Afierce tempest arose in 1999 about a controversial other, a boy named Elián González, who had washed ashore. The drama was intense, day after day, as the Clinton administration, Cuba, and the anti-Castro Cubans conveyed their passions to millions of Americans watching on television from late 1999 until June 2000. More than ever, the irrational wrath of the anti-Castro exiles was on full display across the United States. The tide of opinion rolled heavily against the exiles as the weeks wore on. The US government stood firmly on the side of the same Cuban government that it refused to recognize. Elián González, seven years old, was returned to his father in Cuba after being treated to the delights of Disneyland by his exile great-uncle. Shortly afterwards, Vice president Al Gore, who broke for cold political reasons with his own president to support the Miami exiles in the Elián controversy, lost the presidency anyway in the 2000 election in Florida, which involved massive irregularities by the Republican Party and their new right-wing Cuban American allies.
It was one of the more abnormal episodes in the long history of the American-Cuban dysfunctional relationship. As often before, Ricardo Alarcón was at the center of things, yet unable to play any open diplomatic role. When it ended, Ricardo stood at José Martí International Airport to welcome Elián González home, ninety miles from the scene of drama.
Little Elián and two other Cubans had survived the horrific drowning of his mother, Elizabeth Brotons, and eleven others trying to float to Miami where they could automatically receive permanent legal status in the United States. It is assumed in the United States, of course, that the balseros (rafters) are in flight from communist tyranny when in fact they also resemble the hundreds who die every year trying to illegally cross the Sonoran Desert for jobs cleaning American yards and toilets. America’s policy of “saving” little ones from communism, in the case of Cuba, began with the “Peter Pan” exodus of 1960–1962 when the Catholic Church arranged for fourteen thousand youngsters, under the age of sixteen, to be flown out of Cuba, leaving their parents behind, in order to protect the children from communist “indoctrination.” Naturally, the exiles, Brothers to the Rescue, Florida right-wingers, and the Republican Party saw another chance to revive the narrative of Peter Pan in the Elián González case. They turned out to be as wrong about Elián as they were about the reality of modern Cuba.
Elián’s mother was estranged from his father, Juan Miguel, who worked as a waiter in a Veradero tourist center. After the drowning, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) proclaimed Elián a “child victim” of Castro’s regime, a story that soon crumbled when Juan Miguel held a press conference demanding that Elián be returned to him, as justified by both US and Cuban law. The Miami relatives orchestrated press conferences of their own, even taking Elián off to Disneyland as an example of the American Way of Life.
RICARDO: Gregory Craig became [Juan] Miguel González’s lawyer. He was very close to the Clintons, a student activist in the sixties who rose to be presidential assistant and White House counsel under Clinton, whom he defended against impeachment, and in the same capacity he also served for one year under Obama.
When Greg came here he was at a big law firm with many connections. He was suggested to us by the National Council of Churches’ Joan Campbell Brown. He came several times, and met with us for hours and again for hours more by phone. He took a very good position as both a lawyer and as a human being.
After weeks of internal discussion, the US immigration service under Doris Meissner ruled in favor of Juan Miguel’s rights as a father. But the anti-Castro relatives immediately appealed and a Florida court ruled that Elián could stay with the Florida family faction during the appeal. Meissner was a Clinton liberal whose husband Chuck, assistant secretary of commerce for international economic policy, was killed in a freak plane crash during the Irish peace process. (I had worked as a temporary adviser to Chuck Meissner during that period.) In addition to Meissner and Craig, attorney general Janet Reno, a former Florida prosecutor, was directing the legal strategy through her deputy, Eric Holder. Theirs was a determined team who knew what they were up against. The US administration’s tough position came as something of a surprise, given Clinton’s connections to the Miami Cuban Right. Politically, the more expedient move might have been to keep Elián with his Miami exile relatives, though that would have been a violation of US law. Was Clinton attempting to do the right thing after having squandered the possibilities of rapprochement during his eight years? The answer may never be known.
RICARDO: There was a very difficult and aggressive lady in the US Interests Section in Havana, Vicki Huddleston. Wendy Sherman1 was our secret channel to Madeline Albright.
It became very personal for Greg Craig, I think. Greg is very much a family man, so it was not just a legal job but also a case where he was motivated personally.
The Miami Cubans played it very stupidly. It was a moment when the completely different perceptions of the Cuban Right and the American mentality were most clearly shown. They were saying they were the “real Americans” but they were un-American. It was one of the most publicized cases of child abuse in history.
I used to be friends with Diane Sawyer in New York. She came down here, then went to Miami, and had a camera interview with Elián when he said he wanted to stay in Miami. The boy was six years old. She should have been sued, and the network too, because you cannot do that to a little boy. Both Greg and I had been in touch with her hoping she would do something in a better direction, but she didn’t.
Ricardo received many urgent messages from US officials while staying in the Havana hospital with his wife Margarita.
