I'm at International Rivals at the Miami International Airport and I just spoke to a large family.

This is Tasha Sandoval, one of our producers who you have heard throughout the series.

Despite spring, during nor Be putting trip in Miami, there was still one more thing Tasha wanted to witness.

It's something that happens often at the Miami International Airport.

That is the reunification of Cuban families.

Tasha spotted a family who seemed like they were about to be reunited with someone.

Yes, the family had welcome balloons in their hands with smiley faces and the American flag.

Balloons may seem pretty routine, but they are also a powerful symbol for Cubans, something you can access when you leave the island.

As a kid in Cuba, I remember with the created or school parties with inflated condoms, as balloons were impossible to get on the island.

Back at the Miami Airport, Tasha was surrounded by a Cuban family of ten or eleven people prima mio, cousins, nephews, nieces.

They waited for the arrival of two family members who had been living in Cuba.

One of them named Carlitos.

Best a person commands.

I and Ida commersame familia.

Hasha waited with the family for quite a while Lodo, but then finally Carlitos arrived.

There were lots of happy tears, hags and kisses.

Even Tasha cried.

It's an emotional moment, something that most Cuban families dream of, the chance to be reunited, to share a meal together, as you know, for eight years.

It was something my father and I dreamt of, And of course this is central to Alian's story.

It is something he's on that long for.

It can be tempting to think that a story of family separation ends at the reunion, but no reunions can be well complicated.

That's at the heart of Alan's story, the real complexity families faced when they are forced apart.

You see, people could see themselves in Alan's story because many of us lived a version of that separation.

So for today's finals episode or final episode this season, we're going to share a really pointed separation and reunion story from a Cuban America.

Can you hear from a lot this season?

There's a way to tell history in which there are categories and everyone.

Fits in a category.

But real life isn't like that, and real experience, the experience of human beings, always pushes against those boundaries.

Ala Ferrer, historian and an author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Cuba and American History.

You might remember that her mother was living in Miami at the time of the Liian case, and that she took her sewing scissors to a newspaper photo of danet Reno after the raid that took Elean out of Miami.

What you may not know is that Anna and her family also experience a god branching separation.

It's one she wrote about in an article for The New Yorker in twenty twenty one titled My Brother's Keeper.

And she told me her story too, while we reflected on the meaning of a Liant's story.

I am Pennileetera meets and this is Chess Peace.

The Lian Gonzalez Story a production of Ututa Studios in partnership with Iheartsmichael Duda Podcast Network.

I was born in Cuba and I left when I was ten months old.

I grew up in a Cuban community, so Cuba was always a part of my life, but I didn't really know anything about it.

I did a master's and specialized in Cuba, and then I started a PhD program in nineteen eighty nine, and I I had to go back.

So I went back for the first time in nineteen ninety and then after that I went pretty much every year.

So right now, fast forward.

You win the Pulitzer two years ago with a book about Cuba, A General History about Cuba.

Tell us about that.

I'd been studying Cuban history for over thirty years at that point, and I felt like I never saw my family reflected in anything I read.

So I wanted to write a book in which people would see themselves reflected.

The way I approach history is you know a history that is peopled.

Well, I will say as a fellow Cuban.

When I read their book, I felt that, for the first time somebody was explaining the country to me in a way that was not this propaganda ish style.

Right.

So, in your work as a historian, how prevalent is this family separation in Cuba, And if you think that also partly explains this passion around the case of Ilian that happened in that moment but persists even twenty five years later.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation, but the people involved couldn't even experience it that way because the story was taken over by these greater, more impersonal forces that tried to use it for political gain.

So the family separation was a part of the story of the Cuban Revolution from the very beginning.

You know, I lived for many years in Mexico, and in Mexico, like in other Latin American countries, you have also many cases of family separation.

But the possibility of going back is real.

You know, people send money and they dream about retiring back home.

But in Cuba, when you leave, you leave.

Yeah, there is no coming back.

I mean, I think you're right.

Once people leave, they leave, they have to make a life.

But I think a lot of people, especially when they're older, do question it and do wonder about it.

You think, yeah, my father did I know.

I mean, that's one man.

I don't know how typical that was, but yeah, he had a sense, like all his life that he'd given something up, and then as he got older and got closer to death, you know, he wanted to go back.

