‘A Family Divided’

Caridad Gonzalez cried all the way to America.

The Pan Am DC-7 “freedom flight” took less than an hour to travel the 200 miles to Miami. But for the 35-year-old seamstress, the second-oldest sibling in a large, close-knit clan, leaving this gritty town on Cuba’s northern coast was the most wrenching passage of her life.

Left behind were her parents, eight brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends--everyone she had ever known. At the airport in Varadero, an official stamped her passport “Void” and told her: You can never come back.

It was April 19, 1966. Caridad was one of 17,355 Cubans who landed in the United States that year--and among 208,536 people who made the journey during the 1960s, the first decade after Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba. But more important, Caridad was the first of the Gonzalez clan to start a new life in America.

“It was very sad, very emotional for me,” recalled Caridad, now 68. “I didn’t want to leave home, but I had promised my mother, and she made me keep my promise” to plant the roots that would allow other members of the family to make new lives in the U.S.

For her family, Caridad was the anchor in the new world. Through nearly 34 years, with a simple wish that no Gonzalez attempt the journey illegally by boat, she has used U.S. immigration laws permitting her to sponsor immediate siblings and their families to help more than two dozen relatives from three generations follow her to South Florida. More than a dozen members of the Gonzalez clan have chosen to remain behind.

Like hundreds of thousands of Cuban families, the Gonzalezes are divided by politics, personal choices and the Florida Straits. Like the Gonzalezes, these families bridge the divide through telephone calls, occasional visits here and there, and gifts of clothing and cash that now total about $1 billion a year. But mostly they stay bonded through an enduring love of family that neither governments nor distance have managed to erode.

In the end, those bonds might even survive the extraordinary case of Caridad’s 6-year-old grandnephew, Elian, whose mother was among members of the family’s new generation who have crossed illegally for the most part because their parents remain in Cuba. Elian was picked up off the Florida coast after his mother drowned and is now claimed by one of Caridad’s brothers in Miami and separated from the father who wants him back in Cuba. The boy’s fate has become a political battlefield between communities, nations and even siblings.

As Augustin Serrano, who lives two doors down from Juan Gonzalez--Caridad’s only brother who remains here in Cuba--recently put it: “To me, the whole relationship between Cuba and the United States is, in itself, that of a family divided.”

Eldest Sister Became Their Anchor in Miami

For the Gonzalez clan, the divide opened in 1966, just seven years after a young, bearded Castro ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista. It was in that year--as Castro was consolidating his Communist revolution with new school uniforms, textbooks and strict codes covering almost every aspect of life on the island--that Caridad decided to leave.

Her brother Delfin had been in prison since 1962, charged as a counterrevolutionary. Caridad’s former husband, Pedro Hernandez, had been among the first Cubans to get out, fleeing by boat in 1961. Though they had been divorced for five years, Caridad wanted to give the marriage another try.

“When Delfin was arrested, I knew I had to leave because someone had to be [in the U.S.] to pay for passage of political prisoners,” she recalled. “I had two chances to go by boat, but I kept delaying because it was going to be hard on my mother. But she made me keep the promise to go.”

Six days after Caridad arrived on one of the joint U.S.-Cuban freedom flights that brought migrants to the United States in the latter half of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, she found work in a Miami garment shop. Her attempt to rekindle her marriage failed, but the roots she planted in America did not.

Relaxed Rules Opened Door for Siblings

Through the next decade, she not only sent money to the family in Cuba but opened her own business, Cary Gold Fashions. And in 1978, Caridad took advantage of relaxed visa rules in both the U.S. and Cuba and returned to the island for the first time. Her mother was ill. Delfin was out of prison, and Caridad wanted to pave the way for his exit from Cuba.

At the airport in Cuba, by chance, she met the same official who had voided her passport. “You see,” she said, waving her visa in his face. “Here I am.”

