Word: sonly
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...ways, give him a taste of a new life. The family's options were fast drying up, even as the crowds chanted "Elian will not leave" and talked about using women and children as human shields. But Juan Miguel was not in the mood to talk to his son's "kidnappers." He and his family went sightseeing. On the phone Friday night, according to Craig, Juan Miguel told Uncle Delfin Gonzalez that no big family meeting was possible until Lazaro takes Elian by the hand, brings him to Juan Miguel and says, "Here's your son...
When Elian was rescued from his inner tube by fishermen on Thanksgiving Day, the first information he gave was his father's name and address in Cardenas. And ever since then, the true relationship between father and son has been a central mystery to this tale. Elian's relatives in Miami say Juan Miguel knew that his ex-wife was planning to flee to America with Elian, and they produce a Sprint phone bill to prove he had called to alert relatives to look out for them. They even say he had applied for a visa for himself...
...prefer to raise his child in Cuba than in America. But interviews with family and friends in Cuba paint a clear portrait that the Miami branch of the family cannot stomach: namely, that Juan Miguel might be both a good father and a good communist, one who loves his son and truly believes he would be better off growing up in the faded, sandy precincts of Cardenas than in the hectic hothouse of the Cuban-exile universe in Miami. "It's an assault on the Manichaean mind-set of so many Cuban exiles," says Max Castro, an exile himself...
Though he and Elian's mother Elisabeth were divorced, they remained close as they shared custody of their son; Elian typically spent four to five days a week at his father's house. Elian enjoyed that rarest of Cuban luxuries: his own air-conditioned bedroom. And before Juan Miguel sold it to pay, he says, for calls to Elian in Miami, the boy's father even had a car, a 1956 Nash Rambler, in which Elian rode through town like a prince, while many people relied on horse-drawn carts. "I'm not ashamed of the life Elian has here...
...wife evidently felt otherwise, strongly enough to pile her son into a makeshift boat piloted by her hustler boyfriend and set out to sea--a fatal choice, as it turned out. The last decision she made was perhaps the one that saved her son's life, when she dressed him for the journey in the bright orange jeans and sweat shirt that fishermen say they found him in, colors that often keep sharks away...