Ten years ago a five-year-old boy was found drifting off the coast of Florida, all alone in the sea. His name was Elian, and his mother had drowned, along with a group of refugees struggling to reach the U.S. from Cuba. That tiny survivor would become a symbol of the on going struggle between the Cuban exile community in the U.S. and Fidel Castro’s government. A viscious, international custody battle between Elian’s Miami family and his father in Cuba escalated to the point at which U.S. customs officials, who had determined the child should be returned to his father in Cuba, had to take him from his family’s home in Miami at gun point.
Elian’s return has been much celebrated in Cuba. There are parades each year on his birthday and his father Juan Miguel Gonzalez, a restaurant employee, has been elected to Parliament. Elian himself is training to join the military. According to Elian’s father, and indeed Elian himself, the boy has thrived in Cuba. Speaking to reporters while Elian posed for picture with church-goers at a service to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his return, Mr. Gonzalez said:
“I am even more certain today than I was at that moment,” he said. “To see him today, doing well, with good grades in school, it shows that what we did, we did not do for no reason.”
Elian agrees, though he doesn’t hold a grudge against his family in Miami. ”I don’t have anger for them,” he told reporters, breaking ten years of silence with the press. ”It’s only that it wasn’t the best effort possible, and thanks to a large part of the American public, and our public, today I’m with my father and I feel happy here.”
