When Elian made it to Miami, I was twelve years old living in Cuba.

My younger brother, Juan Carlos, who we called Kwankey, was eight, kuanky like me.

Remember, Alian's face was everywhere, Yeah.

Of course, and they made shirts and posters and all over the school.

There was the flavor of the month.

You know.

Elian's story was more than just the flavor of the month.

Actually, it was a national cause.

Before Elian was even rescued, his family in Cuba had contacted the Communist party in his hometown seeking help.

That's how Fidel Castro found out about Ilian.

The Cuban government sent a message to the US.

The day after Elian was found, Tregress and Mino Superba in Cuba returned the boy to his father in Cuba.

In the days that followed, Strum met with Ilian's father and became increasingly angry.

In film and check, he said, the US has kidnapped Elian Gonzalez.

The opinion shut down where.

It sounded a little like a threat, but the ominous stone in Castro's boys escaped my kid brother.

He was more concerned that he could not watch his regular cartoons because of the constant news about Eliang.

They were giving a whole spill of bring back Alian at that time.

I'm a kid that he really didn't care about it.

I did not care about cartoons.

I was just a regular nerdy preteen, dividing my time between poetry and the Spice Girls.

The year before, my father had fled Cuba for Miami.

He was trying to escape the poverty and instability of our country.

I didn't know when I will see him again.

Much of this time in my life is blurry, but there is one sharp memory.

I'm in front of the US headquarters in Cuba at a government mandated protest that I was required to attend.

Screaming loudly.

Bring back Ilian to Cuba.

This memory surprises me now because frankly, I don't remember what I actually thought of Elia, like I don't remember actually having an opinion, and yet here I was at this protest, screaming from the bottom of my heart.

I have come to realize I was not screaming for Elian.

I was screaming for my dad, screaming in frustration that, like Eleane, the same strip of ocean separated me from my father.

I did not understand or really care about the political forces that had caused or separation.

I only knew that I missed him, that I needed him, that I was angry that I could not be with him, and so I.

Screamed, no family issue had to go through what we went, just because I'm looking for a better future.

My brother told me this recently.

I agree, but we are Cuban, and to be Cuban is so often to be separated from their family.

Unpenny later meets and this is chess peace.

The Elian Gonzalez Story a production of Putuda Studios in partnership with Ihearts Michael Tuda podcast Network.

On December sixth, nineteen ninety nine, Elian Gonzalez celebrated his sixth birthday in Miami.

It was just a week and a half after he had been rescued from the sea.

He had been staying with distant relatives on his dad's side, his great uncle Lasara Gonzalez, and Lazaro's twenty one year old daughter Mary Leasis.

How did he survive by himself when he's only five?

And the only thing I could probably say that it's just a miracle.

People said.

She became like a mother figure for Elian.

She cared for him, making him chocolate milk, something that was so luxury in Cuba and that Elean had quickly come to love.

One journalist reported that Mary Leasis would say to Elian, mere Alliancito, your grandmothers cannot make you this in Cua.

I just want him to be wherever he wants to be comfortable.

Marit Less quickly became the family spokesperson.

Unlike her father, she spoke English well because she had been raised in the US.

She was young, passionate about the lean, and comfortable in front of the cameras.

I asked him, do you want to go back?

You mean you know you want to stay here?

And he said, I don't want to go back.

She and her father, last Settle, believed Elian's mother died trying to give him safety and freedom in the US, and they were not alone.

Cuban Americans would show up at their house demand in the US government let Elean stay in the US.

Yeahmanda.

People would say it would be a shame to send the boy back to communism and hunger in Cuba.

At his birthday at a local park, Elien was given many gifts and a huge birthday cake, but that was an Alien's only birthday party in Cuba, his school organized a celebration in his absence with a special guest, Fidel Gastro himself stopped by.

He wore his typical olive green military uniform.

Alien's father, Juamiel, spoke to his son by phone that day to wish him a happy birthday, and they spoke as if Alien will be back in Cuba soon.

Well, that went to Hedi.

Really.

There were protests in Havana marking the week of Alian's birthday.

Cubans chanted down with imperialism, socialism, or death.

But the protest in Cuba did not change Elean status in the US.

His future was still in limbo.

His Miami relatives had begun the process to file for asylum for Elian.

At the time, Cubans were guaranteed entry to the US if they made it to the US soil.

But Alian didn't technically meet these requirements.

Because he was rescued at sea and never made it to the shoreline.

He was a wet foot Cuban national.

This is Bernie Permurter, professor of law at the University of Miami.

He's referring to an unusual American policy at the time known as bisco pimojus or wet foot dryfoot.

It allowed any Cuban to legally stay in the US as long as they made it to the American shore after crossing the ocean from Cuba, literally stepping on dry land.

