MSNBC
January 17, 2000
 
 
Elian’s story: ‘Dateline' in Havana


                                                                 NBC News
                        HAVANA, Cuba, Jan. 17 —  A look at the life
                        Elian Gonzalez left behind may confirm everything
                        you believe or challenge much of what you
                        thought you knew. Correspondent Keith
                        Morrison reports from Havana.
                                 So much noise across the water about the boy
                         Elian. So much baggage, so much anger to load on the fate
                         of one little boy whose entire existence had been a few
                         streets in a small town quite out of the way of the world —
                         with a mother named Elizabet, and father Juan Miguel, and
                         grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins.
                                What happened to them? Why was the need to get
                         away so great that this young mother would risk herself and
                         her child on a rickety boat to Florida?
                                So fraught has the image of Cuba become in the
                         American imagination that we tend to invest almost any
                         thought about this truly lovely place with some political view
                         or other. Is Elian’s story about escaping Castro, repression,
                         communism? Or, as some accuse, virtual kidnapping by
                         Americans? Or something else altogether? It’s dramatic, all
                         right. It’s also very human. And it begins in a little blue
                         house down the coast from Havana in a town called
                         Cardenas.
                         THE LOVE STORY
                                “I have known Juan Miguel since he was born,” says
                         Juana Hortado Demendosa. He watched from the house
                         next door when Juan Miguel Gonzalez fell in love with
                         Elizabet Broton at age 14.
                                “They loved each other very much,” says Demendosa.
                         “They always got along well.”
                                 They were childhood sweethearts, with the blessing of
                         Elizabet’s mother, Raquel Rodriguez. “When you know
                         somebody that long,” she says, “after a while they
                         become a member of the family.”
                                But both women knew the young couple was having
                         trouble, too. “She had a situation that she couldn’t get
                         pregnant,” says Juana Hortado Demendosa.
                                Time and time again — seven times — Elizabet
                         suffered miscarriages. And then finally, there was Elian.
                                Best friends of the new parents, Fidel and Marta
                         Ramirez were there when Juan Miguel and Elizabet
                         combined letters of their own names to come up with Elian.
                         “That boy was awaited with much love,” says Fidel
                         Ramirez. “They were trying for a long time to have that
                         boy.”
                         FRIENDSHIP REMAINED
                                Fidel and Juan Miguel grew up together. Now, they
                         work together running security at a nearby tourist park.
                         Those are lucrative jobs by Cuban standards because they
                         are paid in American dollars, and wind up earning more
                         than doctors or engineers. And both of them, says Fidel, are
                         proud of their careers, their memberships in the Communist
                         Party, and their families.
                                Fidel Ramirez’s son, Lincoln Anthony, says he is
                         Elian’s friend.
                                And when Juan and Elizabet drifted apart, then
                         divorced, all the friendships, they say, survived. “After they
                         separated they still had a great relationship,” says Fidel
                         Ramirez. “And when it came to Elian they didn’t act like
                         they were divorced at all. They acted together.”
                                On this, in Cardenas, there is no dispute at all. Elian’s
                         now-famous fifth birthday party, was attended by both
                         parents and a big extended family. Parental duties, say both
                         family and friends, were shared almost equally. Elian was
                         with both mother and father almost every day.
                                “One of the great virtues that Juan Miguel has is that he
                         has always been a good parent,” says Fidel Ramirez.
                                Elizabet’s mother Raquel Rodriguez says, “Elian
                         wouldn’t take a bath unless his dad was with him. He
                         wouldn’t get his hair cut unless his dad was with him. He is
                         very close to his dad. It’s almost an obsession with his
                         dad.”
                         ELIAN AND ELIANA
                                Who else shared Elian’s life? In a video, obtained
                         exclusively by ‘Dateline’ and never before seen by anyone
                         outside the family, is a record of Elian and his closest
                         companion — his cousin, born shortly after he was. How
                         close were they? He was Elian. She is Eliana.
