The Magical Realism of the Elian Chronicle

My heart goes out to them now, the Cuban Americans who kept vigil in front of the home of Elian Gonzalez’s Miami relatives all those months. Lately, they’ve been the object of disapproval and condescension, the unlikely “love-it-or-leave-it” jingoism of liberal opinion and the weighty dismissal of the American cold poll shoulder. All the while they’ve been entertaining, outraging and enchanting us with the greatest story ever told, live on television. Look how they’ve drawn us into their world of overheated imaginations and passions! Into their biblical, mythical, magic realist, national epic: A story, essentially, about a miraculous boy savior sent by God to destroy the Monster.

Everyone knows the astonishing drama of Elian’s escape from Cuba in a leaky raft, watching his mother drown, then floating, for 48 hours, on an inner tube. Dolphins protected him. Florida fishermen rescued him. He was taken in by his great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez’s family. Destiny is a mysterious thing, sometimes enfolding a miracle in a leaky basket of catastrophe.

Demanding the boy be returned to his father in Cuba, Fidel Castro summoned everyone in his island prison into the streets. Their whipped-up indignation seemed to restore the old tyrant’s strength. But the crowds in Miami understood that not just the boy’s life was at stake but the freedom of the entire Cuban nation! Where would the Jews be now if the pharaohs had returned the infant Moses to his parents? In the Bible, Jesus asserts the primacy of his spiritual mission over his earthly family: He runs away as a boy to preach in the temple, and when Mary finally finds him and says, “Behold thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing,” Jesus brusquely returns to his preaching.

To the more fervent Miami Cubans, Elian wasn’t a political chess piece: He was a holy sign, a new messiah. From Cuba came the revelation that Santeria, the island’s mystical Yoruban religion, had prophesied that if the boy didn’t return to Cuba, Castro would lose the spiritual aura that protects him from death.

If you believe in the mystical-biblical Elian, then nothing--after Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s decision to send agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service on a predawn commando raid--could be more apt than Marisleysis Gonzalez’s heart-rending cry: “Oh, God, how could you have performed only half a miracle!”

Obsessed enemies come to resemble each other. Hate, fanaticism, illogic, mirror each other. Much of Miami Cubans’ extremism results from years of frustration with their enemy’s seemingly mystical longevity. Nothing has worked: assassination attempts, embargo, not even the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union a decade ago, which plunged Cuba into such surreal poverty that people had to be taught to cook grapefruit rind as if it were meat.

How can Castro still be in power? The explanation must be supernatural: a pact with the devil, an aura.

But how to explain the way many in the United States have been swept up in Cuban extravagance? A reputable television news queen stood on her head for an interview with a confused 6-year-old. An American nun claimed Elian’s visiting grandmothers wished to defect, though she doesn’t speak Spanish, and the nun who was translating said she heard no such thing. Republican politicians and commentators, plus Vice President Al Gore, insisted that despite the circus atmosphere and hysteria of the Miami relatives’ house, Elian would be better off recovering from his tragedy there than with his father. After the raid, they lined up on television to parrot paranoid fantasies: Photographs of a boy clearly happy to be reunited with his father must be faked. Look, the hair is different.

Magical realism taking over America? But magical realism is partly derived from the surrealism of tyranny and empty stomachs, solitary imaginative flights in societies denied political expression, justice and development. Democracies are supposedly places of reason and the rule of law. But like their longtime communist nemeses, they are also vulnerable to demagoguery and kitsch. Remember how, in the great Cold War novels of Milan Kundera, kitsch defined the forced happy face of communist regimes? At one point in his novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” an East bloc refugee watches with a U.S. senator while his children play. “ ‘Now that’s what I call happiness!’ exclaims the American senator. Behind his words was . . . a deep understanding of the plight of a refugee from a communist country where, the senator was convinced, no grass grew or children ran . . . . The smile on his face was the smile of a communist statesman beamed from the height of the reviewing stand.”

Here in Mexico City, I have Cuban-exile friends, mostly writers and academics. Some made dramatic escapes from Cuba. All are intimidatingly well educated. They are as opposed to Castro’s dictatorship as Cuban exiles anywhere, though they are not extremists. Recently, when musicians from “The Buena Vista Social Club” played in Mexico City’s Zocalo, they dedicated a song “to the reunification of the Cuban family” kept divided by self-interested extremists on both sides.

My Cuban friends are in that vast, overlooked middle. The other day, Jose Manuel Prieto, the Cuban novelist, put it like this: “Cubans living in exile and in Cuba share a common condition: They live without a sense of stable ground under their feet.” The former, because of exile’s dislocation, the latter because of paralyzing uncertainty over the future.

Still, Prieto admitted, Cuba is not such a bad place to be a child. The education he received there, he said, was “ a dream” compared with other Latin American countries. He said Cuban children grow up without the lessons of inferiority and weakness that are daily fare elsewhere; they are taught they can triumph. Only when they reach an age when they can think for themselves, do Cubans realize they are living in an intolerable place. As for the supposed brainwashing of children, how effective can it be when so few now believe in communism?

A never-ending challenge of Elian’s life will be to make sense of what has happened to him this year. Surely, there are healthier ways to do that than by being told he is the second coming.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s mesmerizing new novel “When We Were Orphans” explores the way childhood trauma lives on through an adult life. The narrator’s parents, in Shanghai in the early 1900s, mysteriously disappear. The boy, sent back to England, grows up to become a renowned detective, his life’s mission to solve his parents’ case. He reflects, “Our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”

Ishiguro’s novel plunged me into reveries. My childhood was not so tragic, but it had its share of shocks and dislocations, including a sense of being divided between two countries. When I was an infant, my mother left my father and took me back to Guatemala; we returned to Boston when I contracted tuberculosis a few years later. Once I vomited terrifying buckets of blood and was rushed to the hospital. My father sat by my bed every day, performing magic tricks he’d bought in a magic shop nearby.

I’ve always managed to keep my composure--except once. I was about Elian’s age. When I saw the photo of Elian screaming in front of the heavily armed INS soldier, I couldn’t help but remember.

I was with my parents inside a U.S. Calvary fort, soldiers and horses everywhere. Suddenly, Indians poured over the rough log walls. Gunfire, arrows, smoke and blood-curdling screams, bodies falling from roofs! I didn’t understand it was play, that we were in a Wild West theme park. I only knew we were to be massacred and scalped, so I screamed and screamed. I remember how I felt, the almost instant calming, when my father scooped me up into his arms and hurried me away from that terrifying place, out through the gates of “‘Fort Apache,” to our car. *