Catching Up With Elian Gonzalez
This past Thanksgiving marked 20 years since 5-year-old Elian Gonzalez crossed the Florida Straits from Cuba.
It was a media spectacle, one that played out live on television. It culminated in a U.S. government-backed raid on a Miami family home, with little Elian sent back to Cuba to live with his father.
It’s a complicated story, in part because of how high up the intrigue went — President Bill Clinton and former Cuban President Fidel Castro were personally involved.
Two decades later, Andersonville, Tennessee, resident Rodney Archer traveled to Cuba to meet with Elian Gonzalez.
To get to know each other
He doesn’t speak Spanish. He has no ties to Cuba. But Archer has an unrelenting intellectual curiosity that drives him to seek out what he doesn’t understand. He read Cuba Confidential, by Ann Louise Bardach, in early 2019 and was intrigued by the Castro administration and its grip on the Cuban people.
He read all about the events that led to Elian’s arrival in Florida and his ultimate return and couldn’t help wondering, “What is he doing now?”
Archer was 18 or 19 when the events first unfolded in Florida.
“It was the first story I remember hearing over and over on the news,” he said. “It was the first major news story I really followed. I saw the images of him and the raid, Elian and his dad. I remember seeing all those things, almost on a daily basis.”
So Archer looked Gonzalez up on Facebook.
“It took me a while to find the right one,” he said. “I reached out to him in Spanish.”
But Elian left him on “read” for a while.
Until, to Archer’s surprise, he responded.
The two struck up a friendship over social media, and eventually, Archer asked if he could meet with him in Cuba for an interview next time he was there.
Traveling to Cuba isn’t easy. Doing anything in Cuba isn’t easy. Americans can’t use credit cards there, and there’s no cell service data or internet.
Archer and Gonzalez met on a Sunday afternoon in a coffee shop where everyone knew exactly who Gonzalez was. He lives in Cardanes, about two hours east of Havana (if you travel by classic car, which tops out at 40 mph).
“He’s still a little bit of a celebrity there,” Archer said.
Being a very close friend to a decades-long dictator will do that.
“He wasn’t going to say anything negative about Cuba,” Archer said. “He admitted to me that he considered Fidel to be like a second father. He was nothing but good to him.”
But he didn’t say anything negative about the U.S.A. either.
“I think the desire of Cubans… and North Americans is to get along well and to get to know each other,” Gonzalez told Archer.
He gives kudos to the Clinton administration, stating that he believed they handled the situation well.
(Editor’s note: Archer recorded their conversation, and then had the notes transcribed and translated. The quotes from Gonzalez in this article are taken from the transcripts.)
In his own words
Gonzalez doesn’t remember much from the time he was floating in a raft in the middle of the ocean with his mother until he woke up in a U.S. hospital. But he’s filled in the gaps from what others have told him. He fled Cuba with his mother, Elizabeth Brotons, and her boyfriend. At one point, when the current was strong, he became separated from her and around a dozen others who were with them.
He was found off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, alone, and brought to safety. His mother drowned. He was eventually brought to family members in Miami, who wanted him to stay with them.
But his father wanted him back in Cuba.
It was the custody battle heard around the world.
His father made a connection within the Cuban government, who involved the Castro administration. While a Florida family court ruled he could stay in Miami, the Immigration and Naturalization Service overruled, leading to a raid backed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno. Gonzalez remembers being scared. The pictures are etched in the minds of people who were aware of the crisis back then: a little boy hiding in the closet, held by one of the fishermen who found him, a large gun held by a government agent pointed directly at them.
Terrifying.
But Elian says that as soon as he was out of the house, he was given comfort and safety.
In fact, he said he now views his time in Miami as a kidnapping, since he legally should have gone back to his father.
“It was necessary to do it by force,” he said. “What happened became necessary, of which I came out unharmed, nobody was harmed, and in fact the people that they chose to do it did it very well. The agents that intervened, I remember, spoke Spanish. They also looked for someone similar to my dad’s wife so that I could feel more familiarized, and right away someone told me, ‘We’re going to where your dad is.’ They began to calm me down and, in that moment, they did a very good job.”
He had happy moments in Miami, he said. His mind was occupied. But he regrets not having the time to mourn his mother.
“I didn’t have the opportunity of maybe — of giving my mom respect or remembrance,” he said. “Because I was occupied with so many things. Everything was so abrupt. Everyone in my life has seen that I didn’t have time to think about it, about what was happening and, better yet, that emptiness.”
He discussed his positive experience with Castro, the support of the Cuban people who protested in the streets for his return when he was a child, and what his life is like now. Archer’s goal is to write and share the entire experience through his blog The Global Diplomat. His goal is to share the stories of the people he meets, and to show how we all have more in common than not.
It’s a sentiment Gonzalez shares.
“We don’t have to come from the same ideology,” he said. “Instead we simply need to respect each other and be friends.”
