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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
As Havana waits for Castro's demise, even his enemies are appalled by the way Miami's Cuban exiles have used the motherless boy for their own political ends.
Jan 15, 2000 | On the streets of Havana, the conflict over Elian Gonzalez is as much about golf courses, beach-front condos and luxury hotels as it is the fate of a boy who was rescued on Thanksgiving Day, clinging by one hand to an inner tube, just off the Florida coast.
A family feud of Shakespearean proportions, the custody struggle over Elian has been cloaked in terms of "what's best for the boy." But many people on both sides of the Florida straits also see it as a battle over who will control Cuba after Fidel Castro: the Cubans who remained in Cuba, or the Cuban-American community living in exile.
In a perverse twist of fate, Castro has outlasted the Soviet empire and nine U.S. presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George Bush, but he is now being threatened by a 6-year-old boy. If Elian is allowed to remain in the United States it will be seen as his emasculation.
Like King Lear, an old man whose pride cost him everything, Castro is watching his "disloyal" children in Miami prepare to take over his kingdom. And now they've taken his beloved Cordelia, humiliating him on the world stage. The struggle over Elian is less about what is "best for the boy," but what is best for Castro, his Miami opponents, and the future of his native land.
So Elian is now a symbol: He's been slapped with a subpoena, become a catalyst for riots, bomb threats and work stoppages. Since fleeing Cuba in a rickety boat for a better life in America, he has lost his mother, the precious innocence of childhood and most poignantly, his name.
To the world he is now simply known as "the Cuban Boy" -- or sometimes, in tabloid headlines, just "Cuban Boy," making him sound like a freak-show attraction. It's hard to say which side has made more distorted political use of the boy, the power-mad Cuban American community, or Castro's repressive spin machine.
But on the streets of Havana, and in more moderate corners of Miami, too, it's clear the Cuban-Americans' excesses on "behalf" of Elian have alienated potential allies. "They're grasping for anything to get at [Fidel] Castro and it's backfired," said Max Castro, a Cuban-born senior research associate at the University of Miami's North-South Center. "It's the worse P.R. they could have done in Cuba and Latin America."
Apart from specializing in immigration and U.S.-Latin relations, Max Castro has a very strong personal connection with the case of Elian Gonzalez. At the age of 10, he was sent by his parents unaccompanied to live with relatives in the United States.
"I did not want to be separated from my parents," he recalls. "But it was 1961 and there was this mass hysteria in Cuba. People were saying their children would be sent to Russian camps and that they would lose them."
For years, Cubans have talked of "when Castro goes," and some sentimentally looked to the exiles to one day help them rebuild their country. But now these very people are beginning to look worse than Castro.
"This boy is about money," said Raul, a 22-year-old computer software student in Havana. "He sells newspapers, T-shirts and gives the Cubans in Miami the publicity they crave."
Raul, like many Cubans both pro and anti-Castro, is appalled by the brute force in which the Cuban American community has manipulated the boy. And the excess makes them fear for the future when the exiles return, as expected, after Castro's demise.
"I will be more enslaved to my own people than I am now," says Raul, a sentiment I heard many times in Havana in recent weeks. "These Cubans in Miami have a lot of power and money. Whenever they come back to Havana they are dripping in gold chains and they act like they are better than us."
"It's a struggle over Cuba," explains Max Castro. "The money is part of it, but it's also about passion, hatred and delusion. It's about revenge and reclaiming what they've lost. They want to show they were right."
