Elián González

Mike tells Sarah how a 5-year-old kid transformed a city, divided a political party and (maybe) determined a presidential election. Digressions include World War II, Clarence Darrow and something called "Like, News with Skeeter." Both co-hosts conclude that this episode is somehow an equal-parts mixture of Satanic Panic and Terri Schiavo.

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Transcript

Sarah: I mean, I feel like I never do anything mind blowing. I'm just like, did you know that this story is about a nice lady? I Just want us all to be sure there's a nice lady in this story.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About where we crack the crab shell of the headlines and extract the juicy empathy within. That was not a listener suggestion, which is why it's so fucking weird. 

Mike: I'm trying to see how far we can extending this metaphor of like the fibers and the innards and cleaning it. 

Sarah: Where you crack open something that you only saw within this hard shell. And then there's a whole lot of soft stuff and a whole lot of stuff that you can't get off of your hands very easily. 

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

Sarah: My name is Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer working on a book about the Satanic Panic 

Mike: And today we're talking about Elian Gonzalez.

Sarah: Yes. My sense of the story is that Elian Gonzalez was this little kid from Cuba whose parents were divorced, and his mom had decided to bring him to America. And they had tried to make the passage over water, and she had died, and then he was rescued and taken in. I think by her family or by his dad, but some family that he had in Miami. And that it was this protracted Citizen Ruth-like battle that sort of stopped being about the actual person pretty quickly. It was like, he has to stay in America where he can have a good life. No, he has to go back to Cuba. I feel like there is a sense of like, we can't let Castro get this kid back in a way.

Mike: Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Sarah: So this time I used to download onto my Compaq Presario, this flash animation thing called Like News with Skeeter. I remember that one of the images of this was that some arm of the American government basically came to take Elian Gonzalez out of his extended family's house in Florida. And they came in with all these guns. There was some connection that I believe Like News was Skeeter drew between that and the standoff at Waco where the ATF famously fired on a compound full of women and children. 

Mike: Those were both ordered by Janet Reno. 

Sarah: Right. And I remember that from Like News with Skeeter!  Yeah. That's what I remember 

Mike: What you're getting at, first of all, one of the things that I did not know before I started researching this is that it appears to be the only armed raid in a custody dispute. 

Sarah: Really? 

Mike: I mean, when you think about it, if a mother and a father are fighting over who gets to take little Billy, and they send in a SWAT team, that's pretty intense.

Sarah: It looked insane. 

Mike: But yeah. I mean, one thing that's interesting about this case, I have told you a number of times that I am worried that as we do more episodes of the show, we will begin to cram historical episodes into a ‘You’re Wrong About’ format. We'll really look for dumb little details that we got wrong and be like, “Wow, we were wrong!” But this is one where on the spectrum of wrongness, I don't know that we got this one all that wrong. There's actually a lot of interesting details. And it's what I think to be a fascinating story. And there's lots of elements that didn't appear until later on. But mostly what you just said, in the broad outlines, that's essentially true.

Sarah: I feel as if it was something to where there was at the time it was a very divisive thing. And I don't remember there being, I don't know, a sense that there was a correct stance on this.

Mike: Yeah. To me, the biggest ‘you're wrong about’ is that the legal issues involved were tricky. Because legally speaking, this is a pretty open and shut case, honestly. A lot of that has to do with the way that this case became a proxy fight between Cuba and the United States and basically Florida being a swing state. People knew before the 2000 election that it was going to be close.

Sarah: And that Jeb Bush doesn't know how to mind his own business. 

Mike:  So I want to start telling the story from the beginning and my guiding principle, whenever I'm looking for any article that's trying to tell this story all the way through, is I get nervous when it starts at the existence of the protagonists. All of the articles that are like, Elian Gonzalez was born December 3rd, 1993. I'm like, no. But then there's a couple of articles that are like in 1961, Cuba passed a little known law and I'm like, we're home. This is the one. So Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. He's set up a communist regime.

Sarah: Everything I know about Fidel Castro, I'm just going to be totally transparent, I basically know from the opening of Scarface. And that's also all the Spanish that I know. 

Mike: One thing that's interesting in this story, is it really reveals the way that we talk about developing countries. As somebody who has been very lucky to have spent a lot of time in Zimbabwe and Zambia and Uganda and these countries that we have these stereotypes of like, oh, they're backwards and they're uncivilized and blah, blah, blah. I think it's very important to realize the intense complexity of every single country on earth. That our country is complicated. Things happen for complicated reasons. All of that complexity is in other countries too. 

Sarah: Are you saying that other countries' issues can't be solved by Americans swooping in and observing things for 20 minutes and then making overarching and poorly thought through plans?

Mike: Well, that's the thing. I think it's dumb and simplistic to say, it's a totalitarian regime and everything sucks. And it's also some dumb and simplistic to say, oh, well, they're just like us and everything's basically the same and America does bad stuff too. I think both of those narratives are wrong. And so the context of what is going on in Cuba, every single thing, from the media to civil society, organizations, to unions, everything, is in some way linked to the state. 

Sarah: That's why Al Pacino had to leave.  

Mike: Elian’s father, his name is Juan Miguel, he works at a beach front resort. He's either a waiter or a cashier, depending on which account you read. Everybody's salary comes from the state. So if the Marriott or one of these other foreign hotel chains sets up a hotel in Cuba, the way it works is they pay the government, say $5 an hour for each one of its employees, and then the government pays the employees $1 an hour and keeps the rest. So the economy is a basket case at this point, because for most of the cold war, they've been getting huge subsidies from the Soviet Union. And of course, that all dries up after 89. And so, because everything is still really troubled there, they're getting waves of refugees leaving Cuba. So one of the things that's really interesting is that by the time Castro's reign ends, 10% of Cuba's population lives in other countries. 

Sarah: Castro has to feel embarrassed by this

Mike: It's actually interesting because first of all, the country relies on remittances. So people living abroad and sending money home is actually a huge part of its economy, like a  lot of developing countries.

Sarah: So Cuba is like a recently divorced mom who's had child support totally cut off. And it's just getting by on birthday cards from relatives.

Mike: The theory is also that it's a good way to tamp down domestic dissent. Because instead of dedicating their energy to overthrowing Castro, they're dedicating their energy to getting the fuck out, saving up for a plane ticket, or doing a boat trip or whatever. It actually works out pretty well that the loudest voices against Castro are able to leave, and that lets him retain his rule. 

