March 29, 2000
Shipwrecked
on Dry Land
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
On Friday, when Juan Miguel Gonzalez went to school to pick up
his son Elian for the weekend, he was told that Elizabet Brotons,
his ex-wife and the boy's mother, had taken Elian at midday and
had not brought him back in the afternoon. In his routine as a
divorced father, this seemed normal to Juan Miguel. From the
time when he and Elizabet had separated two years earlier, on
the most amicable terms, the boy had lived with his father and
spent every other day at his mother's house. But Elizabet's door
was padlocked over the weekend and on Monday as well, and Juan
Miguel began to make inquiries. This was how he learned the bad
news that was already becoming common knowledge in the city of
Cardenas: Elian's mother had left with him for Miami, with 12
other people, in an aluminum boat 5 1/2 meters long, with no
life preservers and a decrepit motor.
It was Nov. 22, 1999. ''My life ended that day,'' Juan Miguel
said four months later. After their divorce, he and Elizabet had
maintained a relationship that was cordial but rather unusual:
they continued living under the same roof and sharing their
dreams in the same bed, hoping to produce as lovers the child
they had not been able to have as a married couple. It seemed
impossible. Elizabet would conceive but miscarry in the first
four months of pregnancy. After seven miscarriages, the child
they had longed for was born. They had decided on a unique name
for him: Elian, composed of the first three letters of Elizabet
and the last two letters of Juan.
Elizabet was 28 years old when she left with the boy for Miami.
She was an amiable and hard-working chief housekeeper at a hotel
in Varadero. Her father says that at the age of 14 she was
already in love with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, and married him when
she was 18. ''We were like brother and sister,'' says Juan
Miguel, a calm, deliberate man who works as a cashier. After
their divorce, Juan Miguel and Elizabet continued living
together with their son in Cardenas -- where all the
protagonists in this drama were born, and where they lived --
until she fell in love with Lazaro Rafael Munero, a neighborhood
tough. Juan Miguel subsequently married Nelsy Carmeta and had a
son, who is now 6 months old.
Juan Miguel did not have to waste time finding out where Elian
was, because in the Caribbean everybody knows everything --
''even before it happens,'' as one of my informants told me.
Everyone knew that the leader of the adventure was Lazaro Munero,
who had made at least two clandestine trips to the United States
to prepare the way. He had the contacts and nerve to take along
not only Elizabet and her son, but also a younger brother, his
father, who was over 70, and his mother, who was recovering from
a heart attack. Lazaro's partner in the enterprise took his
entire family. At the last moment, because each of them paid
$1,000, three more people came on board: 22-year-old Arianne
Horta, her 5-year-old daughter, Esthefany, and Nivaldo Vladimir
Fernandez, the husband of one of her friends.
An infallible formula for being well-received as an immigrant in
the United States is to be shipwrecked in her territorial
waters. Cardenas is a good departure point: it is close to
Florida, and its coves are protected by mangrove swamps.
Moreover, the regional art of making small craft for fishing in
the nearby Zapata Swamp and Del Tesoro Lagoon provides raw
materials for illegal boats, in particular the aluminum pipes
used for irrigating citrus groves. People say that Munero must
have spent some $200 and an additional 800 Cuban pesos on the
motor and the boat's construction. The result was a kind of
lifeboat, with no roof and no seats. Three inner tubes were put
on board as life preservers for 14 people. There was no room for
more. Before they left, most of the passengers injected
themselves with Gravinol to prevent seasickness.
It appears they set out on Nov. 20 but had to go back when the
motor broke down. They remained hidden for two days, waiting for
it to be repaired, while Juan Miguel thought his son was already
in Miami. This first emergency convinced Arianne Horta that the
risks were too great for her daughter, and she decided to leave
her with her family, to be brought over later by a safe route.
It has been said that Elian also became aware of the dangers of
the crossing and screamed to be left behind.