That's the dry foot.

But Cubans who were captured or rescued at sea by the cost guard, they were not permitted entry to.

The United States.

That's the wet foot.

The federal government had taken legal custody of Elianis.

I said he didn't reach the shore, so he did not have the benefit of dry feet landing on the beaches of Florida.

So Alien's status under immigration law was not certain, and another immigration policy in the US at that time said that only a parent could apply for asylum for their child.

So to immigration officials, Alien's Miami relatives didn't have the authority to decide the boy's fate.

I'm not sure I understand what their rights are.

These were distant relatives.

This is Jim Goldman, former special agent with US Immigration and Naturalization Services or ions.

We shall say in unusual circumstances, the law does allow the government to assign a guardian to one unaccompanied child, even if there are distant relatives or not relatives, but in this case, the government was insistent that there was no need to since Elian's father wanted him back.

I think the biological father has more right to make decisions for his child at the time was, you know, five and six years old, more so than anybody.

Jim thinks this case should have been open and shot, but.

It became a hot topic because I think the system allowed for it to become a hot topic.

He's right.

Tensions between the United States and Cuba get hotter every day six year old Cuban refugee Ilian Gonzales remains in this country.

The American media system jumped on Alian's story.

Cuban men, women, and children protested on the streets of by the thousands last night.

It was the largest turnout so far at the third night of protest, orchestrated by Fidel Castro.

It became the biggest story in the country at a time when networks competed for wall to world news covers.

It happens at the same time that we have the modern media machine being created, the twenty four hour news cycle, the dying of network news, the expansion of cable news the need for content.

Go back and look at some of the news archives and it does start to fill at times like Elean was treated like content.

There were cameras always stuck in Ilian outside the Miami home, reporters trying to catch a look of him playing ball, being.

A little boy.

Relatives of Elian Gonzalez say they saw a different side of the six year old, a boy simply filled with joy and happiness.

Reporters tried to capture sure every detail of Alian's introduction to American culture, like when he went to Disney World for the first time, where he got a personal hug and a baseball hut autograph for Nana Masi Alamenos came Mickey Mouse himself.

But Ellian showed some lingering signs of his Thanksgiving ordeal and rescue at sea when he went on the It's a Small World water rid.

And the interview request kept coming.

Diane Sawyer had a playdate with Lean on camera.

It was probably the biggest media item in the United States, if not the world at the time.

He would go to a party, you would go to a restaurant, you would see your family.

The talk the main subject was Ellian, you know what's going to happen to that boy.

Alina Mayo Assay is a television news bra a seasoned news anchor who covered Miami's biggest stories for decades.

She says nothing at the time could compare to the appeal of Alien story.

It was unprecedented.

It was our headline story practically every day.

It was before Alian and after Alian.

It definitely marked a line and the story and the history of the Cuban exile in the United States, especially in Miami.

But in Cuba.

The US media frenzy seemed to make Fidel Castro even more upset, and soon Castro will send another stern message.

We turned the boy in seventy two hours.

Fidel's message to the US was clear, returned the boy in three.

Days, only not too el Primian.

So that the pains of for an on trauma Dipoe and his family does not go a mini longer, he said, and his words were in the only ominous move.

Castro stationed several dozen Cuban soldiers outside of the US Government Intersection office in Havana.

This is the headquarters where I remember attending government sponsor protests for Elian.

I remember the tension in the air, the vague sense that there was something biggest stake here, something with a lot of biggers.

To understand why Land's case became such a big deal, you had to understand the complicated relationship between Cuba and the United States.

Let's start in the early fifties.

At this time, Cuba was ruled by Fulhenzioatista, who was once elected, but whose government had become actually a military dictatorship.

Six years of surface pastparity and government corruption, of retression and police brutality, right explosive discontent.

Mattista was friendly to US interests, allowing American companies like Coca Cola and United Fruit to own a giant amount of Cuban land.

Workers struggled to survive on low wages and oppressive conditions.

This inequality ripened the country for the ideals of Fidel Castro's revolution.

Hubert's Fidel Castro emerged triumphant after two years a guerrilla warfare against the Batista regime.

A revolution that began with Castro of fugitive ended with the find of dictator for Cenzio Batista and the entry into Havana of rebel forces to be acclaimed.

By the city.

He and his fighters including a john Argentinian doctor named Erneto che Evara, eventually overthrew a Vista and his government.

Castro and his men were the underdogs.

The uprising had begun with just eighteen men in the mountains of La Sierra Maestra, and it had spread to the whole island.

At first, the US was not alarmed.

Now, when Fidel Castro's fighting to depose Battista, he's not calling himself communist.

