A Secret Split Among Miami’s Cuban Exiles

Miami’s Cuban exile community appeared united as it vowed to prevent Elian Gonzalez from returning to his father on the Communist island. Large crowds kept a vigil outside the Miami home of his U.S. relatives. Hundreds of exiles prayed for God to save the 6-year-old from the grasp of Cuban President Fidel Castro. The Miami relatives showered him with attention, claiming that if anyone really did love him, they would want him to stay in the United States.

But a new “Frontline” documentary coolly exposes the dissension--of those who believed that the familial bond superseded politics--that was kept out of public view and contained within the Cuban American community during the seven-month ordeal.

“Saving Elian” may not be received well by South Florida’s most powerful bloc when it premieres nationally on PBS on Tuesday night, but it provides a critical insight into the highly charged relationship between Cuba and the United States. Producer Ofra Bikel made numerous attempts to reach the Miami relatives, wanting to include their perspective in the documentary, but “they wouldn’t even answer my calls.”

“[Elian] became very quickly a confrontation that fed into a 40-year struggle between Cuban exiles in Miami and Fidel Castro,” Lisandro Perez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, tells the camera.

Bikel, an Israeli, has worked for “Frontline” for nearly 25 years. This past decade she focused on the U.S. justice system, including a three-part series on sexual abuse at a North Carolina day-care center that began in 1991 with “Innocence Lost.”

Bikel examined the potential to manipulate a child’s testimony, even when his or her accounts contradicted physical evidence. The series, which helped free all seven defendants, garnered her several awards, including an Emmy, two DuPont-Columbia Silver Batons and the Grand Prize at the 1994 Banff International Television Festival.

To hear her tell it, she was ready to take a respite from reporting on heartbreaking children’s issues. But when “Frontline” executives reached Bikel she initially thought “Saving Elian” would be a simple, compact piece about the unique journey of a child rescued at sea over Thanksgiving weekend in 1999. She went to Cuba last winter, about four months after his rescue, to locate his family.

“Everybody I met--even when they whispered that they themselves wanted to leave the island--they wanted the boy back in Cuba. Everyone thought the child belonged with his father,” she said. “The more nuanced and unclear story was actually in Miami.”

In Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, the epicenter for Cuban exiles, Bikel spent hours with exiles in front of Elian’s temporary home, and then left to spend time with some “Pedro Panners.” These were some of the 14,000 Cuban children put on U.S.-bound planes in the early 1960s by parents who wanted them to escape the revolution. Operation Pedro Pan (Peter Pan) was run by Father Bryan Walsh, a local hero whom Bikel captures celebrating his 70th birthday with a group of middle-aged Pedro Panners.

“But if we expected this group of successful immigrants to support Elian’s Miami relatives,” Bikel says in a voice-over, “we were surprised by their private reactions.”

Even though many of them are deeply connected to Little Havana’s main artery, Calle Ocho (8th Street), they confided individually to Bikel that Elian should be returned to his father. Bikel assembled the group in front of her camera and told them she had learned a surprising fact: They all thought Elian should go home, but they were all too guarded to admit it in public.

“All along, I thought if I walked down south of 8th Street and said [that], I would have been lynched,” said Frank Avellant, a Pedro Pan child.

Bikel found the fear emblematic of the exile culture in South Florida.

“This is the only show that I’ve ever done where people said, ‘I’d love to talk to you, but I can’t on camera. . . . We live here. You wouldn’t understand,’ ” Bikel said. “More people in Miami said it than said it in Cuba.”

What will surely offend some Cuban exiles is Bikel’s psychological analysis of the community. In “Saving Elian,” she implies that much of the intensity about Elian in Miami was really a collective projection of grief by a community that has never recovered from its traumatic departure from Cuba years ago.

“If the United States is willing to send the boy back, the United States is treating Cuba as any other country,” Bikel said. “It totally negates the exiles’ fight.”

After “Saving Elian” airs on Miami’s WPBT-TV, the public television station will run a special edition of its weekly public affairs program, “Issues.”

Bikel will participate in an online chat at the same time, but she won’t appear during the live one-hour round-table discussion. Those who are scheduled to participate and take phone calls are Tom Fiedler, editorial pages editor of the Miami Herald; Alina Lambiet, state, national and foreign editor of the Sun-Sentinel; and Marvin Dunn, chair of psychology at Florida International University. The station will beam in by satellite from Washington, D.C., Joe Garcia, director of the Cuban American National Foundation, and Marcela Sanchez, staff writer for the Washington Post who covers Latin American affairs.

* “Saving Elian” can be seen on “Frontline” on Tuesday night at 9 on KCET-TV and at 10 on KVCR-TV.