Elian Gonzalez: The Six-Year-Old and the Immigration War
Near Miami, Florida
On November twenty-fifth, nineteen ninety-nine, Thanksgiving Day, two fishermen found a five-year-old Cuban boy clinging to an inner tube in the Florida Straits. He was one of three survivors of fourteen people who had attempted the ninety-mile crossing from Cuba in a small boat. Eleven people drowned, including his mother. His name was Elian Gonzalez.
He was taken to a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, treated, and released to the custody of his paternal great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. What happened over the next seven months was less a custody dispute than a proxy war, using a small boy as the field of contest, between the Cuban exile community, the Clinton administration, and the Cuban government.
The exile community in Miami, and particularly the family that had custody of Elian, argued that returning the boy to Cuba, where his father lived, was equivalent to delivering him to a totalitarian state. His father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, argued that he was the boy's legal parent and that his son belonged with him. The Clinton administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service determined that Juan Miguel had the legal right to his son. The Miami family refused to return Elian. Federal court orders were ignored.
On April twenty-second, two thousand, at four fifty in the morning, armed agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service entered the Gonzalez house in Little Havana, removed Elian from the closet where he was being held by a family friend and a fisherman, and carried him to a vehicle. Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz was in the house and captured the image of an agent in tactical gear pointing an automatic weapon in the direction of the closet. The photograph ran on the front pages of newspapers around the world the next morning.
Elian Gonzalez was reunited with his father and returned to Cuba in June of two thousand. He grew up there. In the exile community, the image of that April morning has not faded.
