Cubans get day in court over shipwreck boy

By Abby Goodnough

January 29, 2005
Elian Gonzalez back in Cuba in 2000.

Elian Gonzalez back in Cuba in 2000.
Photo: Reuters

The moment - 5.14 am on April 22, 2000 - remains as vivid to them as yesterday. Armanda Santos was getting her daughter a drink in the pre-dawn quiet of their kitchen. Carmen Valdes was praying the rosary. Leslie Alvarez was eating pizza. Madeleine Peraza was holding vigil with friends in her living room.

The calm - and for years to come, they said, their wellbeing - was shattered when US federal agents with long guns descended on NW Second Street in Little Havana, swarming through a small white house and snatching a boy named Elian Gonzalez. Now, almost five years after the United States Government seized Elian from his great-uncle's home and returned him to his father in Cuba, neighbours and others who witnessed the three-minute raid are getting their day in court.

In a civil trial that began this week here, 13 plaintiffs are seeking up to $US250,000 ($A322,700) each in damages, alleging that agents from the Immigration and Naturalisation Service unnecessarily sprayed them with tear gas at close range, shoved, swore at and traumatised them in their zeal to remove Elian without a struggle. Government witnesses have testified that the officers used only appropriate and necessary force as they pressed through furious protesters to reach Elian.

Though the world - even most of Miami - has put the Elian affair in the past, the plaintiffs say they relive it constantly. In court evidence this week they described being sprayed in the face with tear gas and swore that they still suffered depression, anxiety and sleeplessness.

"I could not breathe, my face was burning," said Ms Alvarez, who did not live in the street but had gone there that morning, she said, to show support for the Gonzalez family. "I thought I was going to die, and something has remained with me."

Several of the plaintiffs said they still gathered at barbecues, in one another's kitchens or in front of Casa Elian, as it is known here, to recall how Elian, then 6, entered and departed their lives. He was found floating alone on an inner tube in the sea off Florida in late November 1999, after his mother and 10 others drowned as they tried to cross from Cuba.

I could not breathe, my face was burning. I thought I was going to die."
Leslie Alvarez

His great-uncle in Miami, Lazaro Gonzalez, took him in, but Elian became an international obsession - the subject of a political tug of war between Fidel Castro, who demanded the boy's return to his father in Cuba, and his relatives and other Cuban exiles here, who said returning him would be crushing to democracy. Many of the family's supporters, including Ms Alvarez and Ms Valdes, had gathered that morning behind barricades the police had erected outside the Gonzalez house. Others, including neighbours such as Ms Peraza and Ms Santos, had stayed up all night in their houses waiting for the showdown they heard was coming, though they had no idea when or in what form.

Nancy Canizares, another plaintiff, said she was sitting in a chair on the footpath behind the Gonzalez home when agents jumped from a van and shouted: "Don't move, don't move, I'll kill you." She said they forced her to lie face-down on the ground with her legs spread, even after she told them she was in pain.

Elian Gonzalez, now 11, is living a cloistered but still highly publicised life with his father, Juan Miguel, in the small town of Cardenas, Cuba. Children across the island celebrate his birth each December. He appears at political rallies with President Castro and is said to have bodyguards who escort him to and from school.

- New York Times