Cuban Exiles Mark Anniversary of Elian Gonzalez Raid

With cries of “Freedom, freedom!” a small group of Cuban exiles gathered Saturday to mark the anniversary of a dramatic raid by federal agents to take Cuban shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez from the home of his relatives here and reunite him with his father.

Armed agents swooped before dawn on April 22, 2000, to take the then-6-year-old boy from the house, effectively ending a bitter struggle by the Miami relatives and their supporters among the city’s Cuban exiles to keep the motherless boy from being returned to live with his father in communist Cuba.

Elian was flown that day to be with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, near Washington. Two months later, the pair went home to Cuba after the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to the Miami relatives’ legal efforts to keep the child in the U.S.

On Saturday evening, a crowd of several dozen people gathered outside the small home where Elian lived for five months, waving Cuban flags and posters of a photograph showing an armed agent and the frightened child.

The crowd prayed, sang, denounced Cuban President Fidel Castro and recalled the raid that shocked the city and was followed by a day of street protests by angry Cuban exiles. Some in the crowd said they planned to return to the house before dawn today to mark the moment when agents went in.

Lazaro Gonzalez, Elian’s great-uncle and head of the household that took Elian in after he was rescued at sea and then tried to keep him here, spoke briefly, referring to the raid as “an infamous dawn” and saying it had taken Elian to a place “where there is no freedom.”

Then-Atty. Gen. Janet Reno ordered the raid after Gonzalez and his family defied a government order to hand Elian over to be reunited with his father, who had come to the U.S. to try to get him back.

The raid--agents whisked the child out in the dark past protesters who had begun staging an almost nonstop vigil outside the home--was the most dramatic moment in the seven-month Elian saga.

The child was plucked from the ocean off Florida on Nov. 25, 1999, after surviving a disastrous voyage from Cuba in which his mother and 10 other people died.

He became a poster child for both Miami exiles, who wanted to keep him in the United States, and Castro, who wanted him back. The U.S. government decided early in the tug of war that the father’s wish to have the child back in Cuba should be respected, but the case dragged its way up to the Supreme Court.

The issue divided Miami--with the city’s Cuban and non-Cuban population largely baffled by each other’s point of view--and mesmerized the rest of the country as a sad family soap opera, dramatized by four decades of hostilities between Castro and the exile community.