A Big Battle For A Little Boy

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He was crying in the boat when the fishermen picked him up, half crazy from his loss, and the sharks were still circling the boat. --Ernest Hemingway, On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter, 1936

It is maybe the oldest story we know about the waters off Cuba, and certainly the most familiar. A man fighting the sea and wresting from it a great victory: his honor. But Hemingway's old man had 80 years to prepare for his high-seas battle.

So there was something peculiarly awful about watching a parallel story of water, fate and power play itself out mercilessly upon a boy no more prepared for tragedy than any other six-year-old. Elian Gonzalez was dazed when fishermen picked him up on Thanksgiving Day, lashed atop an inner tube in the Atlantic off Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He too was half crazy--from dehydration, from the loss of his mother, from watching his other companions, after the small boat that had brought them from Cuba sank in heavy seas, slip one by one into the deep. And the sharks--TV news crews, Cuban-American activists, Fidel Castro, Jesse Helms and other U.S. politicians--were just beginning to circle.

In the six weeks since Elian was delivered like some kind of Thanksgiving gift by two Florida cousins out trolling for dolphinfish, the outline of his 2 1/2 days on the blue water has been colored in with horrible detail. There have been tales of his boatmates who, when they realized their loved ones had drowned in the night, stopped treading water and went to join them. And hints of how Elian's mother Elizabet, 29, a woman with deep, happy eyes and a proud Latin gait, bound him to that inner tube even as she fought to stay alive. And even a coroner's description of how Elian's tube trailed behind it the body of 61-year-old Merida Barrios, who had been strangled by one of the raft ropes, and floated, like bait, yards from Elian.

What must this small boy, a child who loves nothing more than making and flying kites in the warm Cuban brisa, have thought during his hours on the water? And later, as he paraded before the world on television--at Disney World, in school, playing "rescue pilot" with his cousins in the backyard--it seemed possible to read everything, anything, in his deep eyes: fear, joy, courage.

He has needed it all. If his sea journey was difficult, his landfall has been little easier. Onshore, Elian has been both cradled and buffeted by the strongest emotion we have, the tenderness of parents toward children in trouble--their own and anyone else's. We sympathize with his father, who wants Elian returned home to Cuba. But then we remember that Elian's mother drowned trying to get him to freedom. And we're disgusted with both Castro and the anti-Castro zealots in Miami who are shamelessly using Elian and his father as fresh draftees in their tiresome feud.