                                And Elizabet? “A good mother,” says Raquel
                         Rodriguez. “A good daughter. A good person.”
                                Elizabet and Elian went to live with her mother in an
                         apartment above a pharmacy. “They were really close,”
                         says Raquel. “He called her ‘My beautiful mommy.’”
                                Elizabet worked, like her ex-husband, in the tourist
                         industry, where, as a chamber maid, she too had access to
                         the dollar economy.
                                And Elizabet’s mother is convinced her daughter would
                         never have considered leaving if it hadn’t been for an affair
                         that had nothing to do with politics. “Over there the
                         politicians and senators are saying that the boy should stay
                         because that was his mother’s wish,” says Raquel
                         Rodriguez. “What wish? What do they know about it if they
                         didn’t even know her? I’m the one who knows. I’m her
                         mother.”
                          THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE
                                So, what happened then? If life was so idyllic, why in
                         heaven’s name would she leave? The answer is: a man, says
                         the family, without whom we would have heard none of this.
                                His name is Lazaro Munero.
                                “I don’t want to talk about him.” says Raquel
                         Rodriguez.
                                Not many in Cardenas do. He and Elizabet, both
                         divorced, began seeing each other in 1997. It was an
                         intense affair, say their friends, which seemed, nevertheless,
                         to come to an abrupt end a year later when Lazaro joined
                         the Cuban exodus and took a boat to Florida.
                                But it was not a happy ending for Lazaro. “All he ever
                         did when he was here was talk about how he missed his
                         family, Elizabet, and the kid,” says Lazaro’s uncle in
                         Florida, Jorge Munero.
                                He missed them so much that he took a trip few
                         Cubans have ever made. He got on a raft and headed back,
                         where he was promptly arrested and spent 62 days in jail.
                                “When he came back he said he was not leaving
                         anymore,” says Dagoberto Munero, another of Lazaro’s
                         uncles, who lives in Cuba and has watched him all his life,
                         and had worried sometimes. “He had problems on the
                         street because he was very impulsive and hard-headed.”
                                In fact, a Munero family member told us Lazaro once
                         spent three years in jail after he was convicted of using a
                         knife to cut off a man’s fingers in a bar fight. His police
                         record lists the charges. He had friends in town, too, but
                         some say Lazaro was a maceta, a bit of a hustler.
                                “I don’t like him,” says Raquel Rodriguez.
                         PLANS TO FLEE
                                Early in 1999, Lazaro was out of jail and seeing
                         Elizabet again. Elizabet’s mother says she tried to
                         discourage this relationship. There was an argument.
                         Elizabet left her mother’s apartment and went to live with
                         Lazaro. Soon after, Lazaro told family and friends he had
                         changed his mind. His return to Cuba was temporary.
                                He bought an old aluminum boat and urged his parents
                         and his uncle Dagoberto to defect with him. “He wanted to
                         leave and wanted me to come with him,” says Dagoberto.
                         “He didn’t want me to stay in Cuba, and I told him no.”
                                But if Dagoberto refused, Lazaro’s parents and a
                         younger brother did not. They agreed to go. And so did
                         Elizabet.
                                “They were in love,” says Dagoberto. “And when a
                         woman loves a man, she does what she has to do, she goes
                         after her man.”
                                Of course it was agreed, she would take Elian with her.
                         The arrangement, say relatives, was kept a secret from
                         Elizabet’s family. Including her own mother, and Elian’s
                         father, Juan Miguel.
                                On Friday, November 19, Dagoberto made one final
                         effort to head off the voyage. He had it out with his brother,
                         Lazaro’s father. They spent the day drinking and arguing.
                         Don’t go, urged Dagoberto. Finally, he says, Lazaro threw
                         him out of the house.
                                “I followed my brother to where the boat was,” he
                         says. “I saw it. A roughly made aluminum boat. But he said
                         to me, if you’re not going to come, go away. So I didn’t
                         even say goodbye to him.”
