CUBA-US: Truce for a Day

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Apr 25 2000 (IPS) - The reunion of Cuban shipwreck boy Elián González with his father in Washington led to a day of “truce” in 41 years of tension between Cuba and the United States.

“It was a shared success,” said Cuban President Fidel Castro.

He praised the US government’s performance in Saturday’s handover of the six-year-old to Juan Miguel González, who has been fighting for custody of his son since the boy was rescued at sea in late November after the boat in which he was travelling to the United States capsized and his mother drowned.

Castro described Saturday – when the brief but spectacular law enforcement action in which Elián was removed from the home of his great-uncle took place – as “a day of truce,” perhaps “the only one” since the 1959 revolution in Cuba.

Castro said US President Bill Clinton “rose to the occasion.”

Local analysts here suggest that this is a favourable moment for Washington to begin to modify its hostile policy towards Cuba, building on a rare moment in which the two countries were in agreement.

The Clinton administration found itself forced to publicly contradict – with the use of force no less – the stridently anti- Castro Cuban exile community in Miami – an unprecedented occurrence, according to observers in Havana.

Public opinion in the United States was in favour of the boy being reunited with his father, and did not look kindly on the failure to respect the law by some sectors of the Cuban exile community fighting the repatriation of Elián.

The “state of ungovernability” triggered in Miami by the Elián affair was hard for the rest of the US population to stomach, commented a Cuban security expert who preferred to remain anonymous.

A Gallup poll found that 57 percent of respondents supported the operation in which armed federal agents removed the boy from the Little Havan home of his great-uncle Lázaro González, to take him to his father in Washington.

And 59 percent of those interviewed criticised the way Elián’s relatives in Miami handled the battle for custody, while 54 percent said the Clinton administration had done everything within its grasp to come to a negotiated solution.

Attorney-General Janet Reno and Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) Commissioner Doris Meissner explained that the decision to send in federal marshalls and INS agents was reached after all efforts to get the Miami Gonzálezes to voluntarily hand over the boy fell flat.

After Juan Miguel González arrived in Washington on Apr 6, he received the full support of the Clinton administration in his efforts to recuperate his son.

The great-uncle, backed by the powerful Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) and hardline anti-Castro legislators, put up resistance to the government’s decision and publicly commented that federal marshalls would have to remove the boy by force.

According to Florida newspapers, more than 300 protesters were arrested in the disturbances staged Saturday by Cuban exile groups in Little Havana, the neighbourhood where the boy lived for nearly five months.

An estimated 800,000 Cuban emigrés and their descendants live in Miami, home to the largest concentration of Cuban exiles in the world. The Elián affair served as a factor of internal cohesion for anti-Castro groups, but many other sectors of society said they were going too far in trying to separate a boy from his father.

The reunion between Elián and Juan Miguel González, who until Monday remained under US government protection in an airbase near Washington, triggered a collective sigh of relief in Cuba, but no public demonstrations.

Castro said Cubans “acted with serenity” as he had urged, because any other attitude could have had a negative influence on the case.

“We must not do anything that would serve as a weapon or new pretext for the ‘mafia’,” said the president, referring to the anti-Castro groups in Miami.

Castro reiterated that on his return, Elián would be welcomed only by his family and students and teachers from his school in Cárdenas, his hometown, located 152 kms from Havana.

“No leader will be there, nor will the public be invited,” said the 73-year-old president, who added that he was confident that Washington would issue entry visas to a group of Elián’s classmates, his teacher and his pediatrician who are to help the boy in his readaptation process.

By court order, the boy cannot be removed from the United States until a hearing – set for May 11 – is held in a federal court in Atlanta on an appeal filed by the Miami Gonzálezes demanding that Elián be granted political asylum.

The boy was found clinging to an innertube on Nov 25 off the coast of southern Florida, and turned over in temporary custody to his great-uncle the following day.

On Jan 5, the INS ruled that Elian’s father had custody rights, and set a Jan 14 deadline for the boy to be returned to his family in Cuba. But the case turned into a huge custody battle with endless legal wrangling and strong political overtones, and it is not yet clear just how long it will be before Elián comes home.