A Big Battle For A Little Boy

By JOSHUA COOPER RAMO

He was crying in the boat when the fishermen picked him up, half crazy from his loss, and the sharks were still circling the boat. --Ernest Hemingway, On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter, 1936

It is maybe the oldest story we know about the waters off Cuba, and certainly the most familiar. A man fighting the sea and wresting from it a great victory: his honor. But Hemingway's old man had 80 years to prepare for his high-seas battle.

So there was something peculiarly awful about watching a parallel story of water, fate and power play itself out mercilessly upon a boy no more prepared for tragedy than any other six-year-old. Elian Gonzalez was dazed when fishermen picked him up on Thanksgiving Day, lashed atop an inner tube in the Atlantic off Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He too was half crazy--from dehydration, from the loss of his mother, from watching his other companions, after the small boat that had brought them from Cuba sank in heavy seas, slip one by one into the deep. And the sharks--TV news crews, Cuban-American activists, Fidel Castro, Jesse Helms and other U.S. politicians--were just beginning to circle.

In the six weeks since Elian was delivered like some kind of Thanksgiving gift by two Florida cousins out trolling for dolphinfish, the outline of his 2 1/2 days on the blue water has been colored in with horrible detail. There have been tales of his boatmates who, when they realized their loved ones had drowned in the night, stopped treading water and went to join them. And hints of how Elian's mother Elizabet, 29, a woman with deep, happy eyes and a proud Latin gait, bound him to that inner tube even as she fought to stay alive. And even a coroner's description of how Elian's tube trailed behind it the body of 61-year-old Merida Barrios, who had been strangled by one of the raft ropes, and floated, like bait, yards from Elian.

What must this small boy, a child who loves nothing more than making and flying kites in the warm Cuban brisa, have thought during his hours on the water? And later, as he paraded before the world on television--at Disney World, in school, playing "rescue pilot" with his cousins in the backyard--it seemed possible to read everything, anything, in his deep eyes: fear, joy, courage.

He has needed it all. If his sea journey was difficult, his landfall has been little easier. Onshore, Elian has been both cradled and buffeted by the strongest emotion we have, the tenderness of parents toward children in trouble--their own and anyone else's. We sympathize with his father, who wants Elian returned home to Cuba. But then we remember that Elian's mother drowned trying to get him to freedom. And we're disgusted with both Castro and the anti-Castro zealots in Miami who are shamelessly using Elian and his father as fresh draftees in their tiresome feud.

More than simply landing in the middle of the always strained relations between the U.S. and Cuba, Elian Gonzalez arrived in the midst of a mounting national argument about who, besides parents, gets to have a say in how and where children are reared (see following story). This week the Supreme Court will take up a case in which grandparents are seeking more visitation with their granddaughters. And last week an Illinois court upheld the right of two white parents to keep and raise a black child they have nurtured for nearly four years. In these and other custody cases--fights by parents, former lovers, even nannies for access to children--America was asking itself, Who has the legal right to take part in a child's life? And then Elian Gonzalez floated into our consciousness.

Although the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ruled last week that Elian's father Juan Miguel Gonzalez has the right to call him back to Cuba, the fight over the boy's future isn't done yet. On Friday Representative Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, issued a congressional subpoena designed to freeze Elian's repatriation, at least until his American relatives have a chance to appeal it in court.

It is hard to think rationally about Elian when your throat is swelled and your eyes wet. And it is that simple human affection for this innocent child that is the first emotion almost everyone feels about him. It's an instinct that what Elian needs most right now is to fill his big eyes with a vision of his father, a 31-year-old hotel security guard and Communist Party member who lives in Cardenas, a small town east of Havana. Juan Miguel hasn't cut his hair since Elian left, because it was their habit to make the trip to the barber together. It's a trip they'll have to make in the future on foot, since Juan Miguel sold his 1956 Nash Rambler last month to help pay for the calls he makes regularly to his son in Miami.

Sources close to the Gonzalez family in Cuba have told TIME that to help Elian, a team of Cuban government psychologists counseled Juan Miguel on what to say to him about their separation. Just tell him he's on vacation. That all this will end soon. But isn't it time to bring this vacation, which began for Elian in the early-morning hours of Nov. 21, to an end? Isn't it time to help him understand the awful truth about what happened to his mother? The boy seems so completely a product of two loving parents--who suffered seven miscarriages before he was born and chose as his name an elision of theirs, Elizabet and Juan--that the thing we reflexively want to do is restore to him what is left of his family.

But there is another instinct as well, felt perhaps a little by most Americans, and passionately by Miami's Cuban exiles: to keep Elian in America and surround him with all the affection (and toys and education and opportunities) that his mother hoped to find for him here. "All we hear about is the father, the father, and no one's talking about what Elian's mother wanted for him," says his cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, 21, of Miami. "Here he'll have opportunities, a career, freedoms." Even in the coldest corridors of power, a tiny parental spark glowed. "Everyone here realized what the law and regulations required," a Department of Justice official told TIME. "[But] what does this decision mean for this little kid? We were constantly trying to see if there were avenues by which we could legitimately not send him back."

