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DRIVING ALONG
Flagler Street, which bisects Miami, you know you’ve reached Little Havana
when the generic signs of American commercialism — supermarkets and strip
malls — suddenly blend together with local Cuban-American funeral homes;
jewelry stores and neighborhood bodegas such as Mi Ja Ruco Market, where a
photograph of Elian is wedged under the counter-top glass. It is easy here to run into people like Rosa Vasquez, who stood outside the Gonzalez home on Sunday night, commiserating with neighbors about the government raid. Vasquez, who said she came to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boat lift, said she had been outside the home every night for the past five months — except Friday, the night before the fateful raid, when INS agents seized the boy. She is afraid, she said, because she thinks her sons, ages 8 and 10, believe someone will come for them in the same manner — and she doesn’t want them to see any more photos like the one of Elian and the armed agent. “I don’t want to see it anymore,” chimed in her 10-year-old. |
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Hers is a poignant tale — with perhaps a touch of hyperbole mixed
in. That’s pretty much par for the course here in Little Havana, where the
Red Threat lives on in people’s minds as a real threat. The 50,000 or so
residents of this Cuban-American community often focus much of their
attention on a homeland they remember longingly and relatives who remain
90 miles across the sea. POTENT IMAGERY The raid just before Easter offered potent imagery to the largely Catholic exile community: Elian as a Christ child-like figure of sacrifice; Marisleysis Gonzalez, Elian’s adoptive mother during these five months, as a tragic corollary to the Virgin Mary, losing a son to a greater cause. These oft-repeated metaphors are compounded by two other ubiquitous images: The Bad Photograph, of Elian confronted by an armed federal agent; and The Worse Photograph, of Elian in the arms of his father, which many in the community continue to speculate was doctored. |
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It is impossible
to go more than a block or two in the neighborhood without seeing one or
both of those images. And worse, for some, is that still photographs are
now all they see of Elian, who once seemed to be living a “Truman Show”
existence on Miami TV. “People are very concerned right now,” activist Ramon Saul Sanchez told MSNBC.com. “They haven’t seen the child on TV.” Speaking at the studios of WWFE radio, a Spanish-language station in the heart of Little Havana, Sanchez still bears the marks from his attempt Saturday to get in the way of federal agents. The leader of the Miami-based, anti-Castro Democracy Movement said the furor over Elian is the culmination of built-up rage of decades. “You have to have lived the experience of the exile community being condemned to oppression” since the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, he said. “Forty-one years of seeing many children arrive on these shores, many of them dead. And then you have Elian.” RAGE AT RENO, CLINTON To many, the federal raid on the Miami home was a betrayal by the Clinton administration and by native Miami daughter Attorney General Janet Reno. Residents and local radio are full of vitriol. “They killed her,” Rodriguez said, “just like they’re going to kill [Elian].” Sunday night, Anais Acuna wandered around the home carrying a two-foot statue of the Virgin Mary and proselytizing about Elian, abortion and why Pat Buchanan is the only choice for president. Her presence is a sign of the surreal collision of Cold War-era politics, Catholic religiosity, political conservatism and Cuban pride that exist in Little Havana. But not all conservatives in Miami are on the side of Elian’s Miami relatives. Many non-Cubans are outraged that the Gonzalez family dragged out the conflict for so long. On English-language talk radio, invective as harsh as the Cuban rhetoric is being tossed around, with the Gonzalez family in Miami the primary targets. “They make up the law,” said one announcer on WQAM, “they make up the stories, they lie, they twist.” Responds a caller: “These people are more like communists than the communists.” ‘NO RELIGION, NO POLITICS’ And many in Miami would rather not talk about Elian at all. A few miles east of Little Havana, the streets of South Beach were full Sunday night of young, sleek men and beautiful, skimpily-dressed women. If there is any discontent about Elian’s plight, it isn’t visible. |
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“We call him
Jesus around here,” said Kenneth Hudson, with a smirk. A bartender at the
Breakwater Café, Hudson said during these past months, he had only
witnessed one mention of Elian: He threw out one patron who was discussing
the case several days before. “I have two rules about the bar,” he explains. “No religion, no politics.” It is an apt description of the rulebook not only in South Beach but for much of Miami. While local politics is dominated by Cuban influence, many other residents are dismissive of the Elian saga. Some consider it to be the latest in a long and dramatic line of anti-Castro spectacles — such as Sanchez’s own 1998 attempt to sail a boat to Cuba. Others are upset that the residents of Little Havana are casting the city in such a light. The total Cuban population in Miami is estimated about 800,000 — in a metropolitan area of 3.6 million — and their influence is significant. As one of the owners of the Breakwater, joining Hudson behind the bar, explains: “They’re a small percentage of the population, but they’re very vocal.” As for their thoughts on Elian’s fate, Hudson thinks for a moment. “Personally,” he says, “I’m a father, so I think he should have gone home a long time ago.” But that’s about as far as the discussion of Elian goes on this corner of South Beach. The case has had only one other effect on the Breakwater, jokes Hudson: “We changed the ‘Cuba libre’ to an ‘Elian libre.’ ” |
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Cuban exiles stage
general strike for Elian