One of the things that's really interesting about this story of course, which takes place in Miami, which is the center of the Cuban American expat community. 

Sarah: And which is like 90 miles away from Cuba, basically.

Mike: Yeah, Cuban American community in Miami fucking hates Castro. Because they are the dissidents. They are people who have been tortured, they are people who've had  their entire families killed. There are people who spent their lives in poverty because of the regime. I mean, these people hate Castro. 

Sarah: You have a population, not just of sort of a crosscut of Cubans, but of people who came to America specifically for the most part because of their dissidents. 

Mike: And are dedicated to overthrowing him. So the second most important national lobby after Israel at the time is the Cuban Lobby. Yeah. There's something called the Cuban American National Foundation, and this was one of the main lobbying groups that fought for the embargo and wanted to keep the embargo in place, because they wanted to choke off  Castro's regime.

Sarah: So it’s just nothing to Cuba and no goods to Cuba. 

Mike: It's very understandable, right? If you've been tortured by the regime, if you had to completely upend your life and move to this other country, yeah, you're going to hate the people that did that to you, right? 

One of the reasons why this is so important is because this is a swing state, because this is in Florida and there's so many Cuban Americans in Miami, they have almost always voted for Republicans because the Republicans are the anti-Cuba party. And so throughout the 1990s, Bill Clinton is deliberately courting the Cuban-American vote and he gets 35% of the Cuban-American vote in 1996, which enables him to win Florida. And so one of the reasons why the Elian story gets so big is that politicians are watching this and saying, an election is coming up in eight months. How can I use this? So anyway, we've got these anti Cuban, Cubans, we've got a country that is shedding people all over the place, but then what's really interesting is the reason why Elian’s mother comes to America has nothing to do with politics. 

So Elian was born to Juan Miguel Gonzalez and Elizabeth Gonzalez. They split up either right after he is born or right before he is born, depending on the account that you read. They had tried for years to get pregnant. She had seven miscarriages. The stress of trying to get pregnant is what broke apart the marriage. But he remains close. Elian comes over to his house after school most days, Elian sleeps over at his house. He remarries, he's got a steady job. He's a member of the communist party. His house has air conditioning, which is a sign of wealth in Cuba. And he has a house large enough for a spare room for Elian. 

Sarah: There's a lot that I would collaborate with politically to get air conditioning in a country where that's scarce. 

Mike: Seriously. And so shortly after Elian is born, Elizabeth meets Lazaro Muniero. Who is, as opposed to Juan Miguel, who's the super stable guy, Lazaro is all over the place. He's a bad-ass, he rides a motorcycle, he goes to the disco. He's involved in the black market. He's a shady sketchy guy. He's exactly the kind of bad boy that you can imagine someone in their twenties falling in love with.

Sarah: And also after you've been married to an obedient communist for however many years, it's a rebound guy.

Mike: So she’s got this new baby, she's got this new guy that she's really into. He starts having legal problems. He sneaks out of the country, but then he sneaks back. And he gets caught sneaking back to Cuba on a boat, and then he goes to jail. And then sort of once you go to jail in that country, I don't know if there's like an official list, but you're definitely not in good graces with the regime and they're watching you. 

And so Lazaro decides this isn't worth it. We need to get out of here. Elizabeth seems to like her life, Elion is five, he seems to like his life too, but she's really into this guy. And so she decides, I've known this guy for five years, it's worth it to me to follow this guy to America. 

Sarah: Right? So it starts off as being about relationships. It's not about asylum. It's not about her life and Cuba being intolerable, but just, well, this is where this relationship is going and might as well. 

Mike: These are the ways that people make these big political decisions is sort of in the intersection between the politics and the personal, right. That there is something going on where he's under threat from the regime, but then there's also something going on where she's super into him. It's both. Both are correct at the same time. Apparently, he knows smuggling people, he's in those worlds. And so they get on a boat on the 20th of November 1999. 

Sarah: How dangerous is the crossing known to be? If I'm contemplating doing this, what kind of scenarios am I thinking about?

Mike: Well the biggest thing to worry about actually isn't storms. The biggest thing is the coast guard. So at the time, America and Cuba have come to this weird compromise called Wet Foot, Dry Foot. 

Sarah: That sounds like a disease horses get. 

Mike: Yes. It's basically that if you make it to America, if you set foot on shore, you can stay. We're not going to ask you many questions. Yeah, it's fine. 

Sarah: So it's like, you can run into a church and claim sanctuary. 

Mike: Yeah. But then the wet foot part of it is that if we catch you in the water, if the coast guard catches you and they're of course patrolling those waters, then we either send you home or we might send you to a third country if you're going to claim asylum. So eventually they end up hitting a storm. The boat has basically as many people in it as feet, it is long. So it's like a 15’ boat with 15 people in it. Or it's a 13’ boat with 13 people in it.

Sarah: That has to be riding pretty low.

Mike:  It's pretty low. I mean, it doesn't take much and it has like a Evinrude motor, it's going like five miles an hour. And so a storm hits, the boat capsizes, and this is really heartbreaking. So Lazaro and Elizabeth both die. And it appears from what Elian says later that she died, tying him around a tire. There are two tires on the boat. The only things that are actually floating. Two adults get in one of the other tires and they are found miles away from where Elian is found. His mother finds a rope and physically ties to this tire and then she dies and just sets him off. And so he spends two days floating. 

Sarah: Oh my God! So it's absolutely incredible that he would survive. I mean he’s five.

Mike: It's like one in a million. The only reason he gets found is that these two random cousins go out fishing on Thanksgiving morning. They just like on a fluke, decide to do it. And they see this little dot in the distance and they're like, what's that? And they go over to them and it's this poor five-year-old kid who is super upset - as he would be - misses his mom, has no idea what's going on, clearly needs medical attention. 

And what's really fascinating is they have satellite phones or whatever, and they call the US Coast Guard and they won't give him over because they know about this wet foot, dry foot thing. So they're like, we're not giving you this kid, unless you promise us he can stay in the states. We're not going to give you this kid and you're going to send it back to Cuba. These two dudes, their names are Sam Ciancio and Denato Dalrymple are the coolest. 