He used to write letters all the time to the Cuban government and to the US government asking for permission to go back.

And also because there was this moment at the beginning of the cast regime on the Cuban Revolution, when people were thinking that we're leaving and then we are returning.

I mean, that's what my parents thought in the beginning.

So they left in sixty two, my father and my mother and me and sixty three, and they thought they would be back.

It soon became clear that they wouldn't.

My father left because he was a stenographer in the army.

He was very anti communist, and when Fidel Castro came to power dissolve the army, he was no longer in the army.

He sold sandals in a park at Patrique de la near the Capitolio, and when the Bay of Pigs happened in April nineteen sixty one, he was arrested because before the actual invasion, Fidel Castro deputized people the populace to arrest people who they thought might support an invasion should they come, and a neighbor had him arrested, and after that he decided to leave.

He thought, you know, they arrested me this time.

They let me go, but I don't know what'll happen, I want to leave, and then my mother left because he left, and when he left, she was pregnant with me.

Because it's what I was saying before about how there's categories and you expect people to act according to these categories.

And that's why I always wondered why they.

Left, because I didn't have property to leave, And I think that's what shape me as a historian in the sense that, like real experience doesn't fit easy histories.

She always knew or thought that after he left, he would do the paperwork to bring us to the US with him.

The complicated thing is that she had another son from her first marriage, my brother Ipolito or Poli, who was nine years older than I was, and his father, who was a member of the Revolutionary police, would not let him leave.

My mother left, always thinking that Poli's father, once he saw that she had left, would change his mind and let his son leave, but that just never happen.

Left him or she left him.

We left him in the same house where we lived, so with my grandmother and with my aunt who has my same name, Ada, who we called the Anina, and they raised him and my mother wrote letters to him all the time.

And sent Baguetes care packages.

But you know, he still felt abandoned.

So years, past, decades passed, he grew into a young man, got into all kinds of trouble in Cuba.

Before Marielle, the US and Cuban governments agreed to let Cuban exiles back to Cuba for the first time to visit family.

Cuban stormed the Peruvian embassy and asked for asylum, and then Fidel Castro said that relatives in Miami could come pick up their family in Cuba.

So my mother went for a week and that was the first time they'd seen each other since he left.

We left in sixty three, and this was nineteen seventy nine, and my mother was in the process of bringing him to the US, so she had applied for the visa.

The visa was approved for family reunification, but you know, it's all slow and slow, and they were waiting, and then the Mariel boat lift happened, and so he came to the US in nineteen eighty, so seventeen years after we left.

And it wasn't a good reunion.

I mean, my mother was ecstatic.

There's pictures of her when he first came back and her smile is like this big.

But he never adjusted and he got into all kinds of trouble here, worse trouble than in Cuba.

So it was hard.

But something that you wrote is that you felt at some point guilty even Yeah, but you were a baby.

I was a baby.

No.

I know it doesn't really make any intellectual sense, but I do feel like in some sense, my mother took me and left him.

So there was always this comparison, right, especially as I got older, that I had been.

The lucky one.

My mother was never missing for me, but she was for him.

So when Elian's case happens, is this case also resonating in you and your mom because of your own family history.

Yeah?

Absolutely, I mean he even he doesn't quite look like Bolly, but there was something about the cut of his hair, the close cropped hair, the big eyes, even the lips.

Bully was darker, his face was fuller.

But even just you know the pictures that I Eleanne reminded me of him.

Elean and my brother have the same birthday, December sixth.

There was the question of a struggle between a father.

Lean's father wanting to keep him in Cuba, which is what Bullie's father did.

So I think for my mother in particular, wanting Lean to stay was a way of fighting that battle with her ex husband all over and the idea that if Bully had been able to come when he was a boy with her, history would have turned out really differently.

So I think for her that's why she was.

So emotional about it and why it.

Hurt her so deeply.

Right, the father.

Should not keep the boy in Cuba, the boy should come as a boy to the us.

That had happened with BALI would have been a different person and we would have been a different family.

Well, your brother finally came to be with you only in the early eighties.

But as you have said, family separation was part of the Cuban Revolution from the very beginning.

