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The Other Face of America
Jorge Ramos
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The Other Face of America
Jorge Ramos
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About This Book
Immigrants in America are at the heart of what makes this country the most prosperous and visionary in the world. Writing from his own heartfelt perspective as an immigrant, Jorge Ramos, one of the world's most popular and well-respected Spanish-language television news broadcasters, listens to and explores stories of dozens of immigrants who decided to change their lives and risk everything -- families, jobs, history, and their own culture -- in order to pursue a better, freer, and opportunity-filled future in the United States.In his famously clear voice, Jorge Ramos brings to life the tales of individuals from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, among other countries, and explains why they first immigrated, what their dreams are, how they deal with American racism, and what they believe their future in America will hold for them and their children.
From the Vieques controversy to the "Spanglish" phenomenon to the explosion of Latino creativity in the arts, Ramos shows that there is a new face in America -- one whose colors and countries of origin are as diverse as the country it has adopted as home.
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Studi sulle minoranzeWE COME FROM EVERYWHERE
16 ELIÁN: HIS FIRST 150 DAYS IN THE UNITED STATES
In this chapter, you will not find Elián’s present or his future. You will only find a report on Elián González’s first critical 150 days in the United States, from Thursday, November 25, 1999, when he was rescued at sea, to Saturday, April 22, 2000, when agents from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service burst violently into the Gonzálezes’ house in Miami and forcibly took Elián so he could be reunited with his father.
STRANGE COINCIDENCE
Miami. There were very few occasions when the Cuban government agreed with the Cuban exile community in this city. But because of a strange circumstance, the government, as well as the Cuban exile community, turned a six-year-old boy into a symbol of struggle. Elián symbolized the two faces of Cuba.
He was one of three survivors of a shipwreck off the coast of Florida. For fifty hours he floated in an inner tube, until he was found by two fishermen. Eleven people died in the tragedy, including his mother, Elisabet, and her boyfriend. They were all fleeing Cuba in an aluminum boat only five yards long. The fishermen, Donato Dalrymple and San Ciancio, who found him in the normally shark-infested waters, reported that Elián had been surrounded by dolphins. No one has been able to prove this, but it now forms part of the mythology that has grown around Elián.
I have two photographs of Elián. In one photograph, his eyes are lifeless, as if his soul were dead. Maybe this was moments after he was rescued, hours after the shipwreck. Or maybe this is what happens when it is impossible to erase the image of your mother drowning. In the other photograph, the sparkle in his eyes seems to be trying to reappear as he plays with a little toy truck. In that photo he is wearing a Reebok T-shirt, and he could be easily mistaken for any American child.
The Cuban exile community took up Elián’s cause at once. Some of Miami’s most important politicians rushed to have their photograph taken with the boy, and radio programs promoted the idea of keeping the boy here. The argument was simple: Even though Elián is far from his father, it is better he live in a free country than under a dictatorship. Naturally, that idea did not catch on in Cuba. Elián’s father, Juan Miguel González, reported that the boy had been kidnapped by his mother, that the child had left the island without his authorization, and through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanded that his son be returned immediately.
The father’s words hit hard those in Miami. He was accused of being pressured by Fidel Castro’s government. Juan Miguel González was working as a cashier in a tourist resort in Varadero, and that kind of work, with access to foreigners’ dollars, was not available to someone outside of the Communist party.
The photograph of Elián’s father at his home in Cardenas, with a portrait of Che Guevara behind him, automatically transformed him into a contemptible person in some sectors of the Cuban exile community. Likewise, seeing Elián in Disneyworld, next to Mickey Mouse, must surely have turned the anti-imperialist stomachs of many Cuban socialists. The propaganda war, and the rumors, had begun.
In a scathing editorial, Cuba’s official newspaper, Granma, stated: “We will free you, Elián, from that inferno of selfishness, alienation, abuse and injustice, where they have so brutally and illegally taken you. You will return to the bosom of your family, your people and your homeland, boy symbol, boy hero.”
The spokesman for the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alejandro González (no relation to the boy), followed the same line when he said: “The scenes of the kidnapped Cuban boy, surrounded by toys intended to buy his innocent conscience, as if he were a twenty-year-old man, are repugnant. That we know of, this has never occurred anywhere else. That is the empire that so cynically speaks of human rights.”
These statements were followed by mass demonstrations outside the U.S. Interest Section in Havana, demanding the immediate return of Elián. It was said, no doubt, to be among the largest protests since the beginning of the revolution.