When Caridad again traveled to Cuba in 1979, Delfin won permission to leave for Miami. He eventually became the most successful of the nine Gonzalez siblings, building a business in the Florida Keys selling lumber and lobster-fishing supplies.

Describing his piece of the American dream as he sat in his late-model Ford pickup truck, his face suntanned and smooth at the age of 62, Delfin said his Cocoplum Lumber Supply company has provided “enough money for me to live and to give some help to my family.”

Delfin remains adamant about Castro and a land where he says “you have to think what the government tells you, otherwise you are nobody.”

And so he encouraged his brothers and sisters to follow him--although none of the three who did so needed much prodding.

Sister Georgina’s husband, Joaquin Cid, was almost as bad off as Delfin had been. He had been active in Cardenas’ anti-Castro underground and was jailed along with Delfin in 1962. He spent just two years in prison, Georgina recently recalled, but he and his family were then ostracized--not merely for his political past but for the family’s deep Roman Catholic faith.

Besides, the couple’s sons were about to get their draft notices to serve with the Cuban army in Angola, where dozens of soldiers already had lost their lives defending the African nation’s Marxist government against U.S.-backed rebels.

The couple arrived in Miami in 1983, with Caridad as their sponsor and her house their first home. They brought along the 15-year-old twins, Jose and Luis, and their 8-year-old daughter, Georgina Maria. Within days of arriving, Cid grabbed a pick and shovel and went to work.

It’s what happened to the twins in the years ahead, though, that helped reinforce the reasons why some Gonzalez siblings chose to stay behind in Cuba--poor, but at peace in a land where crime is rare, and where the government teaches from an early age that the capitalist United States corrupts absolutely.

Both boys have had run-ins with the law: Court records in Miami show that Luis Cid, now 32, is scheduled to go on trial Feb. 28, accused in the strong-arm robbery of a tourist last fall, after already serving six months’ probation for carrying a concealed firearm in 1995. Jose was sentenced in 1986 to two years’ probation for burglary.

Delfin’s take on the twins: “I don’t know if they have been raised strict or not strict. But you know the way kids are raised here. . . . What family in the U.S. might not have had somebody who got a little off track?

“Lazaro’s kids have turned out good.” And so have Manuel’s.

The last of the Gonzalez siblings to make the journey, Manuel and his youngest brother, Lazaro--who both would ultimately take center stage in a public conflict now ripping the family apart--came to the United States in 1984, a year after the eldest of the nine siblings, Jose Luis, died in Cuba.

By all accounts, it was, until last year, the most painful odyssey for the clan. Their two families, 11 people in all, arrived in Costa Rica and were told by U.S. officials that there were too many in their party to continue on to the United States. Manuel and Lazaro were told they had to first establish themselves in the U.S. because Caridad could not sponsor them all.

“Go or stay. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” Manuel, 59, recently recalled in Miami of his decision to leave his wife, three daughters and son in Costa Rica.

“I have never been political,” he said “I did not work against the regime. I just wanted to reach some goals, to get ahead. And I knew there were better opportunities over here than over there.”

He worked hard, eventually becoming a school bus mechanic.

Still, the price was high. Manuel’s wife, Emilia America, son Manuel Antonio and youngest daughter Daymara followed him to Miami nine months later. But daughters Solangel and Rosa had to stay in Costa Rica for a total of 18 months, while Manuel worked to send them money to survive.

It was an experience that would foreshadow so much for Manuel’s family.

“I know about separation from one’s father,” said Solangel, now 36, a divorced single mother in Miami who works as a dental assistant with a degree she earned while living in San Jose, the Costa Rican capital. “When I lived in Costa Rica, I was 21 years old, but I needed the support of my father. It was very hard.”

The stories of the hardships became cautionary tales in the concrete home of Juan Gonzalez and his children and grandchildren on Cossio Street, one of the Gonzalez clan’s last outposts in Cardenas.