RICARDO: One time Greg called me and said, “Listen, I have a message from Doris Meissner. It is very sensitive. She wants to ask you what is the blood type of Elián.” Imagine what goes through the mind! Why is Doris Meissner interested in Elián’s blood type? Did they want us to believe they were going to do something dangerous to recover the child? Another time Greg called at night to relate a conversation with Eric Holder. He’d had a strong discussion with Eric Holder. Juan Miguel was getting desperate, he wanted to go to Miami personally. Greg said he would go with him if he decided to go. What finally happened? Janet Reno made a strange proposal to have both families living more or less in the same quarters in a complex in Miami. When Juan Miguel was told this he was very angry, and I am sure the Miami groups didn’t like it either.
That night Greg transmitted to Holder how angry Miguel was. Holder said something like, “It’s easy to swim outside the swimming pool.” Then he asked, “Where will you be tonight?” So then Greg called me to say something might happen and to ask where would I be. At the hospital with my wife, I told him. I was sleeping with the TV on CNN, and in the middle of the night Greg called again and asked, “Are you watching CNN?”
Suddenly the Miami Cubans were interrupted by an FBI SWAT team, not from Miami but from the federal government, who were taking over houses, a classic secret operation that could have led to some injury, which is why Doris wanted to know Elián’s blood type. It made us stand still. But it turned out to be an excellent operation to return Elián. Can you imagine what might have happened?
Greg Craig was representing Juan Miguel in a custody case over his son, not the Cuban government, and he advised Juan Miguel of that fact. The Justice Department was moving slowly, attempting to placate the Cuban relatives, which proved impossible. The department even wanted to draw in a team of psychiatrists for family counseling. When Craig complained about the dilatory and unnecessary tactic, it was Ricardo who counseled patience, even noting that the Cubans would have done the same thing if the situation were reversed. In the event, the three shrinks met for hours in Miami with Juan Miguel and his wife, and concluded that they constituted a “wonderful little family,” according to an individual close to the process.
One evening in Washington, Juan Miguel came to dinner at Hickory Hill, the home of Ethel Kennedy. This was the very place where Bobby, Ethel, and family sheltered the anti-Castro exiles in the early sixties, and where angry exiles once broke in to retrieve their banner from the Bay of Pigs debacle. The dinner for Juan Miguel started very formally, but ended with everyone singing around the table.2 Times had changed.
At a key moment in the drama, Craig drove Juan Miguel to the Justice Department building for a direct meeting with Janet Reno. The meeting was closed. Juan Miguel was advised by Greg to tell Reno what he truly wanted to do. If Juan Miguel’s answer was to become an American citizen, the naturalization process would have been immediate. The INS general counsel was waiting in the building. Or, if Juan Miguel wished to take Elián back to Cuba, that would be arranged immediately as well.
The Justice Department premise apparently was that anyone in their right mind would accept a hero’s welcome in America and turn their back on Cuba. Two members of Congress were called in to the proceedings to repeat the offer to Juan Miguel. It would have been simple for Miguel to choose America. He was “completely independent,” Ricardo said. Juan Miguel wasn’t a Cuban ballplayer seeking to make millions, nor a dissident fleeing prison. He was a father of a traumatized child, who wanted to take his son home. For one of the Americans attending, however, it was astonishing “that Cuba had become so demonized that it was impossible to believe anyone would want to raise his son there.” So far from Disneyland.
After the SWAT raid, Elián and Juan Miguel were placed on a plane from Andrews Air Force base and flown to Havana, where a relieved Ricardo met them. And there they live today, with Elián now twenty-one years old, a Cuban in his own country.3 When the last of the Five returned, Elián took part as an honored guest at their welcoming.
What is most telling about this agonizing story is how the US government thought it was necessary to circumvent their own FBI agents in Miami, not to mention the administration’s longtime allies in the Cuban exile community. Like the segregated South in the Kennedy years, federal officials were forced to realize that on the issue of Cuba, South Florida was not part of the United States.
Poor Al Gore. He was the biggest casualty of the Cuban Right’s sabotage of the November election. The Miami Cubans’ central role in subverting the Florida electoral process that year is mainly forgotten. Incredibly, Gore had supported them on keeping Elián in Florida, but it didn’t matter. According to Ann Louise Bardach’s detailed account, the exiles were carrying out their payback against the Clinton administration’s return of Elián to Cuba.4
Gore won the vote in Miami-Dade County that night, though by a close margin of thirty-nine thousand votes. Bush won Florida overall by 537 votes, triggering a recount. Fifteen days later, the Miami-Dade recount still was proceeding, with a green light from the Florida Supreme Court, before the local canvassing board abruptly cancelled its review. One member of the three-member board, judge Myriam Lehr, switched her vote in favor of closing down the recount. Judge Lehr was represented by the same political consultant, Armando Gutiérrez, who was the aggressive public relations spokesman for the Miami relatives of Elián González.5 Cuban exile US representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart6 took to the radio accusing Gore of trying to steal the election.7 Only hours later, the election board’s offices were taken over by a mob whose participants included Republican staffers and furious Cuban exiles.8 The long struggle to force democracy on Cuba was forcing the end of democracy that day in Florida and, it would turn out, in America.