And sometimes I hear questions from people asking, well, couldn't family stay in communication even if they were separated, But aha, we know how complicated that really is.

I know someone in Cuba who believed very deeply in the revolution.

Her family was very comfortable.

They decided to leave, and she said I'm not leaving, I'm a part of this now, and she stayed.

She was sixteen, stayed by herself, and she did not speak to her family until the Special period, until the early nineties.

It was the physical separation, but it was even that people were encouraged to not write to family, to not keep those connections right.

If people wanted to advance in school or their careers or the government, they could not maintain relations with their family abroad.

So there was the physical separation and then a forced emotional separation.

All the people who've left Cuba over the last sixty some years, most of them have not left in a full family unit.

In many cases they reunified, but not everyone reunifies, and so there's a separation and pain and loss everywhere.

And I do think that's why many human families have a story like that, which is why Alan's story resonated so deeply.

So it's a story that it's about Elian, but it's also a story that it's about all of us.

All of us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When I wrote Cuban American History, part of what I wanted to do was to allow Americans to see their own country from the outside end, to use Cuba as a way for Americans to question what they thought they knew about the US.

And I feel like I also wrote it for Cubans, and I think part of what I wanted to do was to get Cubans to see their own history like through the eyes of each other, to not just assume these ideological straight jackets that people have been forced into, because most people know that those straight jackets are completely ridiculous and insufficient.

So just to kind of connect with each other on a more human level and to just set aside these ideological constraints.

So is Eliane then a symbol of you know, more than sixty years of Guven history.

Yes, and no.

I mean he's a symbol in terms of reminding us about the centrality of the family in this history and the centrality of family separation.

So I think that's what makes him a symbol.

But he himself, no, I just think we don't know enough because he's this boy who was only ever allowed to be a symbol, but he wasn't allowed to escape that.

He remains a symbol.

Thank you to Ada Ferrer, Cuban American historian, twenty five years after he was rescued at sea.

Elian Gonzalez indeed remains a symbol for US Cubans, no matter if you are in Miami or Cuba.

His story shows the pain and possible healing that comes from family separation.

Elian's case also shows that history is not just political changes, but history is about how ordinary people experience those changes, suffering or benefiting from them.

Leanne may be seen as a symbol, but he himself is not.

He is a real person, a father, son, friend, living a very human life.

As adadive her book, I have worked on this podcast to get Cubans to see their own history through each other size.

This is why I'm not just telling what happened to Elian and his father, but also what happened to my family.

To understand the passion around Elian's case on both sides of the Florida Straits, you must understand our wound of family separation.

I must say it was easier to investigate millionaires evading taxes for the Panama Papers or corrupt politicians taking bribes from the drug cartels than asking my father about the time he spent separated from me, or asking myself what that separation mentioned in my life.

Reporting this story gave me a perspective I never experienced before.

It made me feel borned up all in front of the story I was telling in the beginning, I was not expecting to reveal how deep the wound of family separation is in me, how healing it is to talk about it.

Now, I know that I supposing my wound, could also help others heal their own.

I see my history through the eyes of others like me, others who had said goodbye to a loved one without knowing when they will hug that person again.

And now I see my fellow Cubans differently, understanding better what we share.

I feel more part of my community, Unaguanamas, in a way I did not feel before.

Jess Peace The Lean Gonzalez Story is a production of Utua Studios in partnership with Iheartsmichael Pura Podcast Network.

This show is written and reported by me Pennilei ra Medz with Maria Garcia, Nicole Rothwell, and Tasha Sandoval.

Our editor is Maria Garcia, additional editing by Marlon bishop Or.

Senior producer is Nicole Rodwell.

Our associate producers are Tasha Sandovallei and Elisabeth Loental Torres, and our intern is Evelin Fajardo Alvarez.

Our senior production manager is Jessica Elis, with production supports from Nancy Trojillo and Francis Poon, mixing by Stephanie Levo, Julia Caruso and j J.

Carubin, scoring and musical creation by Jacob Rossati and Stephani Levo and credits music from.

Los Acellos Or.

Executive producers are Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia.

Uturo Media was founded by Maria Nohosa.

For more podcasts, listen to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I am Pennileira Millez.

Thank you for listening to this season of Chess.

Peacestoria, Yesta Tempora, Chess Peace