All About Elian
Re Howard Rosenberg’s “Elian: Through the Looking Glass” (Feb. 5):
One point Rosenberg seems to miss completely is that the media created the feeding frenzy in the first place around the Miami relatives who were probably just trying to do what they thought was best for their traumatized nephew.
But worse still is the fact that he uncritically buys into all or many of the mischaracterizations of Elian’s U.S. relatives and the Cuban American community that the media here cooked up to create a simplistic situation that the public could more easily swallow.
Many Cubans living here who I’ve spoken with, whether they agree on the custody matter of Elian (and, yes, Cuban Americans are as quarrelsome politically as any other people, with a passion for disagreement approximating that of Israelis), seem to feel that Americans who have not lived through the situation in Cuba on a daily basis as common people (and not as invited privileged guests or “cultural tourists” of the government) will never understand the degradation, duplicity, hopelessness and despair that Cubans have lived with for the past 40 years of Castro’s despotic and oppressive rule.
It must make some in Cuba hoping to escape wish there was some other country instead, reachable by ocean current, to which they could risk their lives on a raft.
JUAN GOMEZ
Pasadena
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Remember sitting in those barber chairs as a kid and seeing your image duplicated back to infinity in the row of mirrors mounted on the wall? I admire Rosenberg’s honest and skeptical approach to analyzing TV news and entertainment programs, but at what point on the time continuum does coverage of a media “story,” however shallow, fabricated or ephemeral, end?
Rosenberg assures us that “the great Elian watch has been downsized to a blurry footnote,” and then within the context of reviewing Ofra Bikel’s “Frontline” documentary on this tragedy, he takes out his own whip and beats this dead horse of a story with an adroit summary of all its relevant details.
Now see what you’ve done! Rosenberg and Bikel have got everyone talking about Elian again!
JIM VALENTINE
Woodland Hills