Elian Gonzalez was taken at gunpoint 20 years ago today and returned to Fidel Castro

We remember.

Twenty years ago Saturday, April 22nd in a pre-dawn raid Elian Gonzalez was taken at gun point from his family in Miami, and sent back to Cuba. His mother had died trying to bring her son to freedom, but the Clinton Administration returned the young boy to the Castro regime.

The Castro regime had the winning narrative, framing the argument as a boy being reunited with his father. The reality was far more complicated, but did not fit into newscasts that demonized the Cuban community in South Florida and clamored for the child's return.

Fidel Castro would often parade his trophy Elian Gonzalez in Cuba

I still remember liberal Cuban friends of mine in tears telling me that the only radio show they could listen to was Rush Limbaugh, because all the others were full of hateful and bigoted tirades against Cuban exiles and Cuban Americans.

When people wonder why Cuban-Americans continue to vote Republican in large numbers they only need to revisit history.

President Clinton did well with Cuban voters in 1992 and 1996, but his moves to normalize relations began early with the Castro regime.  We learned later that much had been going on behind the scenes in the early days of  the Clinton Administration.
 
According to Raul Castro in a December 2008 interview with Sean Penn under the Clinton Administration a new relationship was initiated between the Castro regime's military and the United States military : "We've had permanent contact with the US military, by secret agreement, since 1994." Not only contacts but joint military exercises. Again the source is Raul Castro:

"It is based on the premise that we would discuss issues only related to Guantánamo. On February 17, 1993, following a request by the United States to discuss issues related to buoy locators for ship navigations into the bay, was the first contact in the history of the revolution. Between March 4 and July 1, the Rafters Crisis took place. A military-to-military hot line was established, and on May 9, 1995, we agreed to monthly meetings with primaries from both governments. To this day, there have been 157 meetings, and there is a taped record of every meeting. The meetings are conducted on the third Friday of every month. We alternate locations between the American base at Guantánamo and in Cuban-held territory. We conduct joint emergency-response exercises. For example, we set a fire, and American helicopters bring water from the bay, in concert with Cuban helicopters.

On Clinton's watch the Castro regime shot down two civilian planes in international airspace in a premeditated and calculated conspiracy that allegedly included members of the Clinton Administration and the Cuban Wasp spy net work that would be broken up on September 12, 1998 when it was discovered that they had planned acts of sabotage and terrorism on American soil, including the murder of an alleged CIA agent living in Bal Harbour Florida. 

During the Clinton Administration a threat assessment was prepared by the Department of Defense that reported Cuba was no longer a threat to the national interests of the United States, but in 2001 it was discovered that the main author of the report, Ana Belen Montes, was a long time agent of  the Castro regime. 

Phyllis Schlafly

While the mainstream media was demonizing Cuban Americans during the Elian affair, in January 2000 conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly acknowledged Elian's mother's sacrifice for her son to live in freedom, understood where Cuban Americans were coming from, and made the case as follows:

The mother of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez sacrificed her life so that her son could grow up in America. Her dying wish, according to a Cuban man who survived for two days on an inner tube, was that Elian could reach the United States and freedom. A reporter for the socialist Madrid newspaper El Pais investigated and learned that Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, had wanted Elian to go to America. Elian's relatives in Florida know very well that Elian is far better off in free America than in Communist Cuba where people are denied the everyday liberties we take for granted, including freedoms of speech, travel, and education.

One person, however, disagrees: Fidel Castro, whose apparatchiks no doubt "persuaded" Mr. Gonzalez to change his story. Elian's escape, like all defections, is an acute embarrassment to Castro. Communist suppression of the right to travel has long demonstrated the inhumanity of its system. The Berlin Wall, guarded by sharpshooters ordered to kill anyone who attempted to escape, symbolized the terror of Communism for an entire generation.

Flight that risks death constitutes the ultimate repudiation of Communist regimes and is often followed by vindictive attempts at retaliation by the humiliated dictator. KGB files newly opened to the West are full of examples.

[...]

Like all dictators, Castro is used to getting his way. He deliberately raised the political stakes of this controversy to the point where Elian Gonzalez is unlikely to have a normal life if he were returned to Cuba. The arguments about father's rights and family unity are phony when it comes to Elian's predicament. If U.S. authorities send Elian back to Cuba, it won't be to Elian's father; it will mean sending him back to be paraded around as a Castro trophy and raised, perhaps in a daycare center, to be a good Communist. The only persons the United States has forcibly returned to Cuba are criminals, and Elian surely is not a criminal. Does anyone believe that, if Elian's mother had died in the act of throwing her son over the Berlin Wall that we would have forcibly returned her boy to East Germany?

