ANALYSIS:The chance discovery of a little boy off the coast of Florida 10 years ago, and the subsequent tug of war over him, has altered profoundly how the rising generation of Cuban exiles in Miami see the homeland of their forbearers, writes JOHN MORAN
BILL CLINTON was coming to the end of his second term as US president and the heat was on in the race for election 2000. Neck and neck in the polls, Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore were scrapping for every vote, and particularly so in the crucial swing state of Florida.
For months leading up to the presidential poll a decade ago, a political storm – now largely forgotten – convulsed the US and sent shockwaves around the world. At its epicentre was the Little Havana district of Miami, Florida, the heartland of Cuban exiles in the US. More than half of the 1.2 million Cubans who live in the US are concentrated in one Florida constituency – the key one of Miami-Dade County.
The drama began in Cuba in late November 1999, when Juan González went to collect his son Elián (5) from school in the town of Cárdenas, east of Havana. But the boy was not there. He had been collected earlier by his mother, Elizabet Brotón, with whom Juan shared custody.
Days later, on Thanksgiving Day, November 25th, off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, fishermen found a small boy strapped to a black inner tyre tube being tossed about in the late November swell. It was Elián González, one of only three survivors of a party of 14 which had set out on a makeshift boat four days earlier from Cardenas. Elián’s mother did not survive.
In international and US law, Elián should have been sent back to his father Juan. But an error of judgment by the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) led to the boy being released from hospital to his father’s uncle, Lázaro González, who lived in the Little Havana district of Miami. There, Elián’s extended family, backed by the exile community and its influential political leaders, and the powerful Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) lobby, immediately vowed to prevent the boy being sent back to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, from which the exiles were totally estranged.
In Cuba, news of a “kidnapping” dominated the state-run media. Elián’s father and both sets of grandparents made impassioned pleas for his return. Fidel Castro called for mass demonstrations, at which he condemned the “Miami Mafia”, and a “Save Elián” campaign was launched. So began the custody war for Elián, which soon would become even more politically charged.
In the past, the Cuban exile community could automatically have expected US authorities to back them on any issue it had with Cuba, the last cold war theatre in the western hemisphere. But from the outset, the INS and the US justice department backed the return of Elián, which placed the Miami exiles on one side and the administrations of Castro and Clinton on the other.
What the exiles had on their side, however, was the fact that the battle for Elián was taking place in the run-up to that razor-edge presidential election and they knew their votes would be keenly sought by candidates Gore and Bush (whose brother Jeb was Florida’s governor).
In Little Havana for seven months, the Elián drama dragged on. Outside the home of Lázaro González, the world media circus was relentless. Elián was regularly brought out before the cameras to show his new toys and to sometimes say he wanted to stay in the US. But such controversial displays by the exiles – and their ongoing defiance of court rulings – began to turn the tide of US public opinion against them. Perhaps mindful of how the event was playing out nationally, neither of the presidential candidates turned up at the house of Lázaro González in Little Miami. In trying to woo the Republican exile vote, Gore dithered, initially supporting a Republican plan to offer Elián and his father residential status, but later changing his mind.
Behind the scenes, federal forces had been planning for the use of force, if required, and surveillance was put in place. What they saw alarmed them. Among the demonstrators guarding the house were armed members of an extreme anti-Castro paramilitary group.
As Miami relatives continued to defy deadlines to hand over Elián set by US attorney general Janet Reno – herself a Miami native – the US authorities considered the extended family to be crossing a line into kidnapping and false imprisonment. Before dawn on April 22nd, Reno finally lost patience and ordered an elite federal force to storm the house and secure the release of the boy.
Cuban Miami reacted swiftly and angrily. A general strike was followed by widespread civil disturbances, with riot police making more than 350 arrests. The violence was broadcast nationwide – the Miami Cuban community was caricatured in the New York Times as an “out of control banana republic”.
On June 28th, the family drama finally ended with a US Supreme Court ruling that Juan and Elián González could return to Cuba. For the exiles, the entire affair had until then been a debacle – they lost Elián to Castro’s Cuba and lost political face in the US.
But they would have their revenge within months. With their powerful political machine and groups such as CANF actively canvassing against Gore, when November came Florida fell to the Republicans and Bush.
Although Bill Clinton had taken some 40 per cent of Miami exile votes in the presidential election of 1996, after Elián’s handover in 2000 that vote collapsed to below half that figure. Bush took 81 per cent of the exile vote, yet still only managed to win Florida – and with it the presidency – by a whisker, just 537 votes.
Perhaps Al Gore’s most inconvenient truth is that, because Floridian Cubans held Clinton accountable for handing Elián back to Cuba, he lost Florida and the White House. And the world ended up with President George W Bush and all that flowed from his administration, particularly when, shortly into his first term, September 11th arrived.
A decade on from the storm that was Elián, the outlook has calmed considerably. Younger Cuban exiles have since been won over by the message of change from Barak Obama. But the wider world might still wonder what could have been had this small boy not been found off the coast of Florida.
John Moran is an Irish Timesjournalist