The story becomes truly venal if one explores the Bush dynasty’s knotty Florida connections to Cuban exiles and mobsters from the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion right up to the 1990 election. Of course, the pre-Bush history was long and treacherous; for example, a June 20, 1972, CIA memo noted the need to cover up the Cuban exiles’ role in the Watergate burglary:
Unumb9 noted a number of inquiries from the press with respect to the Cuban Americans involved in the bugging attempt at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and their alleged involvement in the Bay of Pigs, etc. The Director asked that such inquiries be met with an explanation that we are not prepared to be helpful on this matter.10
The first President Bush was the CIA director who covered up the Cuban exiles’ murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in 1976, falsely suggesting to the media that a leftist conspiracy was to blame.11 When the same Bush became Rea-gan’s vice-presidential running mate in 1980, Jeb Bush moved to Miami where “the cachet of being the vice president’s son quickly attracted the support of Miami exiles, who guided him into South Florida’s lucrative commercial real estate market.”12 Then Jeb became a leasing agent for, and later partner with, a conservative Cuban American developer, Armando Codina. In 1984 Jeb Bush was Dade County’s Republican Party chairman, closely tied to Camilo Padreda, a former intelligence officer under Batista, who became the GOP finance chairman.13 In 1987, after being appointed Florida secretary of commerce, Jeb managed the congressional campaign of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and his father George declared, “I am certain in my heart that I will be the first American president to step on the soil of a free and independent Cuba.” Jeb’s lobbying was credited with his father George releasing Orlando Bosch from prison in 1990 and subsequently granting him residency.14 Meanwhile, exile violence in Miami reached its peak levels during the Reagan-Bush years.15 The publication office of Ricardo’s friend Max Lesnik, for example, was bombed eleven times.16
When the second Bush president took office, the Republican-exile incest continued. The Cuban who had taken Elián to Disney World, Mel Martínez, was named US housing secretary, while several others who worked on the 2000 Florida recount reaped political rewards. Since the Cuban exiles were directly engaged in the illegal Iran-Contra program, everyone was pleased when Elliott Abrams, convicted of withholding information from Congress, joined Bush’s National Security Council. Abrams, a fixture in neoconservative circles, took over the new portfolio of “democracy promotion.” John Negroponte, also enmeshed in Iran-Contra, was UN ambassador; Roger Noriega, former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, became ambassador to the OAS; Emilio González, a Cuban exile military officer, turned up to head the Cuba desk at the White House; José Cardenas of CANF took a State Department post. Bardach does a thorough job of describing how the Bush executive branch was “stockpiled” with Cuban hard-liners.17 The second Bush refused to extradite Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela, where he faced charges for the 1976 bombing of the Cubana airliner.
Elections really matter. That was the lesson the Cuban Right took to heart in “winning” the 2000 election for Bush, once again stopping a drift toward rapprochement with every tool at their disposal. One Cuban exile leader told the Miami Herald that “if it wasn’t for Elián, George Bush would not have won the presidency.”18 As for Al Gore, critics continue to wonder why the Democratic Party leaders exhibited less passion and aggression than the angry Cubans. The New York Times and Miami Herald both concluded that Gore would have won Florida—by a narrow margin—if every vote intended for Gore had been counted. But Gore’s decision not to fight for a statewide recount was fatal. Perhaps his lifelong adherence to the proper functioning of institutions, assuring their stability and continuity, was a handicap when confronted by Cuban exiles obsessed with their “rights” to shoot, sabotage, bomb, and rig elections. In the end Gore was rejected by the very Cubans to whom he had pandered.
RICARDO: Would Gore have been better? Yes, on many other issues. But he would have continued all that Torricelli and Helms-Burton stuff. He was more or less moving in the conservative direction he demonstrated in the Elián matter.
The tragedy of US policy was partly that it sheltered exiles waging war illegally from American soil. That war featured paramilitary groups like Alpha 66, plots to assassinate Fidel, rocket attacks on the United Nations building, the bombing of a civilian Cuban airliner with seventy-three aboard, bombings of hotels and restaurants in Havana, countless acts of violence in Miami, the assassination of a Chilean diplomat in Washington, D.C., assisting the terrorist network known as Condor in Latin America and serving as mercenaries for the CIA in the Angolan and Nicaragua wars. With the CIA’s help, they tried to infect Cuba’s pig population with swine flu. They blew up offices of Air Canada, Air France, and Japan Airlines. They demanded haven for known terrorists like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada-Carriles. (Bosch was accused of thirty terrorist operations by the Bush Justice Department, yet the president expedited his release from prison and in 1992 granted him American residency.)19
While they were serving as mercenaries in US foreign policy, the Cuban exiles became a cancer on democracy in America. Cuban exiles played a key role in the 1972 Watergate break-in. They turned Miami into a city of crime and corruption; in 1992, Human Rights Watch, a group usually devoted to human rights abroad, chose to list the city of Miami and its police department as responsible for permitting a climate of violence and repression by the Cuban exile community’s extremists.20 They once forced Nelson Mandela to curtail a visit to Miami where he was scheduled to receive an award.21 So it was consistent with fifty years of past behavior that they would do everything possible to deny the presidency to Al Gore. Unable to defeat Fidel Castro, they could obstruct an election in America which Gore won by 500,000 votes.