HOMENATION
INDICATORS
Tax Dollars, Child Heath,
Internet Use and More
CAMPAIGN 2000
Pump Up the Volume
Who Gets the 'A'
in Education?
What They Think of
Each Other
WORKSHEET:
The Big Issues:
A Summary
CIVIL RIGHTS
The Ghosts of Alabama
SOCIETY
Aye, Aye, Ma'am
SCIENCE
The Race Is Over
BUSINESS
Grounds For Appeal
WORLD
GLOBAL ECONOMY
The New Radicals
MIDDLE EAST
Arafat's Long Journey
After the Lion
RUSSIA
The Acid-Bath Solution
WORKSHEET:
The Role of the President:
A Comparison
ASIA
The Remaking of
a Dictator
Taiwan Takes a Stand
AFRICA
When the Peace
Cannot Be Kept
LATIN AMERICA
The Bionic Candidate
Can One Boy
Change Policy?
WORKSHEET:
Deciding Elián's Fate
TECHNOLOGY
Attack of the
Love Bug
Current Events in Review
Answers
LATIN AMERICA
By TIM PADGETT
As Elián González’s grandmas informed us this year, their clan sometimes displays affection by nibbling on each other. So when Elián’s grandfather Juan González scooped the boy into his arms last week at Havana’s José Marti Airport, he kissed him and joyfully urged him, “Bite my ear, hard!” Elián shyly buried his head in Juan’s neck, then revealed to his Cuban kin why he couldn’t chomp on his abuelo’s lobe: he had lost his two front baby teeth during the final weeks of his seven-month-long stay in the U.S.
But Fidel Castro is much more concerned with what the world-famous six-year-old acquired in the U.S.—symbolized by the black suede Pokémon chain Elián wore when he arrived from Washington, a capitalist contrast to the Young Communist Pioneer scarves that dozens of his shouting, flag-waving Cuban classmates donned to greet him. In a calculated show of political restraint, Castro didn’t come to the airport to hail the pint-size icon. Instead, he broadcast a Cuban animated cartoon character to welcome Elián on national television—Elpidio Valdés, the patriotic, machete-swinging colonel who tells children to eat their vegetables, brush their teeth, and recently exhorted them to march against Elián’s imperialist “Miami kidnappers.” It was a cuddlier reminder of the dour communiqué Havana issued earlier in the week, promising that Elián would become a “model child.”
The odyssey of Elián supposedly ended when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Miami Cuban exile lobby’s bid to win political asylum for him; and the boy and his father Juan Miguel González, who had gone to the U.S. to claim him, were free to go home. Cubans like architect Ernesto Pasalagua, 67, called Elián’s return “a great victory, just like the Bay of Pigs.” But this custody saga has proved to be more than an extended tit for tat. Just as Elián’s young mind will now struggle to reconcile the polarized worlds of Pikachu and Elpidio, he may have forced post-cold war politics to do the same. That’s largely because Elián showed many Americans that not everyone in Cuba wears a beard, fatigues and an anti-gringo scowl.
Meanwhile, has Elián helped change U.S. policy? The U.S. Congress struck a deal to allow food and medicine sales to Cuba last week. However, it is fettered by embargo conditions, such as a ban on U.S. financing of Havana’s purchases. Still it marks a sea change on Capitol Hill: before Elián washed ashore, that bill and measures like it were a Beltway laughingstock. Post-Elián, says Angelo Fuster, a Cuban-American business consultant who favors ending the embargo, “the inflated myth of the Cuban exiles’ political power has been punctured.” The setbacks have started raining down on Miami. A U.S. federal court, for example, upheld the Administration’s policy of sending back Cuban rafters intercepted at sea.
The question is whether the Elián effect will soften the Castro dictatorship. Not much in the short term. Warning that Washington is still Cuba’s bitter foe, Castro scorned the anti-embargo bill as a paltry gesture, and dissidents fear he’ll use his Elián victory as a ticket for a summer crackdown. But Castro knows the Elián affair let Cubans see that not everyone in the U.S. is a right-wing Miami exile. So much of Castro’s power resides in their distrust of los Yanquis. Elián may also have punctured that.
Questions
1. How was Elián González’s custody battle
resolved? What reactions did this resolution cause?
2. What policy changes has Elián’s case triggered?