Many of the people who were in his movement, which was called the twenty sixth of July Movement, were young people who were ardently anti communists.

This is Ala Ferrer, the Cuban American history professor at Princeton you heard from in episode one.

But they believed in deposing Batista.

They believed in acting against government corruption.

By nineteen sixty, the new government approved laws that banned all foreign ownership of Cuban land, banishing American companies from the island and nationalizing their businesses.

His government also confiscated the line of Ques, who held more than one thousand acres.

Even Castro's own mother was apparently outraged that her son had confiscated their family estate.

Castro redistributed this line to workers or statecomings.

They start enacting social reforms like the urban reform, cutting rents, and with all these laws that they're passing, they're getting enormous amounts of support.

Some of that support came from my own grandparents, who got the chance to buy for almost nothing the apartment that they were renting before the revolution.

It was the same apartment where I was raised with my mother thirty years after that.

Not everyone felt like my grandparents.

Obviously, the people whose land is being taken away are not necessarily going to support.

But Castro was well liked in Cuba, not just by my grandparents but by many other Cubans.

So the tor policies in Cuba, doctor Castro, are leading to two conditions of great economic difficulty.

Is this so everybody working?

Everybody happy?

In this nineteen sixty one BBC interview, Castro is young, smiling, easy going.

The journalist wrote that Castro charmed and impressed many reporters.

When Castro came to power, he promised democratic elections will come as soon as the new government stabilized, but by the early sixties that hadn't happened.

The Cubans who left for the United States after Castro had taken their land.

So Castro not for a revolutionary but a despot.

Some people say, some of your Cuban enemies, says yes, people in Miami Americans say that you started a revolution to bring in democracy and you have not done so.

In this part of the video, when the reporter mentions ones in Miami, Castro gets a son Ricita his marks a little.

Do you believe that there is no democracy here?

I'm ensure there is more your question than that.

In the United States, the most free main man you can't find in all America is the Cuban.

Ada says that in a survey from February of nineteen fifty nine, about ninety one percent of the respondents said that the new government was doing everything perfectly well, but Washington didn't feel this way.

Here is Ada again, The President and senators and congressmen were saying, what is Cuba doing?

It's turning communists.

By nineteen sixty two, the US had cut diplomatic ties with Cuba and declared and embargo forbidding American trade with Cuba, hoping to create shortages and hunger on the island to destitlize Castro's new government.

This time Castro had been turning into the Soviet Union for help and trade.

What the United States and self respect can endure that lemit has now been reached.

The CIA also secretly trained some fourteen hundred Cubans who had led for the US to invade Cuba at the Way of Peaks Lava Yedecuccinos, believing the attack could kickstart an uprising against Castro.

But the attended invasion failed miserably.

I remember learning in our history classes in Cuba about these early days of Castro's rule, how he created new systems, free health care and free education, improving the quality of life for ordinary Cubans.

I remember some people in Cuba saying that yes, their life improved at the beginning, and they supported Castro, pretty convinced that great years were ahead.

But what I didn't learn in school was that from the very beginning, the censorin and self Censorina started, and Cuba quickly became a place with almost no freedom of expression.

Under this new regime, dissidents were often imprisoned and then thanks got warse.

It's a period that follows the fall of the Soviet Union and state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Cuban economy just tanked almost from one day to the next.

There was the joke of you know, Cuba, but it wasn't really a joke.

You know, Cuba just has three problems.

You know, there's a union and mercilla, comedia breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And everywhere I went, the constant refrain was noise fasci.

Everyone had the reservation meant that, and it was just this constant struggle to live and to survive.

Over the decades, waves of Cuban's left the island for the US flights and votes.

There were the fourteen thousand children who were put on planes to Miami in fear that they will be taken away from their families and put in communist inductrination camps.

That never happened, by the way.

Then the next wave was nineteen eighty and the Mario boat lived in which one hundred and twenty five thousand people came in the space of about you know, five months.

Even less, the president has literally opened the floodgates, placing no limitations on the number of Cubans entering the United States.

A decade after Mariel, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba entered the years of severe scarcity that I remember from my childhood.

The Cuban government named it the Special Period or Elperio Pessie.

Then there was the Raftro crisis in ninety four, which I think was about thirty five thousand people in the space of a few months.

But in all those years there were people leaving.

Most of the time could not leave Cuba together.

They would decide who had a better chance to leave, save, send money, and work hard to help the rest of the family on the island.

There are many families like mine and Aliens where a parent or a child comes without the rest of their family.

Family separation is, you know, was a part of the story of the Cuban Revolution from the very beginning.

Family separation has become souci a part of the Cuban cultural DNA that is actually pretty difficult to meet a Cuban who has not been touched by it.