Sarah: Those are amazing names. Like Ciancio and Dalrymple needs to be a show about Miami fishermen detectives.

Mike: And one of the things that's really amazing is Denato, one of the fishermen, stays in Elian’s life. So in that famous photo of the raid, we've got the cop pointing the gun at Elian and then Elian is being held by this guy who's also screaming. The guy is Denato Dalrymple. The guy is the fishermen that found him at this point, 7 months earlier.

Sarah: So this is also one of those stories where, where everyone who becomes not everyone, but where a lot of the people who become involved stay involved, it's this snowball rolling down a hill.

Mike: It's also another theme that we will come back to. It's also a story that tears apart families. So Sam, the other fishermen in the boat, and Denato don’t speak because Denato wants the kid to stay in America. And Sam wants him to go back to Cuba. That is the break, that is the disagreement that breaks up nine different families by the time we get to the end of the story, it's fascinating. 

So anyway, these guys find him. The coast guard promises they will take him straight to a hospital, he's eligible for asylum because he needs medical care. So that counts as ‘dry foot’. So they take him to a hospital. Eventually Elian’s family finds out. So he has two great uncles, the brothers of his grandfather, who live in Miami, and they find out about it. They come and they pick them up and they take him back to the house. And this is another weird thing about this story, that Elian’s father was one of seven children and five of them have moved to the United States. He's a devoted communist. He loves Cuba. He likes living in Cuba. He has it pretty good. But his family completely disagree with his decision, and they ideologically are completely opposed to the country where he lives. So there's already this rift and the boy, Elian gets into that rift and just opens it up.

Sarah:  This is also what it's like when anyone has a kid and a big, complicated family, right? That like the child will become the catalyst for all of these arguments and totally rifts between adults that were going to happen about something.

Mike: So basically at this point, this becomes a legal story. We've got an unaccompanied minor who arrives in the country. This is actually very rare. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's kind of like a question you would give law students. 

Mike: Right? One of the big legal questions in this is that the INS, Immigration Naturalization Service, doesn't have a clear policy on this. It's like, well, when we have children that are here, but their parents aren't with them, but they're great uncles who they've never met are here. It's not clear what exactly we should do. And so basically these relatives, you know, one or two days after they find him, they're like, well, you're here, we've got this dry foot policy. So what we should do is we should apply for asylum for you and get you recognized here. How familiar are you with asylum? Just like the concept of applying for asylum. Oh my 

Sarah: Oh my God. I know nothing. Just explain it to me. 

Mike: Okay. Everything, all of these international laws and these international things like refugee policy, all of them were really set up after World War II and all of them were really set up explicitly to prevent another Holocaust.

Sarah: See, this is what you were learning when I was watching all those Law and Order episodes.

Mike: So basically the entire world watched the Jews get exterminated and did nothing. It’s awful.

Sarah: And then after the fact, we felt a little bad about that.

Mike: That’s the thing, it's this huge moral stain. So we create this entire system of human rights, all these principles that are very narrowly targeted at, if another Holocaust in exactly that same way, happens, we will prevent it. So the entire asylum system is basically, if you are being persecuted for your race or your gender or your religion or your political beliefs, we will help you. 

However, if you are being persecuted not by a state actor, if you're a victim of domestic violence, we can't help you. If your country is just a totalitarian regime, but just sort of randomly throwing spaghetti against the wall type totalitarian regime and they're not persecuting you for a demographic variable that you have, we cannot help you. And so one of the things that we get into very early with Elian as an asylum seeker is that he's not being persecuted. There's something like 60,000 political presenters in Cuba at this time.

Sarah: But he wasn't one of them.

Mike: He's not political. Right. Cause he's six years old and he doesn't have a set of political beliefs yet. And there's also a lot of Afro Cubans that are systematically persecuted because of their skin color. There are also LGBT Cubans that are persecuted because of their sexuality, but Elian is none of these categories. 

Sarah: Couldn't you say that he's being persecuted as a capitalist? You know, you can take him to Toys R us, and then, you know, I'm just spit balling here.

Mike: So they're there for asylum basically on these like general grounds and you know, a lot of their evidence for persecution is, I was tortured by the Castro regime. So one of his great uncles was tortured and he talks in the legal filings about how terrible it was, how he spent years in prison, how miserable the regime is. But then of course the INS people are like, we're sorry that happened but this isn't  the situation of this boy, right? He's not a member of a particular group. There isn't any evidence that if we send him home, he's going to be harmed.

Sarah: And in fact that if he were sent back, he would have air conditioning and a dad who was favored by the government in power.

Mike: Right? If anything, he's going to go back and be like a Senator or something. Meanwhile the family is making all these applications in America, the father is making all these applications in Cuba. So Juan Miguel, Elian’s father, didn't know that he was leaving. Elizabeth never told him he had no idea. He doesn't hear from her for a couple of days. He hears about this boat that had left. 

There are now these rumors that the boat has capsized and that there's a five-year-old boy in the hospital and he gets really nervous. Right? Because he hasn't heard from his son, he hasn't heard from his ex-wife, and he hears through the grapevine that the child in the hospital in Miami asked for mango juice. And he knows that it's Elian because that's Elian’s favorite thing. His heart explodes. He doesn't know what to do. He knows government people, so he starts contacting government folks. He tries to make an official claim that I want my son back. And so this is basically the battle, the legal hole that this falls into is that there's never before been a case of a boy arriving in the United States applying for asylum against the wishes of his parents.

Sarah: It's amazing that every day in America is rich in legal battles and yet there are still things that are unprecedented. It's amazing that that remains possible. 

Mike: I don't know. I feel very weird about this whole thing. I mean, to me it feels like a pretty open and shut case. It's very understandable that the Miami relatives are like, I was tortured by this regime. I don't want him to go back to the regime, but the idea of taking a child away from his father because his country is shitty in general, feels really gross to me.

Sarah: I mean, I don't know, giving national politics and personal custody stuff equal weight seems...it's an interesting thing to do.

Mike: These countries are complex. I have spent a decent amount of time in Zimbabwe, which politically speaking is a total basket case, but also, it's not that bad of a place to raise kids. A lot of my colleagues there have kids, like they don't love their kids any less than people in Iowa do. It's such a profound thing to take a child away from their parent that it feels like you have to have really good reasons for it.