Elian's case has also been influenced by less noble emotions: desire for political gain, greed, hunger for fame. For Miami's Cuban exiles, Elian has become a poster boy--literally, his giant image now hangs over I-95--for everything that's right about America and wrong with Cuba. In a TIME/CNN poll taken last week, 56% of Americans polled agreed with the INS decision to return the boy to Cuba to live with his father, rather than have him live with other relatives in the U.S. But a Miami poll found that 90% of local Cuban Americans felt Elian should remain in the U.S. In Miami's Little Havana, everyone knows someone who has been in the situation that Elian's family faces. In that religious community it is a given that Elian's mother died for her son, who, floating alone and at a time near Christmas, was surely placed in America by God's own hand. It's not just resentment of Castro that girds Miami's protests, but also the image of a mother giving her life--and the certainty that such a sacrifice can't be in vain.

And what does Elian want? No one knows for sure. On his birthday last month, he told his father, "Tell my friends to take care of my things for me." At his school-house, Castro paid a visit while the young refugee's amigos sang Happy Birthday and decorated his desk like a virtual communist youth shrine. But other public words from Elian have been scarce. In a badly miscalculated effort to convince the world that he wants to stay in Florida, Elian's Miami relatives--who had sworn they would never exploit him in front of the media--trotted him before local cameras and asked the trembling child, "Tu te quieres quedar aqui?" ("Do you want to stay here?"). Staring at the floor, Elian offered a nervous and uncertain "Si." Watching him, it was clear that the only thing this boy wanted was to be held.

Part of the Administration's rush to get Elian out of this logistical purgatory--and out of the country--was that he was already being embraced by the nation's conservative politicians. New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani considered having Elian drop the ball in Times Square on New Year's Eve. And presidential candidates, eyeing the Florida vote, rushed to form opinions. McCain and Bush (who kept mispronouncing the boy's name as "Alien" in last week's debate) suggested he should remain in the U.S. Gore and Bradley opted for a more opaque endorsement of whatever the INS decided.

Senate Foreign Relations chairman Helms announced plans to make Elian a U.S. citizen when Congress reconvenes Jan. 24--a move that could stall repatriation procedures. Though conservatives regularly uphold the sanctity of the family against intrusions by the government, Helms and others have reversed course in this case. Explains Jose Garcia Pedrosa, a lawyer fighting to keep Elian in the U.S.: "Which kind of a family is a less important factor in how this boy should be raised than which kind of state."

There were surely many emotions in the heart of Elizabet Brotons Rodriguez when she bundled Elian into a crowded 17-ft. aluminum skiff in the predawn hours of Sunday, Nov. 21. High among them must have been hope. In the 40 years since Fidel Castro came to power, tens of thousands of Cubans have taken a fateful step to a better life in just the same way: from shore to boat, with hopes of a quick and easy landfall. And 1999 was a particularly popular year for the trip. The Coast Guard picked up more than 1,300 rafters, more than double the 1998 number.

The distance between Cuba and the mainland is less than 150 miles, a thumb's width on most maps. During the dusky gulf afternoons, it's possible to look out from Cuba's beaches and "see" the U.S. rippling on the waters. It's an optical illusion, but for young Cubans the mirage--and all its glitter of hope, promise and opportunity--is too real to resist. Most balseros expect a speedy journey, and some find it.

In the past couple of years, high-speed powerboats have begun making the run, smuggling human cargo in a matter of hours for thousands of dollars a head. (Some poor Cubans, who can't afford the steep price, pay their way with exotic birds captured in the forest and sold to the U.S. black market.) But most fleeing Cubans make the trip the old-fashioned way: in rickety craft with weak motors. A good trip takes 10 hours. A nightmare takes days. And for uncounted Cubans swept into the Atlantic during a storm, the journey is eternal. At least 60, including Elian's mother, have paid the price this year. It's not uncommon in Miami for telephones to ring in Cuban-American households with nervous relatives asking across a line crackling with static, "Have you seen our son? He left last week. Have you heard anything about him?" Often no one has.

The man who arrived to carry Elizabet and Elian to the promised land was no Cigaret-boat pro. Lazaro Munero, 24, was a maceta, a hustler. He had been seeing Elizabet since 1997, when she was divorced from Elian's father. In the summer of 1998, Munero and three friends made the trip to America on a tiny boat. But that autumn he returned to Cuba--heartsick, relatives say, to be away from his family and Elizabet. He was thrown in jail, but a few months months later, after his release, he began working to persuade Elizabet to join him on a second escape. He also began quietly advertising the trip to others in the relatively prosperous town--at $1,000 a head. And, out of sight, he began patching up an old boat and an Evinrude 50-h.p. outboard motor.

