This Thanksgiving marks the 25th anniversary of Elian Gonzalez’s rescue at sea after the little boy’s mother drowned, and he drifted alone on the Florida Straits after escaping communist Cuba. His rescue and arrival captured the hearts of the Cuban exile community and America, while his forced removal by the Clinton administration broke the heart of a Cuban American community that was horribly betrayed.
He was the cutest little kid and he was a story: a big story that lingered on for months dividing the Miami community, with implications that spread from the streets of Little Havana to Washington, D.C. But nearly 25 years later, does anyone in South Florida still remember Elian Gonzalez? It depends who you ask.
“No,” former University of Miami professor Andy Gomez told CBS News Miami. “Every once in a while in our conversations when some of us get together we talk about Elian and the failures of how the whole episode was handled.”
Coral Gables City Commissioner Kirk Menendez, then a young lawyer working for the Cuban American National Foundation, has a different take.
“I think in the hearts of the Cuban American Community Elian is still present but it’s something that, it’s a sadness,” he said. “A frustration that people carry inside of them.”
How Elian Gonzalez arrived to Miami
On Thanksgiving 1999, Elian Gonzalez was found on an inner tube floating in the Atlantic Ocean off Dania Beach. His mother, lost at sea, died during an escape from Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
“Elian became a symbol for the Cuban American Community, a fight against Fidel Castro,” Gomez said.
Elian Gonzalez had relatives in Miami and they took him in. His father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who resided in Cuba, wanted Elian returned to his custody — and so did Fidel Castro. Many in the exile community did not want to see the little boy sent to his father, saying he would be Castro’s “trophy child” and a propaganda victory for his regime.
“We became a chess piece in a geopolitical chess match,” Menendez said at the time.
Elian had an opportunity to grow up in freedom, but Bill Clinton allowed himself to be intimidated and bullied by Fidel Castro and kidnapped the boy at gunpoint and returned him to Cuba. The Cuban American community warned that he would just become a pawn of the Castro dictatorship, and that’s exactly what happened.
Today, Elian is a staunch communist and comes across a bitter young man, unable to remember what freedom tasted like, and unable to say anything contrary to the regime.
We were not betrayed, exactly. We were simply shown more clearly what we’re up against–even in the USA.
I remember CNN doing a documentary on Elian, now a grownup in Cuba. There was so much dishonesty in that documentary that I vowed never to watch CNN again, a vow I kept until there was a debate on CNN. But other than that I never turned on that lying channel again.
Elian is a dark time in our lives as Cuban exiles. I truly hate Bill Clinton. I will never forget how he cracked a joke at the expense of Marileysis after Elian was kidnapped by Doris Messiner’s goons. Marileysis said that the picture that the New York Times chose to publish where you see a smiling Elian in the hands of his father was doctored, because Elian had a short haircut and the NY Times picture shows him with fuller hair and then lowlife Clinton cracked an unfunny joke during a press conference that he had a haircut too. And who can forget that mannish creature, Janet Reno, who had the nerve to run for political office and campaign in the Cuban community after she left the Clinton administration. She died shortly thereafter of Parkinson. Her legacy is burning people alive in WACO and Elian.
In the end, we are to blame, especially the Cuban American National Foundation that started this entire BS by publishing an ad of Elian [“another of Castro’s victims” read the ad] when he was first rescued in the ocean and then not confronting Fidel Castro who used Elian to screw us over. CANF did nothing instead of using their enormous resources to take out ads in major newspapers and magazines. And whatever happened to that lowlife who was handling the Gonzalez uncles? When Allen Dershowitz offered to take the case pro-bono, that lowlife rejected the offer, because he wanted to be in control. So many mistakes! They even got an offer to take the kid to Indian land where federal agents could not enter and they rejected that too!
In the end, the Cuban community screwed up.. We have no finesse and simply don’t know how to do PR. I mean, I used to cringe when I would see Marileysis talking and the uncles, cubanazos from Little Habana. They didn’t know what they were up against.
On a bright side, the goon who you see pointing the guy at the “fisherman” in that famous picture when Elian was captured was arrested sometime after as a pedophile and was sent to prison.
It wasn’t just the Miami relatives who didn’t know what they were up against–neither did most of us. We were basically sucker-punched, though it was past time we realized the ugly truth. There’s some parallel between our rude awakening and what’s been happening to American Jews since the 10/7 massacre. Trouble is, people tend to believe what’s nicer and more comfortable and easier to deal with, but reality is what it is and doesn’t care who does or doesn’t like it.