And who you blame for that separation depends on what side of the small strip of ocean between Cuba and Florida you are on.

Alien's story flooded every corner of life in Cuba.

I remember not just attending but watching the protests in Havana demanding Elian be brought home.

So those Harold Cardinas quean journalist and political analyst.

People in Havanah had to rally all the time, and it's impressive when you look at the images of the Malecon in Havana next to the sea full of probably millions of Cubans.

That is an impressive thing.

That showed the capacity that the Kivan government had back then to rally people and to bring them together for a cause.

I am sure that many of them were strongly encouraged in their jobs to join those rallies, but others were going because they really believe in it.

I felt this too.

Sure there were people there because the protests were mandated, but I also saw people who were truly calling for his return, outraged that the boy was being kept from his father.

Obviously, at that age, it's hard to distinguish between the real fight of a kid that deserves to be with his father and the propaganda and how the governments also used people citizens for propaganda purposes.

So as a child it was hard to distinguish the propaganda.

On both sides.

In Cuba, I remember hearing a lot about how Alien's father had never agreed that Ilian could be taken to the United States.

How the US was keeping a boy away from the rightful parent, another example of the evil US Empire.

But for Cubans in Florida, this case was about freedom and saving a boy from oppression.

Many of the people, the Qubit Americans in Miami identified with the mother and her motivations for doing what she did and the fact she lost her life in trying.

To do this.

This is former Assistant Secretary of State Petromero.

But this idea that Alien's mother had died trying to reach freedom for her son is not as black and white.

There is some evidence that Alien's mother was going to the United States not for freedom, but to follow her boyfriend.

They truly were the Cuban Romeo and Juliet Well.

She was reputting the story.

Journalist and Louis bardak So a five page love letter between the couple, and she and others are convinced that love was the real motive.

The reason the mother was on the boat was because of her great love for Rafa Muneerum.

If Rafa had said we're going to Iceland or we're going to Columbia, I think she.

Would have gone with him, regardless of why she got on the boat.

What do you should know is people either identified with Lilian's mom and the US or Alien's dad and Cuba.

Everybody can understand, you know, a child who's a Cuban child taken away from you know, the bosom of the motherland and all of that stuff, and you know we want him back.

And yeah, I mean it was it was great for propaganda.

I see how Alian was used by both sides to boaster ideology.

But mostly when I see Alian, I see US Cubans, people who have experienced family separation over seven decades.

I see my family, my brother Juankey, who now lives in Miami and works as a SWAT paramedic and firefighter.

Some people thought that you look like Ilian yourself.

Well, yeah, that was my nickname on Fire Academy when I was eighteen, or my English pretty much up.

But back then it was pretty bad, and that was my victim of Fire Academy, Alion Gonzales, you are the littlefees million.

It is true my brother does look like Alan.

Maybe that's why it's been easier for me to imagine Elean, not as a headline, not as a piece of geopolitics or history, or even as propaganda.

No, I see Elean as someone who once was a boy in a new and unknown country without his mom.

Or his dad.

And I know the whole that creates in your heart to be separated from a parent.

Forces greater than you keeping you from them, countries and their policies, politicians and their aims, reporters and their deadlines.

That's all in the periphery.

At the center, at the heart of Alian's journey is that he was a boy who longed for his parents like I once did.

Next time on Chess Peace, Miami, Cubans and Ilian's relatives start getting angry.

Elean comes Fidel hasn't gone down.

Everybody is not happy about that, and by God, Fidel's not going to get this trophy.

And the battle for Elian starts breaking up a family.

Chess piece.

The Elian Gonzales Story is a production of Utuda Studios in partnership with Iheart's Michael Turda podcast Network.

This show is written and reported by me Pennileea Medz with Maria Garcia, Cold Rockwell and Tasha Sandoval.

Our editor is Maria Garcia.

Additional editing by Marlon Bishop or.

Senior producer is Nicole Rockwell.

Our associate producers are Tasha Sandoval and Elisabeth Loental Torres.

Sound designed by Jacob Rossatti and our intern is Evelin Fajardo Alvarez.

Our senior production manager is Jessica Elis, with production supports from Nancy Trujillo and Francis Poon.

Mixing by Stephanie.

Levo, Julia Caruso and j J Carubin, fat checking by Media Bautista, Scoring and musical creation by Jacob Rossatti and Stephanie Levo and credits music from Los aceos Or.

Executive producers are Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia.

Legal review by Neil Rossini.

This episode was recorded in part at Dynamica Studio in Mexico City.

Whuturo Media was founded by Maria noo Cossa.

For more podcasts, listen to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or whenever you listen to your favorite shows mpany later, missus see you in the next episode.

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