Cubans Rally for Return of Boy in Custody Battle

Inside the small concrete house on Cosio Street, where a pet parrot still squawks Elian Gonzalez’s name, a small army of uncles, cousins, grandparents and friends was plastering and repainting his bedroom Thursday to prepare for the 6-year-old boy’s return.

Outside Elian’s classroom at the nearby Marcelo Salado Primary School, Cubans from all walks of life waited in line to demand that the U.S. hand over the boy--signing the little red book that bears the boy’s school photo and the words, “The Cuban People are your lawyer.”

And in Havana, about 75 miles to the west of this sleepy provincial city, more than 300,000 children, intellectuals, homemakers, peasants, professionals and parents took to the streets, paralyzing the Cuban capital as they marched on the U.S. government’s seafront diplomatic mission to shout, chant and scream for Elian’s return.

These were the sights and sounds in Cuba two weeks after Elian’s miraculous Thanksgiving Day rescue off the coast of Florida; such is the nature of a custody battle between two nations with enormous implications for both the United States and Cuba.

At the core of Cuba’s argument are the simple facts of the case: that Elian’s mother is dead, drowned along with 10 others in their flight from the island; that his father still lives here and means to stay; and, especially, that the boy’s father and his closest living relatives here love the boy and want him sent home.

President Fidel Castro has accused the Clinton administration of caving in to the Cuban American lobby in South Florida by allowing the boy to remain under the powerful voting bloc’s influence.

On a day when Elian’s cherubic face took its place beside revolutionary hero Ernesto “Che” Guevara on billboards, many Cubans and Americans alike speculated that the growing conflict could endanger a 5-year-old agreement that has regulated migration between this nation of 11 million and the United States.

Negotiations to extend that pact are scheduled to begin here next week. But the orchestrated energy unleashed on Havana’s streets Thursday and the tears and pain that fill the little house on Cosio Street where the boy was born and raised are clear indications that this is a case Castro intends to push to the limit.

If the immigration talks collapse and the accord lapses, many analysts fear a repetition of the mass 1994 exodus that brought tens of thousands of Cubans to America’s shores by raft and rickety boat.

Elian’s case, Castro has argued in recent days, underscores a U.S. unwillingness to fully comply with the immigration pact, which requires all illegal Cuban migrants picked up at sea to be sent home, while those who make land can stay. Informally, the policy is called “wet foot/dry foot.” The agreement also requires Cuba to accept anyone the U.S. sends back; without it, analysts fear, the exodus would begin because there would be no threat of being sent home.

But feelings are just as strong to the north, in Miami. At the same time Elian’s face was filling Cuba’s streets and state-run airwaves in a live, two-hour special on the mass demonstration, that same face was gracing the posters of the fiercely anti-Castro Cuban American lobby in the South Florida city, where the boy is living under the glare of television lights and a showering of gifts with one of his great-uncles in a Little Havana bungalow.

Elian Gonzalez, Miami’s anti-Castro forces argue, symbolizes the oppression and despair that have driven hundreds of thousands of Cubans to dare death and flee the Communist-run island for freedom.

But the view here in his hometown and in the Cuban capital is that Elian has been kidnapped--pure and simple--by a heartless “mafia” and an uncaring government that are depriving a boy who has already lost his mother of the company of his father.

Officially, the U.S. government is treating the case with increasing caution. In the days since U.S. immigration officials took the unusual step of unilaterally giving the boy to his great-uncle after his rescue at sea, Washington’s line has appeared to soften.

Just hours before Thursday’s demonstration, Vicky Huddleston, the top U.S. diplomat based in Havana, told reporters that U.S. immigration officials are “able and willing” to interview Elian’s father any time, any place to determine that he is, in fact, the boy’s father. Immigration authorities will then decide whether to send the boy home, which U.S. immigration lawyers say would be almost inevitable under U.S. law.

“What culture, what president, what country could say that a boy’s place is not with his only living parent, especially a father and grandparents who have loved and cared for him all his life,” a tearful Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian’s grandfather, asked in his Cosio Street home.

The elder Gonzalez, a 53-year-old retired Interior Ministry soldier who is the don of this family that suddenly stumbled into history, spent hours explaining the complexity of a family that is typical of hundreds of thousands that have divided themselves between Cuba and the U.S. since Castro’s 1959 revolution.

But he and his wife--Elian’s paternal grandparents who, by all accounts, have cared for the boy five days a week before and after his parents divorced three years ago--also stressed that this boy was a miracle child from birth.

His mother had four miscarriages through 13 years of marriage before Elian was born, they said, and he remains the couple’s only son, although his father now has a 3-month-old baby from a second marriage.

Gonzalez bristled at allegations from the Cuban American community in Miami that Castro is using the boy as a propaganda tool and is pressuring the family to play along: “It is we who are pressuring the Cuban government,” he said. “We are nobody to the Americans without the support and backing of our government and people.”

And he insisted that no one in the tightly knit family was warned that the boy and his mother were about to leave.

“We knew nothing about his mother’s plans,” he said. “If we did, it wouldn’t have happened. Elian is too precious to all of us.”

Although Gonzalez said the family remained close to Elian’s mother, taking on parental duties while she worked as a hotel maid in the nearby resort town of Varadero, they were less kindly when they spoke of her boyfriend--the man who had arranged the boat trip in which he, his father, mother and brother also died.

“This man already had been in the United States,” Gonzalez said of the mother’s boyfriend, whom he identified as Rafael Munero Lazaro. “He stole a boat in Florida and came back five months ago. We never thought he’d try to go back.”

What haunts Elian’s grandfather is the fact that his own younger brother, Lazaro Gonzalez, is now at the opposite end of the custody fight.

For years, Gonzalez said, his brother has sent dollar remittances that have helped the family here get ahead. “We’re a very close family--we speak every week,” he said. “But I’ve racked my brains for 13 days, and I can’t understand why he’s doing this, why he isn’t sending our boy home to us. I’m up the whole night, thinking, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ ”

But for the moment, Gonzalez added, he has just one mission--”to get Elian home”--and a single request.

“Please, I would like just one favor,” he said. “Please call the two fishermen who pulled our child from the sea--here are their names and telephone numbers--and tell them that, from the bottom of our hearts, we are endlessly grateful.”