                                It was still dark, early in the morning of Sunday,
                         November 21, fifteen would-be refugees, including Lazaro,
                         Elizabet and Elian pulled their little boat down a path to an
                         isolated bit of shoreline. But they were spotted by a Cuban
                         patrol boat. Then their old outboard motor failed. All they
                         could do was row back. After they limped back to shore on
                         that Sunday night to repair the boat, one of the mothers
                         aboard decided it was just too risky out there for her
                         five-year-old daughter. She sent her home. The rest of them
                         waited. Elizabet decided Elian would go. And on the
                         Monday morning, before dawn, 14 people climbed back
                         into the skiff to head out to sea.
                         FATHER BEGINS TO WORRY
                                Back in Cardenas, Elian’s father says he had not yet
                         begun to worry. Elizabet, he says, had told family and
                         school that she was taking Elian to Havana, and wouldn’t
                         be back until Tuesday. But they did not return on Tuesday.
                         Juan Miguel knew something was wrong.
                                “He phones our house,” says Marta Ramirez. “I pick
                         up the phone, and I said, how is the kid? He started crying.”
                                A lot of people in the U.S. think the father is glad he is
                         in Miami. Did you ever hear Juan Miguel suggest that he
                         would like Elian to leave Cuba?
                                “It’s entirely absurd,” says Fidel Ramirez. “If Juan
                         Miguel knew — not just knew — if he only imagined, none
                         of them would have gone.”
                                But by then, out at sea, it was all coming apart.
                                “The waters began to get choppier, the weather began
                         to get rougher, and a storm came through,” says Tim
                         Padgett, “Time” magazine’s Miami Bureau Chief. He
                         reconstructed the last hours with the help of U.S. Border
                         Patrol investigators.
                                “The boat was being tossed about,” says Padgett.
                         “People on board panicked. And again 14 people panicking
                         on a 17-foot boat in choppy seas, the most natural thing is
                         that it’s going to capsize. And that’s exactly what it did.”
                                Lazaro Munero and his passengers, including Elizabet
                         and Elian, now in the water, grabbed some old Russian
                         inner tubes they brought along in place of life preservers.
                                Nivaldo Fernandez Ferran, one of only three to
                         survive, would be one of the last to see Elian’s mother.
                         “Elian said that he was very cold and she took off a jacket
                         and put it on him,” says Nivaldo Ferran. “We men were
                         protecting him so the waves didn’t hit him in the face, so he
                         wouldn’t swallow water.”
                                But as the hours passed, their grip on the tubes
                         weakened. Confusion set in. Nivaldo recalls one
                         passenger’s desperation. “He was thirsty and hungry and he
                         thought that land was close,” he says. “He had
                         hallucinations. He said ‘Look, land is there, it’s close.’ We
                         told him no. We are in the middle of the ocean. He said,
                         ‘Yes, yes, there it is. I can reach it.’ And he swam and we
                         didn’t see him again.”
                                Pounding waves, wind and fear pulled the group apart.
                         And one by one, they drowned, including Lazaro, the man
                         who planned the trip, and Elizabet, the woman he loved.
                         BACK IN CARDENAS
                                Left behind in Cuba, Dagoberto Munero, would soon
                         learn the fate of the voyage he chose not to join. “I lost my
                         family,” he says, crying. “It was a hard blow. But I have to
                         resist, to hold on.”
                                And in her house, Elizabet’s mother cannot but think if
                         only she had not fought with her daughter that day over that
                         man. “I’ve lost my only daughter,” says Raquel Rodriguez.
                         And he’s my only grandson.”
                                And now the whole country knows how that little boy
                         was plucked from the sea like a miracle on Thanksgiving
                         morning, to become the prize in a long bitter feud between
                         communism and democracy. But here it’s far more personal
                         than that. It’s about a woman who followed a man. And a
                         result no one could have expected. And Juan Miguel
                         Gonzalez sits in the bedroom he built for his son and
                         wonders what the world is coming to.