They finally set off at dawn on the 22nd, with favorable seas
but a wretched motor. The stories the survivors recounted in the
Florida press after their rescue, and expanded on in phone calls
to their families in Cardenas, revealed terrifying details.
According to them, at midnight on the 22nd, the men in charge
dismounted the hopeless motor and dropped it in the ocean to
lighten the weight. But the unbalanced boat flipped over on its
side, and all the passengers fell into the water. This may have
broken the fragile soldering on the aluminum pipes and caused
the boat to sink.
It was the end, in darkness and an inferno of panic. The older
people who did not know how to swim probably drowned
immediately. The Gravinol, which can cause drowsiness, must have
worked against most of them. Arianne and Nivaldo clutched at one
inner tube; Elian, and perhaps his mother, held onto the other.
Nobody knows what happened to the third. Elian can swim, but
Elizabet could not, and she may have let go in her confusion and
terror. ''I saw when Mama got lost in the ocean,'' the boy would
later tell his father on the phone. What is difficult to
understand, though it deserves to be true, is that she had the
presence of mind and the time to give the boy a bottle of fresh
water.
His information was erroneous, but Juan Miguel had a premonition
of the tragedy. He called his uncle several times -- Lazaro
Gonzalez has lived in Miami for years -- and asked about
clandestine arrivals or recent shipwrecks, but was told nothing.
At last, at dawn on Thursday, Nov. 25, the news broke in a
sequence of events. The body of an older woman was discovered on
the beach by a fisherman. Later, Arianne and Nivaldo were found
alive. Not long afterward a small boy appeared in the water off
Fort Lauderdale, unconscious and badly sunburned, lying across
an inner tube, face up. It was Elian, the last survivor.
When he heard the news, Juan Miguel was determined to speak to
the boy on the phone but did not know where he was. On Nov. 25 a
doctor in Miami called him to ask about Elian's medical history.
Juan Miguel learned to his great joy that Elian himself had
given his father's name in the hospital, and his phone number
and address in Cardenas. The next day Juan Miguel talked to
Elian. Troubled, but in a steady voice, Elian told his father he
had seen his mother drown. He also said he had lost his backpack
and school uniform, which Juan Miguel interpreted as a symptom
of his disorientation. ''No, baby,'' he said. ''Your uniform is
here, and I have your backpack ready for when you come home.''
But it is possible that Elian had had another pack at his
mother's house, or that one had been bought for him so he would
not insist on returning to his house. His fondness for school,
as well as his desire to return to class, were clearly
demonstrated a few days later, when he told his teacher on the
telephone, ''Take good care of my desk.''
From the earliest calls, Juan Miguel realized that someone in
Miami was disrupting his conversations with his son. ''You
should know that from the very beginning they've done everything
they could to sabotage us,'' he told me. ''Sometimes they shout
at the boy while we're talking, or turn the volume all the way
up on television cartoons, or put a candy in his mouth so it's
hard to understand what he's saying.'' These kinds of stratagems
were also suffered in person by Raquel Rodriguez and Marcela
Quintant, Elian's grandmothers, during their turbulent trip to
Miami. Their visit with him, scheduled to last two days, was
reduced to 90 minutes, with all kinds of interruptions, and they
said they spent no more than a quarter of an hour alone with
Elian. They returned to Cuba shocked at how much he had changed.
''This isn't the same boy,'' they said, saddened by the timidity
of a child they remembered as lively, intelligent, and with a
remarkable talent for drawing. ''We have to save him!''
Nobody in Miami seems to care about the harm being done to
Elian's mental health by the cultural uprooting to which he is
being subjected. At his 6th birthday party, celebrated on Dec. 6
in his Miami captivity, his hosts took a picture of him wearing
a combat helmet, surrounded by weapons and wrapped in the flag
of the United States, just a short while before a boy of his age
in Michigan shot a classmate to death with a handgun.
In other words, the real shipwreck of Elian did not take place
on the high seas, but when he set foot on American soil.
Drawing (Christoph Niemann)