The Elian Case, A Year Later

It separated a boy from his father and killed his mother.

It divided a small, vocal contingent of Miami's Cuban population from the rest of the country. It allowed a tired and all-but-forgotten Fidel Castro to swagger upon the international stage again to rail at his old enemy, the United States government, created international headlines for almost seven months, cost taxpayers about $2 million, and partially reshaped Miami's city government.

One further thing: it may yet decide who will be the next president.

It is the Elian Gonzalez incident. It began exactly a year ago on Thanksgiving Day, when 6-year-old Elian was found by fishermen floating in an inner tube off Florida's coast after the boat carrying his mother and 13 others drowned when their boat capsized near Fort Lauderdale.

To Damian Fernandez, it may have been the incident that will cost Vice-President Al Gore the presidency.

"You could say that Elian decided the presidential race," said Fernandez, a senior academic at Florida International University (FIU).

It shaped the way many Cuban-Americans in Florida would vote, Fernandez said, and in an election hinged upon several hundred votes cast in the Sunshine State — and the state's 25 electoral votes — that is crucial.

For Gore, the incident was a political Catch-22, Fernandez said. Gore blamed "the oppressive regime of Fidel Castro" for causing the controversy, saying, "Elian should never have been put in the position of having to choose between freedom and his own father.

"We still need a full and fair court hearing based on due process in a court of law according to the facts available about what is in the best interests of the child," Gore said.

To the rest of the country, it may have seemed like Gore was pandering to Miami's powerful Cuban-American community at the expense of the law. A Miami Herald poll showed that 59 percent of all Americans favored the Justice Department's decision to raid the Little Havana home of his relatives to return Elian to his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.

But Gore's position may have seemed like small beer to inherently conservative Cuban-Americans, even though he broke with the Clinton Administration in taking it. Most of Miami's Cubans fled Castro's Cuba and were furious with the administration's allowing the Justice Department to raid the Miami home of Elian's relatives on April 22 to enforce a court ruling.

Father and son eventually returned to Cuba in June after the Miami relatives exhausted their legal ability to keep Elian here (They have since sued U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, however). Cuban exile leaders vowed to punish the Clinton-Gore administration at the ballot for what they saw as its treacherous pact with Castro.

"Cuban-Americans felt badly and it backfired on Al Gore," Fernandez said. "Democrats had worked hard on the Cuban American community and Elian undid all the inroads the Dmocrats had made in the last several years."

Meanwhile, several local Miami officials, including the city manager, police chief, and members of the county Community Relations Board were fired or resigned for their handling of the affair.

Miami Mayor Joe Carollo and Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas earned points with their Cuban-American constituents by vehemently fighting Elian's eventual extradition but also got the wrath of national Democrat Party officials angered at their non-support of Gore during the election. White and African-American Floridians were also dismayed at Carollo's replacing the city manager and police chief with Cuban Americans.

For Castro, Elian was a form of political rebirth. It vaguely hearkened back to the early 1960s, when he drew international applause from other small South and Central American countries by repeatedly portraying the U.S. as the bullying neighbor that flouted international law.

For years, Cuba had been an almost forgotten player on the international stage, its Communist political system seen as a demoralized, poor and vastly inefficient anachronism in a world increasingly democratized. That hasn't changed, but what was amazing about Castro's maneuverings, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa wrote, was how Castro's propaganda war pushed such sentiments aside.

Castro closed schools and businesses to put anti-U.S. protesters on the street, ordered Cuban radio and TV media to devote at least four hours of coverage to the case, spent $2 million on protest paraphernalia, and put his best weapon — himself — out there arguing that under the law, Elian belonged with his father.

"Even those of us who seem him as one of the most bloody and repugnant dictators that Latin American's authoritarian fauna has produced must tip our hats," Llosa wrote in the Herald.

With "chilling cynicism, he manipulated the Elian case so that for ...months no one talked of the satrapy he created or the catastrophic economic condition that the Cuban people suffer, only of the boy martyr," he added.

His maneuvering vastly increased Cuban nationalism and enraged the virulently anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in the U.S. Their anger added some steam to the movement to end Cuban trade embargoes and made them seem almost lunatic to other Americans who may have seen the issue as being simply about a father separated from his young son.

And what of that young son? After returning home, Elian has enrolled in grammar school and lives quietly in Cardenas, Cuba, with his father, who was given a medal by Castro for his "heroic behavior" — standing up to the United States.

By NICK SAMBIDES Jr.
©2000 CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Reuters Ltd. contributed to this report