián would become a nightmare for others, in particular the United States government and its Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which had to figure out what to do with the boy, as well as for members of the Cuban-American community, who tried to explain why, in their eyes, he needed to stay on U.S. soil. Instead of being heard, the community fell from grace. From one day to the next, in the eyes of the general public, Cuban-Americans went from “hard-working immigrants” who exemplified the American dream to screaming fools.
It could have been simpler. Yet, considering the thicket of deception and political chess, it could not have been.
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By the end of the year, an all-out battle had erupted between what the media had begun to call the “Miami relatives” who took the boy in (his uncle Lázaro González and cousins), the Cuban government, and the U.S. government. That conflict would grow to include the voices of the Cuban-American community and the American public at large.
When I returned to college in New York after winter break in January 2000, I went to an office hour with my favorite professor. She turned to me at the end of our time and said, “Vanessa, you’re smart and Cuban. Can you explain these crazy Cubans to me? I mean, isn’t it obvious the boy should go back to his father?”
She was, of course, referring to members of the Cuban-American community represented on TV, who were protesting in the streets and outside Lázaro González’s house, where they cried out for the boy to be allowed to stay in the States.
But “crazy Cubans” pierced me like a myopic dagger. How could I begin to answer what she had phrased so condescendingly? For the first time in my life, I felt like a persona non grata in my own country.
I told her it was very complicated and tried to change the subject.
I think that now, on the 20th anniversary of “Elián,” I can look back and give a better answer.
Read the entire piece HERE.
Excellent piece, and I’m glad its author got it published, even though practically nobody except “those people” has cared about the matter since Castro, Inc. was given what it wanted 20 years ago. However, I’m afraid the author may still be a bit naive. Unfortunately, the truth is ugly and has a very bitter taste.
The Elián crisis did not cause Cuban-Americans to “fall from grace,” because they were never really in it. They had been tolerated and, to some extent, given credit for their remarkable success as immigrants, but that was very much tempered by various kinds of resentment. The fact is, to a significant degree, nos masticaban, pero no nos tragaban. THAT is what Elián brought out into the open–what had been latent all along: “‘I’m tired of the fucking Cubans! I just want the fucking Cubans to just fucking go home!'”
As I said, it is ugly and bitter, but while I, too, had been blind to it before the Elián debacle, I wised up very quickly, and I have not forgotten it. It made me grow up, and I have seen much more clearly ever since.
And Carlos Eire wrote Waiting for Snow in Havana because of the Elian Gonzalez affair.
I never understood how any American could have suggested that Elian go back to Cuba. Yet so many opposed me in my opinion.
For some reason it is popular to hate Nazis, but to hate Communism has never been as important for so many Americans.
The Elián debacle was a reality check, and in that sense it was useful. Among other things, it highlighted the reality that it’s NOT about goodness or justice or truth but about what side one is on and what side one is against–THAT is what makes all the difference, or most of it.