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By
Gabriel García Márquez
March 29, 2000 New York Times Op-ed |
On
Friday, Juan Miguel González went to school to pick up his
son Elián for the weekend, he was told that Elizabet Brotons,
his ex-wife also the boy's mother, had taken Elián at noon
and had not brought him back in the afternoon. In his routine, as
a divorced father, this seemed normal to Juan Miguel. From the time
when he and Elizabet had separated two years earlier, on the most
amicable terms, the boy had lived with his father and spent every
other day at his mother's house. But Elizabet's door was padlocked
over the weekend and on Monday as well, and Juan Miguel began to
make inquiries. This was how he learned the bad news that was already
becoming common knowledge in the city of Cárdenas
in Cuba: Elián's mother had left with him for Miami, with
12 other people, in an aluminum boat 5 1/2 meters long, with no
life preservers and a decrepit motor.
It was Nov. 22, 1999. "My life ended that day," Juan Miguel
said four months later. After their divorce, he and Elizabet had
maintained a relationship that was cordial but rather unusual: they
continued living under the same roof and sharing their dreams in
the same bed, hoping to produce as lovers the child they had not
been able to have as a married couple. It seemed impossible. Elizabet
would conceive but miscarry in the first four months of pregnancy.
After seven miscarriages, the child they had longed for was born.
They had decided on a unique name for him: Elián, composed
of the first three letters of Elizabet and the last two letters
of Juan.
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Elizabet
was 28 years old when she left with the boy for Miami. She was
an amiable and hard-working chief housekeeper at a hotel
in Varadero.
Her father says that at the age of 14 she was already in love
with Juan Miguel González, and married him when she was
18. "We were like brother and sister," says Juan Miguel,
a calm, deliberate man who works as a cashier. After their divorce,
Juan Miguel and Elizabet continued living together with their
son in Cárdenas
-- where all the protagonists in this drama were born, and where
they lived -- until she fell in love with Lázaro Rafael
Munero, a neighborhood tough. Juan Miguel subsequently married
Nelsy Carmeta and had a son, who is now 6 months old. |
Juan
Miguel did not have to waste time finding out where Elián
was, because in the Caribbean everybody knows everything -- "even
before it happens," as one of my informants told me. Everyone
knew that the leader of the adventure was Lázaro Munero,
who had made at least two clandestine trips to the United States
to prepare the way. He had the contacts and nerve to take along
not only Elizabet and her son, but also a younger brother, his father,
who was over 70, and his mother, who was recovering from a heart
attack. Lázaro's partner in the enterprise took his entire
family. At the last moment, because each of them paid $1,000, three
more people came on board: 22-year-old Arianne Horta, her 5-year-old
daughter, Esthefany, and Nivaldo Vladimir Fernández, the
husband of one of her friends.
An
infallible formula for being well-received as an immigrant in the
United States is to be shipwrecked in her territorial waters. Cárdenas
is a good departure point: it is close to Florida, and its coves
are protected by mangrove swamps. Moreover, the regional art of
making small craft for fishing in the nearby Zapata
Swamp and Del Tesoro Lagoon provides raw materials for
illegal boats, in particular the aluminum pipes used for irrigating
citrus groves. People say that Munero must have spent some $200
and an additional 800 Cuban pesos on the motor and the boat's construction.
The result was a kind of lifeboat, with no roof and no seats. Three
inner tubes were put on board as life preservers for 14 people.
There was no room for more. Before they left, most of the passengers
injected themselves with Gravinol to prevent seasickness.
It
appears they set out on Nov. 20 but had to go back when the motor
broke down. They remained hidden for two days, waiting for it to
be repaired, while Juan Miguel thought his son was already in Miami.
This first emergency convinced Arianne Horta that the risks were
too great for her daughter, and she decided to leave her with her
family, to be brought over later by a safe route. It has been said
that Elián also became aware of the dangers of the crossing
and screamed to be left behind.