When the group set out that Sunday, it was clearly with an idealized crossing in mind. Munero packed rations of water, bread, cheese and hot dogs for his 15 passengers. At 4:30 a.m., they set to sea, with hopes of arriving in Miami before the next sunrise. After less than a mile, the boat's engine failed. Munero returned to shore and passenger Arianne Horta nervously put her five-year-old daughter back on land. The group, now 14 strong, shoved off again the next morning. But that night, during a storm just south of the Florida Keys, the motor failed again, leaving the boat more vulnerable to the tumbling seas. It took on water and, unsteadied by the movements of the frightened passengers, capsized. The group decided they would be better off climbing into the two large inner tubes they carried as life preservers.

The women and Elian were put onto one tube while the men held onto the other. And then, investigators say, they began to give in to the ocean, one by one. Munero may have been among the first to go. He was followed by a deluded man who decided to swim for land--and by a second man who set out to help bring him back and never returned. At least one woman, seeing part of her family drowned, decided she had no reason to live and let go of her inner tube. During 2 1/2 days on the ocean, the 14 refugees were whittled down to just three. On Thanksgiving morning, two fisherman spotted a small inner tube with what they thought was a doll on top. They sailed past and continued fishing, reeling in a dolphinfish, until one of the men realized that the doll was alive. They picked him up, called to the Coast Guard and waited. The two other survivors, Horta and her boyfriend Nivaldo Fernandez Ferran, were rescued by the Coast Guard and have been granted permission to stay in the U.S. for the time being. "I'll adopt the boy if there is no one here to claim him," one fisherman, Donato Dalrympler, told reporters. "This is the best Thanksgiving gift I could have ever imagined."

But there were plenty of people--too many--trying to claim Elian. The primary law governing cases like Elian's is the 1966 Adjustment Act, which grants U.S. residency to all Cubans one year after their arrival in the U.S.--a special treatment accorded to Cuba's victims of "communist oppression." It's a law that is often terribly inequitable. Last week, as Elian's case was being debated, the U.S. sent 437 Haitian raft refugees home without a thought, since they are not covered by the act.

On Dec. 13, as U.S. officials began to sort through the details of the case--and, according to some, to look for reasons not to send Elian back--a U.S. immigration officer stationed in Cuba met with Elian's father Juan Miguel at his Cardenas home (without Cuban officials present). They met again on New Year's Eve in the Havana home of a United Nations diplomat. The latter location was deliberate: U.S. officials were worried that Juan Miguel might be manipulated by Castro and wanted a location that was unlikely to be bugged. The goal of the inquisition was to determine just how close father and son really were. Elian's family in Miami had told investigators that Juan Miguel was, at best, an indifferent father. So the U.S. investigators unpacked a set of questions often used in custody cases. The examination, delivered orally, is stuffed with minutiae: What size shoes does your child wear? Who are his friends? What are his teachers' names? Juan Miguel, sources say, not only passed the quiz, he painted a portrait of a deep and emotional relationship. Investigators found something else as well: a man who still honestly believes in Castro and the system that he built. "This country is where I can teach my son the values I want him to learn," Juan Miguel explained to TIME recently. "This is where I want us to be together." It won't be a life of Disney World, but it won't be a life of destitution either. Juan Miguel, one of the lucky Cubans to be paid in dollars, is a part of the nation's small middle class. At home in Cardenas, Elian has a spacious room to himself, unlike the one he is now sharing with cousins in Little Havana. He'll also be surrounded by all four of his grandparents.

And so he shall be, U.S. officials ruled. They had hoped Juan Miguel would come to Miami to pick Elian up, but the father insists that returning Elian is the obligation of U.S. officials. Castro, who has used the incident to whip up anti-U.S. feelings at home, barred Juan Miguel from making the trip, probably fearful of a defection. "This is a case of common sense," said Ricardo Alarcon, the president of Cuba's National Assembly. "This boy has to be returned here as soon as possible." The INS is committed to having the boy out of the U.S. by Jan. 14.

So is this a good thing, Elian's returning home? Like all of these disputes in the territory of our hearts, there is no good thing, and rarely even a best thing. We are simply confronted with the thing that must be done. "When the kid is 21," reflects a U.S. official, "I wonder what he'll think. You know, 'I'm condemned to a life sitting on the seawall here in Havana with no job and under this repressive dictatorship, and I could be at the University of Miami right now.'" After the protesters have gone home and the media have moved to the next cause celebre, after the State Department has handled thousands of other cases of children separated from their parents around the world, where will Elian Gonzalez be? After this impossible choice between freedom and love? Most likely with his father and his memories of his mother slipping under the ocean, nightmares of the past and dreams of the future. Elian most likely will be returned to a land where, at sunrise, it is possible to look over the ocean and think you see hope bubbling on the horizon. And he will be a child who will know what children and even adults should rarely have to acknowledge: that too often hope is only a mirage.

--Reported by Tim Padgett/Miami, Dolly Mascarenas/Cardenas, Massimo Calabresi and Viveca Novak/Washington

With reporting by Tim Padgett/Miami, Dolly Mascarenas/Cardenas, Massimo Calabresi and Viveca Novak/Washington