Sarah: And when that parent is like actively lobbying to get the kid back. 

Mike: Right. And of course, you know, we know what's happened to Aboriginal populations in Australia. America has done this with native American populations. This idea that we have to take children away from their parents because it will be better for them. 

Sarah: If the parents are a certain kind of parents.

Mike: Yeah. There's like, there's  not a proud history of that concept.

Sarah: Telling someone that they're incapable of raising children is a really dehumanizing thing. 

Mike: Totally. And not even due to themselves, it's due to their country. I didn't fucking elect Mugabe, right? I'm not into this guy. To tell me that my wish to be with my child doesn't count. One of the things that just makes me sick to my stomach, and this is that so much of the argument for why Elian should stay in the United States, is essentially that his father, Juan Miguel, is being coerced by the Castro regime.

Sarah: Can we allow a grown man to take responsibility for his opinions for once? 

Mike: For a guy that there's no evidence of abuse, there's no evidence that this guy's a bad father. The only evidence is that his interests happened to align with Castro. And he admits this. He’s like, yeah, Castro wants the kid back, but like, he's my son. So just because those two things have the same outcome doesn't mean that I'm being influenced. All of the arguments for keeping Elian in the United States are these broad arguments about just how shitty Cuba is. One of the filings that they file says, “Although Elian would return to Cuba a hero in the eyes of the government, returning him to a cauldron of oppression, doublespeak, and forced political ideology, would be a grave injustice”.

Sarah: Listen, if I have a child and their other parent takes them to Australia or something, and then the Australian government is like, well, if we give your kid back to you, what if they want an abortion someday? What if they get shot at school? What if they're the victim of a hate crime? That would be a pretty valid argument if those were the terms that you were negotiating on and ignoring the premise of, maybe the kid wants to be with their mother. 

Mike: And so what's weird about this is that it's now December, January. It's been two months since Elian was found in the water.

Sarah: Clock is ticking for election 2000.

Mike: Well this is the thing. One of the things I came across is that Bush and Gore are already on the campaign trail, it's already becoming this thing. And one of the analyses I read of this said that Elian Gonzalez got more coverage in the first four months of this case than the election. The country stopped whatever it was doing. Everybody put down their soup ladles, turned to the TV, and watched Elion Gonzalez coverage for months.

Sarah: I mean I was watching it and that was 11.  

Mike: I looked up Lexis Nexis search to find out the first couple of references to him, when he showed up in the media first. And it's actually interesting, the night that he was found, he was on CBS news national.

Sarah: Wow. So from the beginning, everyone knew that this was a big story.

Mike: From the beginning. Because it's a human interest story. All three cable news networks tripled their ratings during this time. Because there were helicopters outside the house where he was staying. There were so many live events and there was so much footage generated by this controversy that everybody rushed in to start covering.

Sarah: And then it's like, they're just going to stay at the teats until there's nothing left. 

Mike: And I mean, of course this immediately starts being picked up and starts being manipulated. So, you know, there's a whole community in Miami that is now fighting to keep this boy in America, right? Because for very understandable reasons, they are convinced that Castro is a murderous dictator, and they don't want him to go back.

Sarah: Well, this is also similar to Terri Schiavo, and that you have family members involved in a dispute that involves a lot of personal elements that are then being projected on a national scale, where you have to let things stay at a personal scale if they're going to be adjudicated correctly, you can't make it a national conversation and improve the life of anyone involved in that dispute.

Mike: Well, that's the thing is that it starts attracting all these PR people and activists and all these other people with their own agenda who start manipulating the Miami family into saying much more inflammatory things about his father. They started doing photo ops. So one of the things they do is they make a video and release it to the media in which Elian says he doesn't want to go back to Cuba. And it's like super clear that he's being coached, right? I mean my niece is five, her opinion on different things changes minute to minute and day to day, that's how children are. 

And so the idea that a five-year-old boy would say, I want to stay in the United States with my uncles, right in front of his uncles who are feeding and clothing him at that time, I don't know that that reflects a deeply held wish. And also, we don't know how the video is edited. He also could have said, I really want to be with my dad. We don't know. But they start releasing it to the media. They start doing these things, like they take him to Disney World for the day and they have television crews come with him. So of course that generates all this adorable footage of him eating cotton candy and him walking around in the sun. Why would you want to take all this away? It's this huge PR movement. 

Sarah: I also love that we're trying to seduce a child into becoming an American, and of course we take him to Disney world.

Mike: My favorite one is that a lot of people start calling him the miracle child because it's like, well, how did he live for two days on the raft? Like, doesn't that sound a little bit fishy? The narrative that forms is that dolphins encircled him and saved him from the sharks and lifted him up. 

Sarah: No. Dolphins rape random swimmers. Dolphins do not have an interest in protecting lovable humans from the elements.

Mike: And of course the actual fishermen that found him are like, ”Uh we didn’t see any dolphins”. But this is all just religious symbolism. One of the protesters outside the house holds a sign that says, ‘Three Kings: Moses, Jesus, and Elian.’  

Sarah: That’s too much symbolism for a child to be freighted with. You feel like people don't recognize that, and of course, we always do this, but if you see a child as a symbol of anything,  you're playing with fire there. 

Mike: The worst thing is, a child of that age is just so manipulable.

Sarah: It's very satanic panic-like. They will say something different based on the needs that whatever adult they've last communicated with has expressed to them. And of course they do that because they know that they're totally dependent on us and they have to...yeah, this is a lot, 

Mike: Even like, even more cynically, and this is the part that I was not aware of at the time, was it Cuba goes crazy. So Castro, his economy was not doing great. People are fleeing his country in droves. He now has this angelic child that has been kidnapped, which is the word that he uses, by the United States. And so all of a sudden, he gets for like the first time ever to be this moral Crusader, right. He gets to look like the good guy. 

Sarah: He finally gets to take the white hat out of the closet. 

Mike: And so he's on the side of justice in this. He's saying, I want to reunite this boy with his father. The amount of pageantry that goes on is insane. All the state run media starts putting Elian on the cover of newspapers, magazines, every single front page. There's not a U.S. embassy in Cuba, but there's like a sort of consular office type of thing. Castro builds a statue outside of it with one of the patron saints of Cuba holding Elian in his arms and pointing a finger accusingly at the diplomats. It's great. He goes for it. He puts up billboards all over the country with the founder of Cuba, Che Guevara, and Elian Gonzalez on the billboards. 