The mystery is why Clinton has sided with Castro. Perhaps his corporate friends are salivating over the potential for investments in tourism, gambling and other industries in Cuba where forty years of Communism have depressed the economy to the point where the ultimate luxury is a 1956 Chevrolet. Perhaps the Clinton Administration considers deporting Elian as necessary to appease Castro and facilitate open trade relations. Based on Clinton's policies toward Communist China, "follow the money" is usually a good explanation of his foreign policy.

Phyllis passed away in 2016,  and her life is now being caricatured and mischaracterized on FX and Hulu. Sadly, we Cuban-Americans can relate to such demonization, but the only defense is to lay out the facts and challenge the lies.

Vanessa Garcia in The Miami New Times has written an important article 20 years later and brought forth some inconvenient facts that explode the dominant narrative:

As the Elián story dragged on, those who were allowed inside his circle were able to glimpse that reality. One such person was the late Roman Catholic Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, whom Reno appointed to mediate when Elián's two grandmothers were dispatched to the United States in January 2000 to argue on behalf of Juan Miguel that Elián should be sent back.

Reno was sure O'Laughlin would remain neutral, but she did not. "I expected to witness a meaningful visit. But I had no idea that what I saw would be so powerful that it would change my mind, persuading me that Elián should not be returned — at least for now — to his father in Cuba," O'Laughlin wrote in a February 2000 New York Times op-ed.
O'Laughlin believed the grandmothers were not acting out of their own "free will." She also discovered that one of them wanted to defect. "This talk of defecting got me to thinking; if one of the adults wanted out, perhaps it was not a good place for the child," she subsequently elaborated to the Miami Herald.

The Elián drama came to a head at 5:15 a.m. April 22, 2000, when, on Reno's orders, federal agents forcibly entered the house where the boy was living. The raid was code-named "Operation Reunion."

[...]

Castro, who had "summoned throngs into the streets to demand Elián's return" while Elián was on U.S. soil, even built a museum in the boy's hometown of Cárdenas, on the island's northern coast. (When Robinson traveled to Cárdenas to try to interview Elián's father, a police officer and a local party official stationed outside Juan Miguel's door politely turned him away.) By 2016, when he was 21 years old, Elián referred to Fidel as his "father."

Other facts have emerged in the intervening years as well. In 2002, an internal memo written by INS attorney Rebeca Sánchez-Roig came to light, revealing that some INS officials believed Elián's father had applied for an immigrant visa at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana through the annual lottery. The memo also pointed to suspicions that Juan Miguel was being "coerced by the Castro regime." A handwritten notation Sánchez-Roig added on a printout of the memo indicated that then-INS Commissioner Doris Meissner had ordered the memo destroyed the very next day and decreed that no further discussions related to the Elián case be put in writing.

Two years earlier, Juan Miguel's cousin María Isabel Martell, who had fled Cuba to the States, had told the Associated Press: "I know for a fact that Juan Miguel wanted to come to the United States. Juan Miguel told me, in front of his mother and his relatives, that sometime in the future he would come, even if he had to come in a tub."
Thus refocused, "Elián" is neither a custody case nor the saga of a child separated from his father. It's the chronicle of a political chess match, populated with the full complement of power brokers and pawns.

And Alan Diaz's photo is precisely the image the victorious Castro would have handpicked to capture the endgame.

Less than six months later Bill Clinton shook hands with Fidel Castro in September of 2000 and a month later signed the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act and opened cash and carry trade with the Castro dictatorship at the end of his Administration. 

Bill Clinton shook hands with Fidel Castro in 2000 and Raul Castro in 2015

Opposition in Congress led to that trade not being subsidized by U.S. taxpayers through government backed credits ensuring that business between the two countries would be cash and carry.

Elian Gonzalez with Gerardo Hernandez ( spy guilty of murder conspiracy pardoned by Obama)

This combined with the Elian episode cost Al Gore Cuban American support in 2000 and led to the loss of Florida in a tight race. President Clinton got 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida in 1996. In 2000, Gore drew less than 20 percent. Bush got 50,000 more Cuban American votes than the previous Republican presidential candidate. According to William Schneider writing in The Atlantic "that's a hundred times greater than Bush's certified margin of victory in Florida. " The taking of Elian Gonzalez on April 22, 2000 would change the course of American and world history. There would not have been a Florida recount or a Bush presidency  if not for what happened twenty years ago today.