“So many times, my sister [Caridad] has asked us to come, but we have everything we need right here,” said Juan, 53, the second-youngest of the siblings. He has retired from a career as a police officer with Castro’s Interior Ministry.

Unlike his brothers, Juan fit well in Communist Cuba. He respected its values and discipline and imparted them to his son, Juan Miguel, who joined the Communist Party at a young age and rose within its ranks along with his childhood sweetheart, Elisabeth Brotons.

The couple married in their teens and set off on coveted careers in the Cuban tourist mecca of Varadero. Their jobs as cashier at a tourist park and chambermaid at a resort hotel gave them access to the new lifeblood of the Cuban economy: U.S. dollars.

Juan Miguel built a new house adjacent to his father’s, and it became the focal point of the clan during reunions with the Gonzalezes who had left for Florida.

Events in ’98 Upset Quiet Life in Cuba

Events in 1998 brought the Gonzalez family closer together, yet they set the stage for the tremors to come.

The husband of Caridad’s sister Aide died of cancer that year, which Aide suspects may have influenced the decision of her 27-year-old son and the husband of her daughter to journey to Florida last year aboard a smuggler’s boat. Five months ago, their wives and children followed in another illegal crossing.

Aide, along with sister Yraida, remained behind. Aide and her daughter Lourdes, 33, explained their determination to stay:

Life in the United States “is too agitated. You don’t know your neighbors,” Aide said. Lourdes added: “You don’t have your family close by.” Aide concluded: “You can spend months without seeing each other. While here, we see our family two or three times a day.”

Yet even now, Aide, 56, sits in her small Cardenas house filled with pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary and says: “The brothers and sisters, we have always been very united. Even the ones who are not with us. We show their picture and tell their stories so that all our children know their cousins. My mother taught us to be a united and close family.”

Family matriarch Faustina Georgina Gonzalez, who had so insisted that Caridad keep her life- defining promise through the years, didn’t live to see the reunions in 1998. She had died here after a long illness in 1980, just days after a visa for her to travel to the U.S. had arrived. Nor could patriarch Luis Gonzalez attend; he died in 1992 in Miami at age 91.

But most of the Gonzalez siblings in Miami did come to stay with brother Juan in Cardenas. And for Delfin, it was the first time he’d seen Juan--or his hometown--in 20 years. What impressed him most, he said, were the conditions.

“The changes that I saw were the same as if, during World War II, you go to Germany before and you go to Germany after,” he said. “The whole city was in shambles. A house falls, and they never rebuild it. . . . An abandoned town.”

Yet it is a town where 98,000 Cubans live. And, with the visitors’ U.S. dollars, the Gonzalez family’s reunions were like fiestas.

Delfin and Lazaro stayed at the home of Juan Miguel, who was to recall with recent, newfound bitterness how he’d slept in the car so his Uncle Lazaro could have his bed. And, for more than two weeks, the family bonded more closely than ever, largely by following a cardinal rule: Never talk politics.

Many of the Miami clan met Juan Miguel and Elisabeth’s son, Elian, for the first time. By then, the couple was divorced but remained close and shared custody of Elian. Delfin gave the boy a goat as a pet. Once back home, Delfin was told that Elian’s goat had died. “But I know they probably ate it,” he said.

Eighteen months later, Delfin and Lazaro saw Elian again. It was last Thanksgiving in a South Florida hospital room, where he was about to become one of the world’s most famous 5-year-olds.

Elian’s mother had died when a smuggler’s boat sank, leaving Elian clinging to a Russian-made inner tube. Within hours after the hospital visit, Elian was at Lazaro’s home in the Miami neighborhood of Little Havana. There, with the backing of the city’s powerful anti-Castro lobby, Lazaro laid claim to the boy against his father’s wishes.

Custody Battle Set for Next Week

The custody battle over the now 6-year-old Elian that erupted between the two Cuban communities and Gonzalez family members on either side of the Florida Straits will be fought in U.S. District Court in Miami on Tuesday. But already, the dispute is doing what three decades of physical division could not: tearing the Gonzalez family apart.