Sarah: Imagine what it's like when Elian tries to date in a few years after this. 

Mike: He turns his school into a museum. He does all of these fake rallies. He gets like 300,000 people to these rallies, ‘bring Elian home’ rallies. You know, he's paying the people and stuff, but some of these people would probably actually do want Elian to come home. Cause that's a very understandable thing that they would want. So they're partly fake and they're partly real. And very importantly, he also starts cracking down. So one of the things that he hasn't done before he has this thing where you have to apply for a visa to leave the country. This is something very common in dictatorial regimes. He starts torturing people that try to leave. 

So one of his things is, oh, you're going to get kidnapped by the United States, too. So a lot of people that are applying for exit visas just get sent straight to prisons. In the four months, the first four months of the Elian Gonzalez saga, he imprisons 592 political dissidents. And of course, what people point out later is that in the 10 years leading up to this, there had been something like 150 unaccompanied minors that had shown up in the United States and Castro did nothing. There's no broader, I want to save the children of Cuba from living in the United States. There's no broader principle here. He just saw an opportunity to do a bunch of dope ass pageantry. And it worked. He got a lot of support.

Sarah: And his pride was being wounded and he had to respond disproportionately.

Mike: Exactly. And so meanwhile, while all of this pageantry is happening, the INS is quietly investigating Elian’s case. Is he eligible for asylum? So they go to Cuba twice to interview Juan Miguel, to figure out if he's a fit parent and if Elian is going to be subject to any kind of abuse or any kind of indoctrination once he gets back. 

And so eventually the INS says, “Sorry, you're not eligible to file for asylum because you're not being persecuted, and a six-year-old child doesn't have the right to file an asylum claim against the wishes of his parents.” This is a pretty fundamental concept of law that not very many people disagree with in principle, not very many people are like, six year old’s should be able to make up their own mind.

Sarah: Well, the state of Florida creates a force field that blocks fundamental concepts a lot is what I've learned from Terri Schiavo. 

Mike: Yes. And so the ruling that the INS brings down says, one, a six-year-old child lacks the capacity to submit his own application for asylum, two, six year olds must be represented by adults in immigration matters, three, absent special circumstances, the only proper adult to represent a six-year-old child is his parent. Four, that the parent lives in a communist totalitarian state in and of itself, doesn't constitute a special circumstance, requiring the selection of a non-parental representative. So basically, sorry guys, the parents' wishes sort of supersede yours.

Sarah: And then everyone listened to the INS report and moved on. 

Mike: And then, I mean, this is January when the first ruling comes down. This takes until June before it's over right. There are appeals and there's more trials. But essentially, at that point is when it becomes super political. So this is already a media story. This is already a court case. And then the Republican party gets super interested in this because of course they want to claw back all of these Cuban American voters that they had lost to Clinton in 1996. And what's a better opportunity to shore up this base then to say, we're going to save this child. So one of the first things they do is they try to pass a US congressional law to recognize the citizenship of Elian Gonzalez.

Sarah: Of him specifically? 

Mike: Yeah. Of one child. So again, just like Terri Schiavo, they tried to pass a law that affects one person. The Senate judiciary committee holds a day-long hearing with the title ‘Cuba's oppressive government and the struggle for justice’. And it's literally just like a hearing that coincidentally happens to take place during this controversy. 

Sarah: We feel like talking about Cuba just cause. 

Mike: They bring in other Cuban experts to talk about how terrible the country is. So like Orrin Hatch gives the opening statement. This is from his opening statement. “If Elian grows up in Castro's island jail, he will never be able to express his political views in public. He will never have a choice about what he can read, and he will never be free to come here again.” So the true freedom that he's losing is to visit the United States later in his life. 

Sarah: And he’ll never go to Disney world again. 

Mike: Yeah, exactly. 

Sarah: I also love how all of these conservative politicians have to be like, you know, what's a great country to be a Latin American immigrant is the United States. Everything's going to be great.

Mike: And also, I mean, I love that in this congressional hearing, one of the Democrats that's also on the panel is like, excuse me, this is not a real hearing. Everyone points out the fact that this is not a real- there's no issue at stake here. You just want to put people on the record talking shit about Cuba. And he also points out, and I think this is really important. What is the precedent you are trying to set with this? Are you saying that all children from despotic regimes should be given citizenship in the United States? Is that what you want to have happened? Cause like I haven't seen that white paper. I haven't seen you propose that anywhere. 

Sarah: This is what I think of is the Clarence Darrow approach being like, I'm just telling you what you're saying. Are you sure you want to be saying this? Cause you don't have to, this is your moment to retract something that you and I both know that you don't want to say, and that you're going to regret later.

Mike: Yeah, but of course nobody really points this out at the time. Right. That you know, all of the crocodile tears for this media circus boy aren't backed up by any actual broader reforms. 

Sarah: Because once the media circus is over, no one will care if you give political asylum to other small children, they can't get attention or votes that way.

Mike: And also infuriatingly, and this is so typical, Al Gore breaks with the Clinton administration to criticize Cuba, and also says that the boy should stay. So he supports the Senate resolution to try to grant citizenship to this kid that doesn't end up passing because not enough Republicans like it. But Al Gore says that he supports it because he also wants to appeal to this Cuban-American community. He says, at one point, “I'm not convinced the father hasn't been coerced by the Castro regime”. 

Sarah: Oh, Al. 

Mike: But then he also says, oh, well, you know, I think the courts should decide. At this time, 70% of Americans want the boy to be reunited with his father. 

Sarah: Also as with Teri Schiavo, the politicians involved are like, yes, we must keep this child in America and average Americans are much more like, oh, I don't know. 

Mike: So in Miami, in Florida, only about one third of the Hispanic community is Cuban. And a lot of the rest of the Hispanic community in Florida doesn't like the Cubans because they have a lot of the economic power. They tend to be higher income. A lot of the rest of the Hispanic community in Florida is like, why is he sucking up to these Cubans?

Sarah: Why doesn't anyone suck up to me occasionally? 

Mike: Why did these people get special treatment? And so all of these divisions and all of this complexity, he’s just bumbling into it.

