The cheers and tears that greeted Elian as he emerged from the airplane in his father’s arms were neither staged nor isolated. When the news spread across the island nation of 11 million people on Wednesday afternoon that the U.S. Supreme Court had turned down the last-ditch appeal of the boy’s Miami relatives, a quiet sense of satisfaction and justice took root among Elian’s countrymen. Right up until the last minute, many Cubans had doubted that the boy could be heading home as early as this week. “We’ve been waiting for seven months,” Lazaro Miranda, the official historian of Elian’s hometown of Cardenas said on Wednesday night. “After so much time, how can we be sure of anything?”
But inside the airport terminal building early Wednesday evening, caution gave way to celebration as whites and blacks, men and women, uniformed Interior Ministry guards and housewives all burst into applause when Elian set foot on Cuban soil for the first time in more than seven months. “I am feeling superemotional,” said Engracia Hernandez Gonzalez, a mother of two teenagers who wiped away tears as Elian climbed into the back seat of an aging Lada sedan and drove off. “I wish it had happened a lot sooner, but we always knew he would come back one day.”
The deliberately low-key reception accorded Elian by the government was partly driven by pure politics. The Castro regime decided early on to downplay the boy’s homecoming as a way of distancing itself from the Miami relatives’ ostentatious parading of Elian in front of the TV cameras outside their Little Havana house on an almost daily basis. But the onset of Elian fatigue among many Cubans may also have played a discreet role. Many of the billboards that sprouted around Havana last winter to demand the boy’s prompt return have been long since taken down. The once ubiquitous Elian T-shirts that Cubans proudly donned in the early stages of the rafter-boy saga have also mostly vanished. “I am glad because now I can watch TV again,” said one jobless resident of the Vedado neighborhood of Havana who would only give his name as Rey. “No more ‘Elian, Elian, Elian.’ I was tired of all that.”
The convergence of interests between Washington and Havana over Elian Gonzalez’s fate gave rise to unprecedented bilateral cooperation and, in at least some quarters, to hopes of a thaw in relations between the two countries. “We feel extremely happy because we see our country’s relations with the United States getting better every day,” gushed airport skycap Orlando Busquet minutes after Elian’s jet had landed.
But that is little more than wishful thinking-at least for the foreseeable future. With only seven months left in office, President Clinton is unlikely to make any major unilateral concessions to Castro that could weaken Al Gore’s bid for the White House. At the same time, the historic Congressional agreement earlier this week to permit food sales to Cuba failed to mollify Havana. If anything, senior Cuban officials instead chose to focus on elements in the pending legislation that undercut the overall political import of the bill, such as the continued embargo on Cuban exports to the United States and the ban on providing financing that would help the Castro regime buy American foodstuffs. “This not only doesn’t modify the blockade,” declared Cuban National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcon. “In some cases it makes it worse.”
Even as ordinary Cubans were quietly hailing the repatriation of the world’s most famous first-grader, officials were busying themselves with preparations for another outdoor anti-American rally in the eastern town of Manzanillo on Saturday. “I don’t think (bilateral relations) are heading anywhere,” says Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies. “We have a presidential election and whatever Congress approved the other day, that’s it. I don’t think the approval of food sales is a significant victory for the anti-embargo lobby [n the U.S.] There are limited areas of [bilateral] collaboration, but that doesn’t mean the revolution is changing or that Cuba is moving towards capitalism.”