At a family meeting in December, Manuel threw his support behind the demand of Elian’s father that the boy be returned to Cuba. He and his immediate family have been ostracized by the rest of the clan in Florida.

“They would not look me in the eyes,” said Manuel, who lives just eight blocks from his brother Lazaro and has agreed to Juan Miguel’s pending request that Manuel--not Lazaro--take temporary custody of the child.

Not even Caridad, the family anchor, is speaking to Manuel.

“After Elian came here, I called Juan Miguel 12 times,” Caridad said this week. “I told him that I could get visas for him and his family, his [new] wife and child. I know how generous this country is. But he said, ‘Take care of him’ and that within 24 hours someone will be there to pick him up. . . . I couldn’t believe he would take him back to that hellhole.”

Father Says He Was Offered a Life in U.S.

Juan Miguel, whose parental claim has been made into a Cuban national cause by Castro, complete with large demonstrations, had a different version of those conversations with the Miami family:

“They called, and that is when they started offering me $2 million, a house and a car,” he told a U.S. immigration official in Havana on Dec. 31. “Also, that a church had offered $4 million to Elian so he would be set for life.

“Caridad . . . told my father that the church would take care of us. I could go there with all my family and would be taken care of. . . . That is when I hung up the telephone.”

Manuel describes Juan Miguel, who calls him often now, as “a tortured man, feeling powerless over the fate of his son.”

“I wonder what happened to my family,” Manuel’s daughter Solangel sadly reflected in a recent interview. “This is the first time we have ever had anything like this. We respect each other, but we disagree. It hurts. It’s a nightmare for all of us.”

And here in Cardenas, Aide, looking gaunt these days with deep-set eyes, says: “I keep my faith in God, and I hope we can be the family we have always been. . . . This is breaking us apart.”

But it is Manuel, who endured the separation from his daughters in the mid-1980s and later lost his son to cancer, whose eyes well with tears when he contemplates where history has taken his humble clan.

“I lost a son. I know what it is like. And because of that, I think Elian must go back.”

As for the family’s future, he adds looking utterly crushed: “The wounds of the problem will heal, but the scars will always be there. There are scars.”

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Fineman reported from Cardenas and Havana, Clary from Miami. Times staff researcher Anna M. Virtue in Miami and special correspondent Dolly Mascarenas in Cardenas contributed to this report.

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The Gonzalez Siblings

The nine children of Luis and Faustina Georgina Gonzalez provide a portrait of the Cuban migration to the U.S., the political pressures on divided families and their efforts to maintain ties across time and the Florida Straits. The Gonzalez siblings are:

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Jose Luis: Died at 54 in 1983 when he fell off a scaffolding while painting the inside of a church in Cardenas, Cuba.

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Caridad, 68: Anchored the family in Miami after she arrived in 1966.

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Yraida, 65: Lives with her family in Cardenas and hopes to migrate to the U.S. someday--but only legally and with her entire immediate family.

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Delfin, 62: Former political prisoner in Cuba who came to Miami in 1979 and owns a lumber and lobster-fishing supply business in the Florida Keys.

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Georgina, 60: Factory worker who came to Miami with her husband and three children in 1983.

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Manuel, 59: Came to Miami with his younger brother Lazaro in 1984 and works as a school bus mechanic for Miami-Dade County.

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Aide, 56: Lives in Cardenas, as does her daughter, after the death of her husband in 1998 and illegal migration of her son and another daughter.

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Juan, 53: Retired Interior Ministry police officer who lives with son Juan Miguel in Cardenas and cared for grandson Elian before the young boy’s journey last year to the U.S.

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Lazaro, 49: An unemployed auto mechanic in Miami’s Little Havana, he has claimed custody of 6-year-old grandnephew Elian.