Little Havana Residents Grieving Over Sudden, Shocking Loss of Elian

On Easter Sunday, they awoke to find him gone.

Elian Gonzalez no longer lived in the little house on Northwest 2nd Street. But still they came.

“We just wanted to see where it happened,” said Iris Arellano, 15, a high school student who joined hundreds of others in what seemed like a pilgrimage to Little Havana.

“We watched on television all day yesterday, and it was just horrible. So we wanted to see.”

On the day after armed federal agents seized Elian from the home of his Miami relatives and whisked him to a Washington reunion with his father, many in Miami looked for a way to vent their emotions. The pepper spray had dissipated, but their anger had not.

During sunrise services, ministers and priests told stories of the day Jesus disappeared from his tomb--and they spoke of the resurrection. They also led prayers for Elian, the 6-year-old Cuban boy invested with a religious significance by many. “He was a gift from God,” the Rev. Agusto Valverde told parishioners who sat on folding chairs in the parking lot of their Baptist church, just two blocks from where Elian stayed for almost five months.

After church, many Cuban Americans went to the house to say another prayer for the boy. Others, in shorts and carrying Cuban flags, were there because they come every weekend. Some just didn’t know where else to go.

“Shame!” cried one woman standing in the middle of the street, holding aloft the picture of a SWAT team officer pointing a semiautomatic weapon in the direction of the terrified child, who was in the arms of one of the fishermen who found him at sea. The print had been altered to insert the face of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno as the officer. A swastika had been etched onto the helmet.

“I love this country,” said Jose R. Villoch, 75, a Cuban-born U.S. citizen and World War II veteran who drove 200 miles to Miami from his home near Orlando early Sunday. “But when something like this can happen, we are in danger. “

The violence that erupted in the wake of Saturday’s televised seizure of Elian seemed spent. Although police remained on standby, Miami’s streets had been cleared of trash. Where tire fires had blazed, only scorch marks remained.

But Cuban flags waved from hundreds of cars in Miami, and signs of outrage were common. “Elian, we want you to be free” were the words printed in Spanish under a huge portrait of the child on Flagler Street.

Elian’s great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, was in Washington on Sunday--along with his daughter, Marisleysis, and his brother Delfin-- attempting to see the child they still hope to keep from going back to Cuba. Their Little Havana house appeared almost deserted, but it was festooned with flags, signs and religious symbols--and a banner advertising a Web site, https://www.libertyforelian.org.

Even though they knew Elian was gone--and is unlikely to return--people left flowers, stuffed animals and notes for the boy.

“This is a historic spot,” said Arai Noda, 24, who lives in the four-unit apartment building next door. “People come because it is important for Cubans.”

Indeed, almost all the residents of the neighborhood are Cuban immigrants, and they have been remarkably tolerant of the crowds and commotion that has attended the Elian saga.

“It didn’t bother me, because it was for the cause of Elian,” said Eduardo Rodriguez, 55, who began sweeping up the trash in front of his house as the last of the television crews folded their tents and wound up their cables. “I just hope,” said Rodriguez, a watchmaker who came here from Cuba eight years ago, “that Fidel Castro does not make him a marionette, a puppet of the state.”

For dozens of television reporters and cameramen, the departure of Elian means they can go home. Freelancers Abdiel Vivancos and Juan Merlo, working for ABC-TV, are ready.

“We spent 61 days here overall,” said Vivancos, enough time to get to know the members of the family and to have come up with a name for the thousands of people who came by to see the boy.

“Some of them we called the peanut-throwers,” Merlo said. “They would come to the fence and yell, ‘Let the kid come out and play.’ Like he was a zoo attraction.”

During his 148 days in Miami, Elian was indeed an attraction. He survived a boat trip from Cuba that claimed the lives of his mother and 10 others, only to become the prize in a bitter international custody fight that is not yet finished.

Despite pictures that show Elian seemingly content with his father, many remain shaken by the way he was wrested from his relatives’ home.

“I was sickened,” said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.). “At a time when families are reflecting on spiritual values . . . to come in the middle of the night . . . was absolutely intolerable, unnecessary and outrageous.”

Miami Mayor Joe Carollo also remained upset that he had not been warned about the federal action, and he blasted the Police Department’s role in “Operation Reunion.”

Federal authorities had alerted Police Chief Bill O’Brien on Friday afternoon that the operation might take place Saturday morning. O’Brien did not inform Carollo.