Casa Elian Keeps Hope, And Grievances, Alive

By Sue Anne Pressley
Washington Post Staff Writer

MIAMI -- It is like the bedroom of a child who died, whose family cannot bear the thought of packing away his things, of dismantling the evidence that he once
existed. There is the small bed in the shape of a hot rod, the school uniform of blue pants and white shirt suspended from the wall, the blackboard that still has the
faint chalk marks he made.

Photographs of the familiar little face are everywhere, some impish, others solemn, many lovingly gathered into collages that wallpaper the room, and indeed, the
whole house. The closet is packed tight with gifts of clothing he never had a chance to retrieve, including his favorite white karate suit, pulled out and hung
prominently over the other things. Six pairs of identical white tennis shoes shine from the dark closet floor.

When Elian Gonzalez comes back -- and the preservers of this room and the rest of the Little Havana house where he lived and played and mugged for the cameras
do not doubt that will happen -- he will, of course, have outgrown everything he left behind. But until that triumphant day, the people who loved him, who almost
deified him, who saw in the small boy all their hopes of defying Fidel Castro, are putting their energy into this shrine.

Every Sunday from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., the house on Second Street now known as Casa Elian or the Elian Museum is open to visitors who remember the small
shipwreck victim rescued from the ocean on Thanksgiving Day two years ago. For five months, until April 22, 2000, when federal agents stormed this same small
house and hurried the boy away, Elian was a living symbol for many Cuban Americans of the passionate struggle for freedom from Castro's communist regime.

The child's mother, Elizabet Brotons, whose photograph also is prominently displayed throughout the house, drowned as she tried to flee Cuba with her boyfriend,
her son and others. When Elian's father in Cuba tried to reclaim the child from the Miami relatives who had taken him in, an explosion of political maneuvering and
media interest ensued. The Miami family repeatedly deflected government efforts to remove Elian from the house, and sympathizers eventually set up a cordon in the
street of this working-class neighborhood.

That Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, succeeded in returning with his son to Cuba, with the complete cooperation of the Clinton administration, remains a point
of anger and pain to the droves of people who kept vigil outside this house for weeks -- the same people who volunteer and pass the time at this memorial to him, as
if they could not quite bear to let Elian and the excitement of that period go.

Delfin Gonzalez, the bespectacled great-uncle often seen on the television news playing with the boy in the postage-stamp-size yard, owns the house and presides
over the museum. "It was important to keep his memory alive," says Gonzalez, who, along with the other well-known relatives -- his brother, Lazaro, and niece,
Marisleysis -- now lives elsewhere in the Miami area. "The Cuban community fought so hard to keep Elian here, and so we opened our house to say thank you."

Admission is free, but a small stand in the corner of one of the rooms asks for donations for "Elian's Little Corner of Freedom."

Gonzalez, 67, says that more than 7,500 people have toured the museum since it opened last month. Although that figure seems exaggerated, it is true that a large
number of people show up each Sunday to pay tribute to Elian's memory. Many of them are parents accompanied by children roughly Elian's age (now 8), who say
their youngsters implored them to come. Elian was like a movie star to them, and at the same time, almost a pal.

"I think it wasn't right to do what they did to him," says Joey Munoz, also 8, who traveled from Cape Canaveral on a recent Sunday afternoon with his dad and
granddad. "I just wanted to see all his stuff."

Explains his father, Joe Munoz, a 45-year-old engineer: "He followed a lot of it on TV."

There was certainly plenty of footage. Elian became a daily news presence as the efforts to keep him here intensified. Relics of those days, all gifts from sympathetic
Americans, cram the tiny rooms: There's the motorized car he tooled around the yard in as the cameras rolled; a huge collection of remote-controlled toy vehicles and
giant stuffed Tweety Birds and other characters; four bicycles; and a photograph of his black dog, Dolphin, displayed on a corner of the bed, the name a reference to
the creatures that, according to the Legend of Elian, miraculously protected the boy from sharks as he bobbed in an inner tube in the waters off south Florida for
three days. If Elian learned nothing else during his strange sojourn in America, it was that this is a land of overabundance.

But what visitors like the Munozes find most disturbing is the second bedroom. That room has the closet where Elian and Donato Dalrymple, one of the fishermen
who had rescued the boy, were hiding when federal agents stormed the house early on the morning of the Saturday before Easter.

They stare, shocked, at the battered door leading into the room, including the hole in the shape of a handprint. They stand before the giant photograph that became a
symbol of that day: It shows Elian, in Dalrymple's arms, shrinking away from the armed agent who had come to take him to his father. They peer inside the empty
closet, and many, like Joey Munoz, imagine themselves in Elian's place.

"I thought that was pretty bad," says the elder Munoz, who left Cuba himself 30 years ago. "They shouldn't have come in here in the forceful way they did. They
should have kept negotiating. And the transition could have been smoother. He could have spent time with both of his families."

But that was not to be. Elian never returned to this house after that dramatic morning, and since then his followers have hungrily scanned the occasional video clip or
photograph that shows a growing Elian back in Cuba -- nothing but an innocent pawn, they say, of the detested Castro.

"Oh, I look at him and I go, 'Oh, the poor baby,' " says Marta Santana, 70, who proudly announced that she was here "day and night" during the political standoff
and now spends every Sunday at the museum. "It is very hard. I worry about him. Elian is very angry. He is not happy. It is a different face. He was happy here. He
would say, 'I'm an American. I'm an American.' "

Santana, who has long, wavy Veronica Lake hair and was wearing a "Proud to Be an American" T-shirt and a large round pin made of a photograph of Elian's face,
says that people in Cuba do not care about him as his Miami relatives and friends did. "Bah," she says, frowning. "His father did not care. He had another wife,
another child. They were all used by Castro."

As she speaks, a tour bus pulls up in front of the house. A security guard -- on some Sundays dressed in a khaki uniform, on other Sundays in camouflage with
"Security" emblazoned on everything -- fiercely scans the crowd.

Delfin Gonzalez sits, legs crossed at the knee, on a folding chair in the front yard, accepting the good wishes of the guests. Someday, he and the others believe, Elian
will be sitting right alongside him. Oh yes, they say, Elian will be back.

                                               © 2001