Sarah: Like he does with everything

Mike: And so all of these political tensions come to a head with the raid. So basically, we've had court decisions saying he's not eligible for asylum, but there's all of these appeals. There are 10 different appeals working their way through the courts. Janet Reno, the attorney general, decides to bring Juan Miguel, Elian’s father, to America. Because the argument of the Miami relatives has always been while we're waiting for the courts to decide, he should live with us. And Janet Reno starts saying, while we're waiting for the courts to decide, he should be with his father. And now that his father is in the United States, he can do that. 

Sarah: This is like he's trying to solve that riddle where you have to get a Fox and a sack of grain and a goose across a river. 

Mike: And then basically they start negotiating. So she's saying we want to take Elian from your house and fly him to DC because his father's living in essentially the Cuban consulate, and we just want to move Elian up to the consulate and then they could wait there. And the Miami relatives were like, well, we're not ready to surrender him because we're afraid you're just going to take him back to Cuba without telling us first. So there's essentially this big, long negotiation with them about where Elian should physically be. So the relatives want to get a house in the Miami suburbs where they will move in, the father will also move in, and Elian will also be there 

Sarah: This is like a sitcom premise.

Mike: I know exactly. II don't know if it's that great of an idea, but I think that they're just doing whatever they can to extend this at this point and trying to compromise. Everybody wants to find a compromise. 

Sarah: And that they've bonded with him too. And then it's like, if you've been taking care of a little kid for a while, it's hard to give them up.

Mike: Totally. And they don't super trust Reno because she has ordered Waco. She has ordered Ruby Ridge. 

Sarah: Right, she has actually quite a reputation for accidentally killing children at this time. 

Mike: Yeah. They are worried for a pretty good reason. So basically, she gives them all these ultimatums that like, you have to give over the child by this time. They basically don't do it. They want to keep negotiating. On April 14th, 2000, Reno started preparing for a raid. She starts doing recon. She starts talking to the agencies. Disturbingly, she tells Juan Miguel, Elian’s father, that she's going to do this armed seizure of his son and he's fine with it. So, you know, maybe he doesn't know how bad it's going to be, or maybe she presents it to him as less hardcore than it ended up being. 

Sarah: Or he just feels like it's the only way. For it to come to that, though.

Mike: I know it really sucks. So she starts doing all this recon. Then she gets a warrant for this under completely false pretenses. So they deliberately go to a judge in Miami that they know is an easy one. Just hands out warrants for whatever. They make the claim that Elian is being concealed in the home and has been unlawfully restrained, like that they're keeping him there against his wishes. No, he's a five-year-old boy. He doesn't want to be going out and vaping with his friends, he's fine being in the house. And then they also try to identify him as an illegal alien so that you can rush in and deport him, basically, which isn't really true because his case is still going through the courts.

Sarah: They're using all these cheat codes, basically.

Mike: Totally. And the judge is just like, eh, whatever that sounds good. It's like 8:00pm. 

Sarah: That's what judges are known for. 

Mike: It's valid for 10 days. So they could have done the rate at any time. Within hours they decide to do the raid.

Sarah: In the middle of the night. Why do the authorities in America love showing up at people's houses and the middle of the night? If we're going to terrorize people, can we at least do it in the daytime? 

Mike: It’s also  weird logistically because Janet Reno that night is negotiating with them on the phone. So there's an all-night negotiation session where she knows at this point that the agents are coming at 4:50 AM, but at 2:00 AM, she's saying, yeah, we can find a house in the suburbs. Let’s work on that.

Sarah: Really?

Mike: Yeah, it’s so deceptive!

Sarah:  I'm worried about Janet Reno. 

Mike: I mean, we have to be careful because some of this stuff is based on the testimony of the relatives afterwards. After the fact, Reno says they keep moving the goalposts, that the minute she agrees to something, they change their demands. They say the minute they agree something, she changes her demands. At some point, we don't know exactly what's going on with this negotiation, but this negotiation is like 12 hours in. At 4:35 AM, Janet Reno says, oh, can I just put you on hold? I just need to take a break for five minutes. And the vans pull up. Depending on which reports you read, there are between 30 and 157 agents. So even at the low end, 30 agents in a two bedroom house in the Miami suburbs is a lot and 150 is really a lot. 

So they basically pull up and all these vans and SUVs and stuff. I'm just going to read this. This is due to the complaint that gets filed later. “They sprayed gas into the residence, broke down the front door with a battering ram, entered the residence without first announcing their presence, sprayed more gas, pointed guns at the occupants of the residence, threatening to shoot, shouted obscenities, broke doors, furniture, and religious artifacts.” I mean, again, we have to take all of this stuff with a grain of salt because we don't know. 

Sarah: But still! I mean, if you have 30 people charging into your home, they're at least going to be breaking stuff accidentally, if nothing else. 

Mike: There’s also the famous photograph. It's an agent holding a rifle. It's Elian, it's this dude that found him holding him. The way that this happens, this is crazy, is there's a photographer named Alan Diaz who has been staking out their house for days, because he has a feeling that this is going to happen. He gets word, somehow, that the raid is going to happen at 4:50 AM. So at 4:00 AM, he goes behind the house, hides in the bushes, waits there for all the vans to arrive. When he sees them pull up, he runs into the house before the agents run into the house because he knows the family. That's how he gets this insane photo that's inside the house because he's there in the room with Elian before the agent's rush in. So he gets a Pulitzer Prize for this. There's also an NBC cameraman who also rushes into the house right as the vans pull up who gets knocked down by the agents as they rush in, kicked in the stomach and they stomped on his camera. 

Sarah: Oh my God. This is really horrible to me.

Mike: It feels so fascinating the way that we talk about ourselves versus the way that we talk about developing countries. Because if this happened in Cuba, how would we describe it? 

Sarah: Right. It's Castro's brutal regime. 

Mike: Yes. And the whole argument is that he's going to be subject to military control. 

Sarah: But in America, we point guns at children for the good, for freedom. Somehow. When a child has an American gun pointed at them, it's in their best interests, inexplicably, I guess is the argument we’re making all the time. 

Mike: I don't like drawing false equivalences between like, oh, America is just as bad as these other countries. Because as someone who has spent time in a lot of those countries.

Sarah: We're bad in our own ways. 

Mike: We don't have to set up a ranking of like shittiness of countries. That's not a useful method. 