THE UNITED STATES AND CUBA: MORE THAN
AN OCEAN APART
AN OCEAN APART
Castro’s government asserted that it was the “wet feet—dry feet” policy that was causing hundreds of Cubans each year to set out to sea in rafts and small boats in the hopes of reaching Florida. That policy allowed any Cuban who managed to touch U.S. soil to remain. The U.S. government, on the other hand, was convinced that it was the high level of repression, and the lack of food, democracy, and freedom in Cuba, that drove the exodus to the sea. No matter what the reason, many Cubans—and we will never know exactly how many—died trying to reach the United States.
The likelihood of Cuba and the United States coming to an agreement that would prevent all those deaths at sea was not very good. Both countries were very set in their positions—one, by sustaining the economic embargo, and the other, by showing no signs of opening up to democracy or respecting human rights. There was no room to negotiate. In fact, the two primary presidential candidates in the United States at the time (George W. Bush and Al Gore) said that there would not be any major changes in U.S. policy toward the island. That is to say, for the time being, Cuban boat people will continue to die in the Caribbean. Just like Elián’s mother.
POLITICIANS AND SURVEYS
As a father, I understood a child’s need to grow up with a loving and supportive father figure. As a resident of a free country, I would not have wanted Elián or anyone else to grow up in a dictatorship. The decision was not an easy one.
Elián quickly became a diplomatic pawn between the United States and Cuba, and everyone got involved. In just a matter of days, then-president Bill Clinton was personally involved, as were Fidel Castro, several members of the U.S. Congress, the president of the Asamblea del Poder Popular on the island, Ricardo Alarcón, the Cuban-American National Foundation, Attorney General Janet Reno, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a judge from Miami (who granted temporary custody of the minor to his family members in Miami), a federal judge, a court of appeals, psychologists, and countless civic organizations, both in the United States and Cuba. The central question of this dilemma was: Who could legally speak for Elián? His family members in Miami or his father?
On January 3, 2000, the INS decided that the only person who could speak for Elián was his father, Juan Miguel González, and it set January 14 as the date by which the boy had to be returned to Cuba. However, the controversial decision was followed by protests in Miami led by groups of Cuban exiles. Streets and highways were blocked, and dozens of people were arrested. But the strategy worked. The pressure was felt, and the case was sent to the federal court.
Opinion polls spoke of one city—Miami—and one country—the United States—divided over the Elián case. One poll conducted on January 7, 2000, by Channel 23 in Miami showed that 86 percent of Hispanics did not agree with the decision of the INS to return Elián to Cuba. On the other hand, 70 percent of nonHispanic whites and 79 percent of blacks in the city supported the decision to send him back. Once again, in times of crisis, the Cuban-American community was at odds with the rest of the population. Accusations of extremism and intransigence began to circulate, and racial prejudice against Hispanics appeared in statements made in newspapers and on radio and television.
Critics of the behavior of the Cuban-American majority also came from within the Hispanic community: “Fear is not allowing them to think,” an influential Cuban exile, who did not share the idea of letting Elián remain in the United States, told me. But this important figure, like many others, did not publicly express his opinion for fear of retaliation.
For the Cuban community living in exile, Elián’s case was a chance to score a victory, no matter how small, over Castro. Few hesitated in taking away from Elián the chance to live with his father. After all, close to 16,000 Cuban children had come to the United States in the so-called Operation Peter Pan, and they survived. There was no reason to think that Elián couldn’t also survive. For Castro, Elián’s case was a rare opportunity to distract world attention from the real problems of his country.
During the Latin American summit, held in Havana in November 1999, the protagonists were the dissidents, not the invited presidents. The anti-Castro movement within Cuba began to gain strength under the watchful eye of the Latin American leaders; they asked Castro for a democratic gesture in order to keep his country from becoming even more isolated. All that was overshadowed, however, by Elián. In early 2000, when talk turned to Cuba, the obligatory reference was no longer the lack of democracy and the reappearance of internal opposition but rather the case of “Eliáncito,” as it was called in Cuba.
MOTHER AND FATHER
Everything leads us to believe that Elián was born to a married couple that waited for him longingly. For years, Elisabet, his mother, had had many problems getting pregnant. So, when she finally gave birth to a son on December 6, 1993, he was called Elián; that is, the first three letters of Elisabet with the last two of Juan.
