Havana Cuba. – In the early morning of November 22, 1999, a group of Cubans left illegally from a point near the Varadero beach, in an improvised boat that sank a few hours later. The only survivor of the 13 migrants was the five-year-old boy Elián González Brotons, whose miraculous salvation, thanks in part to a herd of dolphins, went around the world, generating astonishment, empathy and even prophetic inspirations.
The event also put Cuba in the spotlight on a global scale, a circumstance preferred by Fidel Castro to display his anti-imperialist rhetoric and turn the tragedy of a child who saw his mother drowned into one of the most intense and exhausting political crusades. that the Cuban people remember.
Elian’s trauma was eclipsed by the voluntarism of the caudillo and the unscrupulous media manipulation that, from both sides, took place around the event. Fidel Castro took the matter personally and sought a way to divert international attention from a failed system that generated three migratory waves in 30 years, to place it, once again, on the myth of David against Goliath, the Island harassed by the Empire, and other known high-sounding.
His egocentrism buried the memory of Elizabeth Brotons, who was blamed from power, the state media and a large part of public opinion for having put her son’s life at risk. When talking about the “little rafter Elian”, the fact that his mother, before disappearing in the waters of the Florida Straits, tied him to the raft to save his life, is never mentioned.
In the narrative that has prevailed, the boy’s survival is owed to the dolphins and to Fidel Castro, the ultimate leader who brought him back after months of insufferable, massive racket that must have cost millions to a nation sinking ever deeper into misery and dependency.
It would have been enough for Elián’s father to process the child’s claim, since he had every right to demand his return as long as he had not authorized his illegal departure from the country; but Fidel Castro needed to make a scandal, that once again his perverted revolution would triumph over “the Cuban-American mafia”, which did not want to return the child to fulfill the will of his mother to get him out of communist hell.
Fidel Castro managed to get Elián to return, that the father of the child become a strong man for the regime and that the “disaffected” Elizabeth Brotons was never mentioned.
But this was not enough to satisfy his ego. Elián González was indoctrinated to the point of choosing military life under the Castro yoke and accept the card of the Communist Party of Cuba. They will not reach all the masses to give peace to that mother who sacrificed her life so that her son would know freedom.
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