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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Now that your telenovela is over, perhaps your normal childhood can begin again.
Jun 29, 2000 | So it's farewell, Elian, we hardly knew ye. One of the weirdest sagas in recent history comes to an end as you fly off to Cuba with your father. In an era when "news" has the shelf life of fresh shrimp, you had an amazingly long ride in the media. You were paraded like a cute and playful panda in a cage for the TV cameras in Miami's Little Havana by your temporary "family" in your temporary home of five months. You were known all over the world by your first name. You stopped a lot of things -- traffic, as rallies ensued; the flow of important international and national news as the media went into full Elian alert, day and night.
You were also instrumental in stopping something major -- the benighted thinking that has kept the embargo against Cuba alive in Congress. The antics of the most rabid of Cuban-Americans in Miami, who screamed and sobbed and marched and picketed and vowed to the death to keep you from going back to Cuba, finally shined the spotlight on our political relationship with Cuba and the kind of people who defended it. And our policy was found wanting. Just as the polls overwhelmingly said you should be able to return to Cuba with your father, so did they show a growing majority of people who felt that an arcane Cold War economic policy was wrong. Now conservative Midwestern farmers and congressmen are adding their voices to the push for an end to the embargo. Now there is a beginning -- the lifting of the 38-year-long ban on food and medicine to Cuba will come to pass.
Early on, a faithful follower who had camped outside the Little Havana home ecstatically told a reporter that all of the attendant publicity "would show the world how bad Castro was." Instead, it was almost as if Castro had orchestrated this whole sad affair. The furor only introduced the rest of the world to an out of step band of extremists in Miami.
The jokes on Letterman and Leno -- indicators always of what is safe to ridicule in American politics -- were leveled at the Miami family and their exploitation of you. And then there was the satiric fable of the boy named Eliat Ginsburg, the creation of Internet jokesters that spread across the country like fire in a dry forest. Eliat was found floating at sea "after being set adrift from Israel on a giant matzoh ... Headlines read "Little boy plays outside without a sweater." And, "the boy's cousin, M'Shugena, became his primary caretaker, because she had no job, no kids, no husband and no skills. The situation took a toll on her; Neiman Marcus and Loehmann's called to see why she hadn't been in ... "
Now your Miami caretakers, with their own special problems, have moved from the tiny house in Little Havana and are seldom seen on television. As you leave the country, their 15 minutes of fame will end after one last round of publicity, of course.