They
finally set off at dawn on the 22nd, with favorable seas but a wretched
motor. The stories the survivors recounted in the Florida press
after their rescue, and expanded on in phone calls to their families
in Cárdenas,
revealed terrifying details. According to them, at midnight on the
22nd, the men in charge dismounted the hopeless motor and dropped
it in the ocean to lighten the weight. But the unbalanced boat flipped
over on its side, and all the passengers fell into the water. This
may have broken the fragile soldering on the aluminum pipes and
caused the boat to sink.
It
was the end, in darkness and an inferno of panic. The older people
who did not know how to swim probably drowned immediately. The Gravinol,
which causes drowsiness, must have worked against most of them.
Arianne and Nivaldo clutched at one inner tube; Elián, and
perhaps his mother, held onto the other. Nobody knows what happened
to the third. Elián can swim, but Elizabet could not, and
she may have let go in her confusion and terror. "I saw when
Mama got lost in the ocean," the boy would later tell his father
on the phone. What is difficult to understand, though it deserves
to be true, is that she had the presence of mind and the time to
give the boy a bottle of fresh water.
His
information was erroneous, but Juan Miguel had a premonition of
the tragedy. He called his uncle several times -- Lázaro
González has lived in Miami for years -- and asked about
clandestine arrivals or recent shipwrecks, but was told nothing.
At last, at dawn on Thursday, Nov. 25, the news broke in a sequence
of events. The body of an older woman was discovered on the beach
by a fisherman. Later, Arianne and Nivaldo were found alive. Not
long afterward a small boy appeared in the water off Fort Lauderdale,
unconscious and badly sunburned, lying across an inner tube, face
up. It was Elián, the last survivor.
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When
he heard the news, Juan Miguel was determined to speak to
the boy on the phone but did not know where he was.
On
Nov. 25 a doctor in Miami called him to ask about Elián's
medical history. Juan Miguel learned to his great joy that
Elián himself had given his father's name in the
hospital, and his phone number and address in Cárdenas.
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The
next day Juan Miguel talked to Elián. Troubled, but in a
steady voice, Elián told his father he had seen his mother
drown. He also said he had lost his backpack and school uniform,
which Juan Miguel interpreted as a symptom of his disorientation.
"No, Baby," he said. "Your uniform is here, and I
have your backpack ready for when you come home." But it is
possible that Elián had had another pack at his mother's
house, or that one had been bought for him so he would not insist
on returning to his house. His fondness for school, as well as his
desire to return to class, were clearly demonstrated a few days
later, when he told his teacher on the telephone, "Take good
care of my desk."
From
the earliest calls, Juan Miguel realized that someone in Miami was
disrupting his conversations with his son. "You should know
that from the very beginning they've done everything they could
to sabotage us," he told me. "Sometimes they shout at
the boy while we're talking, or turn the volume all the way up on
television cartoons, or put a candy in his mouth so it's hard to
understand what he's saying." These kinds of stratagems were
also suffered in person by Raquel Rodríguez and Marcela Quintant,
Elián's grandmothers, during their turbulent trip to Miami.
Their visit with him, scheduled to last two days, was reduced to
90 minutes, with all kinds of intentional interruptions, and they
said they spent no more than a quarter of an hour alone with Elián.
They returned to Cuba shocked at how much he had changed. "This
isn't the same boy," they said, saddened by the timidity of
a child they remembered as lively, intelligent, and with a remarkable
talent for drawing. "We have to save him!"
Nobody
in Miami seems to care about the harm being done to Elián's
mental health by the cultural uprooting to which he is being subjected.
At his 6th birthday party, celebrated on Dec. 6 in his Miami captivity,
his hosts took a picture of him wearing a combat helmet, surrounded
by weapons and wrapped in the flag of the United States, just a
short while before a boy of his age in Michigan shot a classmate
to death with a handgun.
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In
other words, the real shipwreck of Elián did not take
place on the high seas, but when he set foot on American soil.
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**Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate in literature, is the author,
most recently, of "News of a Kidnapping." Edith Grossman
translated this article from the Spanish.
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