Sarah: It's useful if we're trying to make ourselves feel better. 

Mike: Yeah exactly. The only thing that does is make ourselves feel better. It's okay to say certain things are bad regardless of who's doing them. And like, this is fucking bad.

Sarah: Yeah. Holding a small child at gunpoint. Yeah.

Mike:  Yes. The Miami family was definitely being intransigent, and they were being stubborn. But does that justify? 

Sarah: You know what? If I had a little kid and Janet Reno wanted them, I don't think I would be any less stubborn than they were being. As with Terri Schiavo, if you're the American government and you're dealing with a family that's being stubborn and difficult, you have to recognize that you possess superior resources then them and that in no world does it make sense for you to bear down on them with the full weight of your fire power and your politically mandated strength. That's never going to be justified. They're never going to pose a threat to you that requires that kind of retaliation. 

Mike: And there was also no urgency. They've essentially picked a random day, April 22nd.

Sarah: That's my birthday. Terrible things always happen around my birthday. It's just part of the season somehow. So of course. 

Mike: Juan Miguel has been in America for three weeks at this point. It's going to be two more months before all the court decisions are done. So why that day? Why Sarah's birthday? Why was that so important? 

Sarah: Right? Why that day is it because there was resistance and maybe also the American government's pride felt wounded? We're not drawing a false equivalency between countries if we're talking about national leaders acting out of wounded pride, that's pretty much an evergreen thing that goes with being in power. 

Mike: Yea. But so the Cuban-American community is livid, as you would be. There were riots throughout Miami that night where 300 people were arrested, they're flipping over cars.

Sarah: I think that's a car flipping over worthy thing. 

Mike: Yeah. There's also a general strike. 

Sarah: Like Cuban workers just were like, no? 

Mike: Yeah. It's fascinating. They had to cancel a bunch of sports games because a lot of the players on football and baseball teams are Cuban and they said, fuck this. We're all going on strike. Schools had to shut down. It was a huge deal.

Sarah: A day without Cubans. 

Mike: But what's really interesting about this is that this story has been in the national media for months at this point, right. It's been almost six months since Elian was discovered in the water, but all of the riots, all of the general strikes only appear on Spanish language TV.

Sarah:  Well, there just wasn't any news media in the area. I mean, who could even report on it? How could they possibly report on the general strike? So the English language media just totally ignores it. They're like, yeah, 

Mike: Yeah, they’re like, Miami, they seem to be mad about something, who can say, anyway. And it's actually interesting that the public is split about 50-50 on the raid. Most Americans want Elian to be back with his father, but people like me feel super uncomfortable about the way that this was done. But then a lot of people don't feel uncomfortable. Half the population is like, well, if it takes this to get him back with his father, then I don't really see the problem. 

And so Al Gore, of course, tries to split the difference. And so he criticizes the raid, but in these very light terms. He says, “I believe this issue should have been handled through a family court and with the family coming together.” 

Sarah: And it's like, Al, this is the moment for you to seem like someone who has a moral center and isn't just full of soft chewy, caramel, or whatever you’re made of.

Mike: Yes. Also, I love this, that Jeb Bush at the time, he's like, you know, I was involved in the discussions with Reno. I was helping do the raids. You know, it's a hard decision. We gotta make tough decisions  as legislators, but you know, we got to do it anyway.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Tough decisions.

Mike:  In these FOIA requests that come out like 10 years later, it turns out he didn't know about it beforehand.

Sarah: Really? It's so interesting to lie in a way that makes you look worse and more morally culpable. But also as if you were in the loop to a greater degree? It's an interesting call. 

Mike: There’s literally an email three hours before the raid where he's like, hope nothing happens. All right. See ya!

Sarah: He was probably just watching Everybody Loves Raymond and eating like a big bowl of unsalted potato chips.

Mike: Also, extremely cynically, Republicans are actually planning on doing an inquiry into the raid of like having congressional hearings and like, how did this come about and the warrants until they see the public opinion polling. 

Sarah: I mean if there is anything we've learned in this country, it's that threatening children with deadly force is a weirdly acceptable idea to a lot of Americans. So this is another Bellwether. 

Mike: I mean, this is also one of the things in that, it's such a snapshot of a time when there were these sort of crossover issues. That somehow, we have Republicans saying, we need to protect these immigrants from the overreach of the criminal justice system. And then we have Democrats saying, we need to be tough on Cuba. It's just this lost era where there was still a tiny sliver of overlap between the parties or there were some areas of nuance. 

Sarah: Yeah. Like where were these two moons that were orbiting each other for a while and then they just flew off into different corners of the solar system. I know that's not how space works, but that's all got.

Mike: And one of the things that actually people in the Cuban American community in Miami talk about is that this was really the end of an era for them feeling like they had political influence. One of the leading lights in the Cuban American community in Miami afterwards says “After the pain of being rejected by your family, Cuba, there's the pain of being rejected by your foster family, America.” And that's how it felt. There was a sense that they sort of overplayed their hand and they tried to use their power. They wanted to humiliate Castro by keeping this kid in the country. And they wanted to flex that muscle. They try to flex it, they lost. And all of a sudden, politicians weren't as scared of them as they used to be.

Sarah:  So essentially the GOP is like, we're not going to try and court Cubans anymore because we pointed guns at a kid and it didn't work out for us politically. And so, you know, whatever, we don't care about the Cuban vote as much. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean, this is basically what happened in that, slowly, the air goes out of it very slowly. There was also a generational shift going on that there were a lot of Cuban Americans in Miami that hadn't arrived directly from Cuba but had been born in America. And they just didn't feel as strongly about overthrowing Castro as their parents did because they hadn't lived under the regime. And so it was this kind of weird distance thing to them

Sarah: Yeah. And they didn't have actual memories of living under Castro. 

Mike: This is a quote of a really interesting column that ran in the Miami Herald five years later from within the Cuban American community, where he says, “After us came the Marielle generation, the rafters, people who got here through immigration Accords, who all wanted to help relatives back in Cuba and traveled to see them.” And so it's a generational handover where you start to merge with all of the other immigrant groups in America that are treated more shittily.

Sarah: Your identity is being traumatized by America rather than being traumatized by Cuba. 

Mike: So the sort of epilogue to this is, you know, most remember the whole Elian Gonzalez thing being over with the raid, but it actually takes two more months. 