With so much propaganda both for and against him, it is practically impossible to know if Juan Miguel González had been a good father before, during, and after the definitive separation from his wife, Elisabet, in 1997. What was easy to see, however, was Juan Miguel’s anger over not being able to recover his son. In an interview via satellite on ABC’s Nightline, he threatened to break the neck of anyone who got in the way of bringing Elián back to Cuba. In Miami, that was viewed as an act by someone trained by Cuban state security agents. The official version of the Cuban government was that Juan Miguel was never aware that his son was going to Miami and therefore they considered Elián to be kidnapped, first by his mother, and then by his family members in Miami.
ELIÁN’S HOUSE
Little Havana. The driver of the car must have seen me looking lost. He stopped his car next to me and, without my asking, he pointed: “There is Elián’s house.”
I had expected a circus atmosphere: television trucks, journalists everywhere, annoyed neighbors, busybodies hanging around the sidewalk. But that afternoon of January 22, 2000, I saw nothing like that. Elián was still at school, taking intensive English classes, and his relatives had gone to federal court to attempt to stop his repatriation to Cuba. Instead, I found a very modest house. It belonged to Lázaro González, Elián’s great uncle who, for a short time, had temporary custody of the boy. At that time, the two windows that looked onto the street had the curtains permanently drawn to avoid the peering eyes of the cameramen. The house was completely white, except for four steps of red tile which led to a double door—one to enter the house and the other to keep the mosquitoes out. The family paid $600 a month in rent.
The grass in the square yard was worn down by the frequent passing of an old car that they kept in the back of the yard. But there was enough space for the little black dog that Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart had given the boy to play with. Christmas lights, which no one had had time to take down, still hung from the roof. They were more worried about other things in that house where Elián was living.
Ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling—the bell of a rickety ice cream truck could be heard; it made its usual stop in front of number 2319 of the second most famous street in this part of Little Havana. (Sorry, but Calle Ocho is still number one.) Not a child came running. But three Cuban exiles did.
“What are you doing around here?” I asked them.
“We’re on guard duty,” said Dagoberto Avilés, who introduced himself as a former Cuban political prisoner. The gray stubble on his face indicated that he had been in front of the house for many hours, the bags under his eyes that he had slept little.
“On guard duty? Why?” I kept on.
“We have to be on the alert,” he responded, as if the reason could not be more obvious.
The other two exiles—a woman and a man, both middle-aged—were much more talkative. They began to tell me all the rumors: that Elían was being protected by FBI agents, that he avoided reporters by leaving out the back way, that one of the neighbors was charging television reporters $500 a day to use his yard—“That house is already paid for”—and that the INS had already come to an agreement with Castro to send the boy back to Cuba.
Dagoberto kept watching.
“What would happen if they send the boy back to Cuba?” I asked him.
“Personally, I think Miami would go up in flames,” he told me. “We would shut down the airport and a million other things.”
Standing there next to the fence that surrounded the house where Elián was living, it was easy to believe what many Cuban Americans think. “The future for Elián is much better in this country. In Cuba there is poverty, hardship, and a lack of opportunity to live a good life,” said black letters on one piece of white cardboard, and just beyond that, “Elián must live here!” Another message, hung from the fence by a string, was almost a prediction. It suggested that sooner or later Elián would be sent into the arms of the tyrant.
From far away, it was hard to understand what Elián signified for many of the Cuban exiles in Miami. Not only did they see in him an extraordinary opportunity to show their hatred of Castro’s dictatorship, but they identified with Elián on a personal level. I heard many people say, “That boy looks like one of mine.” It was not just his alert eyes, his quick smile, or his playfulness that touched their hearts. Deep down, many exiled Cubans saw a part of themselves in Elián, and their first instinct was to try to defend him against what had done so much harm to them.
No one along that gray fence that shielded Elián’s fragile interior world, no one wanted to give credit to the statements of the two grandmothers who had come to the United States hoping to bring the boy back to Cuba. They did not want to read the national opinion polls that went against Cuban-American sentiment in Miami. Nor did they want to listen to the opinions of those like the psychologist from Yale University, Preston Miles, who appeared on television saying that the separation from both parents would be a tragic and unimaginable loss for Elián. Miles conceded that freedom is very important for an individual, but he stated that after the death of his mother, what Elián needed most was the emotional security that only his father and his grandparents could give. In Miami, those arguments never stood a chance.
That very night, I returned to Little Havana hoping to look into Elián’s eyes. I still did not understand his eyes; they were an enigma. I didn’t know what they wanted. But I never saw them. Elián was locked up in his house, in his Miami world. Through the curtains, I could see a television on ...