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.