Sarah: But did the media sort of lose interest after that point?

Mike: Yeah. There's like 10 different court hearings. You know, each one of those gets like a blip of media. But there's not a whole lot of images any more coming out cause he's not going to Disney world there. There isn’t this kind of drip, drip of new information.

Sarah: The photographers can't be hiding in his backyard anymore.

Mike: One of the most Important images that we've totally forgotten now is, you know, we all saw the assault rifle, horrifying, sick to your stomach photo. But then a couple of days later Elian and his father were photographed together and the kid was beaming. This is why, you know, there was no big investigation. There were some civil suits, but all of them got dismissed. There was never really a reckoning with how shitty the raid was because we had these beautiful photos of a father and his son together again. And it looks like it all worked out in the end. 

Sarah: All’s well, that ends well.

Mike: And you know, there's a couple more appeals, there's a bunch more court decisions, but they're all basically reaffirming that this is not really an asylum case. And so almost exactly two months after the raid, the Supreme court refuses to hear the final appeal by the Miami relatives. And that's it. As soon as the decision comes down, not to hear the case, Elian and his father are on a plane back to Cuba. And of course, all of the predictions about, you know, if he goes back to Cuba, he's going to be indoctrinated.

Sarah: In Castro’s island jail.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. Back to his island jail. I mean, it's sort of true. He becomes a massive celebrity. Castro is exploiting the shit out of this kid for the rest of his life. He shows up at his seventh birthday party. There's like this really gross footage of his seventh birthday party becoming basically a national holiday. This is like six months after he comes back from the United States. Castro shows up, he slices the cake. There's like musicians, super famous musicians there. 

Sarah: You know I just wouldn't want Castro at my birthday party. It makes it feel less festive.

Mike: His father ends up running for the version of the Congress that they have there, the national assembly. Elian is like constantly being trotted out to read these speeches from note cards about the revolution continuing and Fidel is great. And in a 2015 interview, they asked him, do you believe in God? And he says, if I believed in God, my God would be Fidel. It's a really interesting debate because I've read articles from scholars who were saying, look, exactly the thing that we thought would happen happened. He was indoctrinated. He became like this perfect little communist. 

But then there's also this point of view of like, well, I don't know, like what's the line between indoctrination and believing something sincerely. This is a kid who spent the rest of his life relatively well off. He had bodyguards that escorted him to school for the rest of his life. He got basically whatever opportunities he needed. Right. He went to university. Is that brainwashing? 

Sarah: It's the inherent damage of becoming a poster child for anything. Anytime you become symbolic of something greater than yourself, you receive all these privileges, and you also have this vulnerability of people having such a personal interest in the details of your life. And that was what was happening to him in the United States while he was there. 

Mike: Exactly. He would have become a totem for something else if he had stayed in the United States. Right. And so, again, I don't want to draw a false equivalency between what is fundamentally a democracy, and what is fundamentally not, but what does it mean that he says, my God would be Fidel? That sort of makes us cringe on an aesthetic level as Americans. But was his life worse for going back to Cuba? Was an injustice done that he lived with his father? They're still very close. He's now some sort of technology specialist at a company that makes plastic water tanks at a state run company.

Sarah: I’m glad he's not a professional celebrity and he's not like on Cuban Instagram or whatever, which is probably the ideal outcome, that he could on some level become a regular dude. And I feel like comparing it to the metric of what happens to child stars. If you can be a Jodie foster and not a Dana Plato. If you survive that, then that's pretty great.

Mike: There’s two little legacies I want to talk about. First of all, it destroyed the family. The Cuba side of the family and the American side of the family have never spoken again. The American side of the family, his great uncle, they've blocked all Miami area codes. And even within that family, there's three brothers that live in Miami and one of them has never spoken to the rest of the family because he thought Elian should have been returned to Cuba 

Sarah: And those two random fishermen who don't talk to each other anymore, which is amazing that you just brush up against this.

Mike: I don't know why this bums me out, but there’s these giant boots of a media circus that stomp all over you and they leave you so much worse off. This is something that you can speak as people, when you're talking about an actual, real live child, in a way that you can't, when you're talking about a totem and a symbol. That's depressing legacy, number one. Depressing legacy number two is that it might have cost Al Gore the 2000 election. 

So you remember we said in that episode that he lost by 573 votes. 3,185 Cuban-Americans switched their allegiance from Democrats to Republicans in the two months after the raid alone. So from Bill Clinton's 35% of the Cuban-American vote, Al Gore got 20%.

Sarah: Because he waffled so much?

Mike: Basically they blamed him for the raid. He's just associated with that policy.

And so there were people at the riots that were holding signs that said, “We will remember in November.” You don't want to give too much credit to that because when it's 573 votes, a rainstorm in one city could explain that. 

Sarah: Yeah. How many of the Cuban American voters were given butterfly ballots?

Mike: Right. So I don't want to over determine this, but  this was a real factor. 

Sarah: And maybe what we can learn is that taking a hard political stance against pointing weapons at children is less risky than it may seem.

Mike: What do you think? What are you left with at the end of all this?

Sarah: I think that the kind of power that the media has to keep the powerful accountable often instead is used in service of telling a story or enacting a kind of tug of war that's always about something other than the actual people that it pretends to be about. Does that ever improve anything for anyone? For the actual people involved? What we end up with as a custody dispute that could have been a lot shorter and a lot less traumatic for everyone involved if it hadn't become something that so many people felt they had personal stakes in. 

Mike: This is where we have to draw the line.

Sarah: Yeah. And  this was a story that obviously was compelling because it starts off with this kid who miraculously survived this accident and everyone could become fascinated by the story very easily because it is fascinating because what do we do when you have to be like, okay, like, yes, this is very interesting. And of course it makes sense to identify with some figure in this,  but this is not about you. This is not about us as spectators or as citizens. We can't decide this based on what we need to believe about the country we live in. That's not going to help the people here.

Mike:  Right. I think as media practitioners, we need to think of ourselves as dolphins, lifting up young boys, saving them from sharks.

Sarah:  Forming a dolphin chain around the vulnerable and they will liberate us from SeaWorld.

Mike: All right. The metaphor has gone too far now. I don't know what you're talking about anymore. 

Sarah:  I don't either. I'm just concerned about Sea World.