Elian

Correspondent Bob Simon Interviews Elian Gonzalez

(CBS) 
On Thanksgiving morning, three days after Elian left Cuba, Sam Ciancio, a local fisherman, took his cousin on a fishing trip off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. Two miles off shore, they saw an inner tube floating in the water with something on top of it. When they drew closer, they thought it was a hoax. “We seen it looked like a doll was tied to an inner tube. It looked like a doll. It really did,” Ciancio says. “We thought it was a joke.”

Ciancio and his cousin sailed on. But on their return voyage, 30 minutes later, they had another look. “As we approached the inner tube, we seen his hand move,” Ciancio says. “Next thing you know, I’m in the water. He grabbed a hold around my neck like that. And I started screaming — this kid’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive!”

His mother was not. Her body was never found. But thanks to an inner tube, Elian had survived, drifting 250 miles. Remarkably, he wasn’t in bad shape. After only a day in a hospital, the child was handed over to relatives in Miami.

His great-uncles and a cousin wanted to keep him in Miami. His father wanted him returned to Cuba. So did Fidel Castro.

At the regime’s call, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Havana, chanting Elian Gonzalez’ name. In Miami, anti-Castro protestors countered by surrounding the house where he and his Miami family lived.

“I thought there was something bad going on, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on,” he says now. “They were not telling me what was happening, why they were shouting.”

Elian told us he hated being cooped up in that small house. He missed his school, his friends and his father.

He says that his Miami relatives were telling him “bad things” about his father, and also “telling me to tell him that I did not want to go back to Cuba.” He said he always told them that he wanted to go back.

Delfin Gonzalez, a great-uncle who cared for Elian in Miami, says he won’t believe anything Elian says in Cuba because he is a prisoner there. Delfin also denies that Elian was unhappy in Miami.

But when we asked Elian about the best part of his stay there, he said there was no best part.

So, we asked him what the worst thing was about the time he spent in Miami. “The nights,” he replied.

He says he was having nightmares then, and his uncles “would talk to me about my mother, and it was better not to remind me of that because that tormented me, to be remembering all that. I was very little, and it wasn’t good to be talking about that.”

The ordeal dragged on for five months.

Then it ended in a flash in the early morning hours of April 22, 2000, as armed federal agents stormed the house to take the boy away. His relatives had hidden him in a closet. A camera clicked, and a haunting image was beamed around the world, of a terrified child screaming.

“At that moment I felt afraid because I thought they were going to scold me or do something to me,” he says.

Elian was carried out of the house, and whisked away by a special agent. And his world changed again.

“When they said I was going to see my father, at that moment, then I felt joy that I could get out of that house,” he says.