In the year 2000, little Elián Gonzalez was seized by federal agents in a predawn raid.
Elián had become embroiled in a heated international custody and immigration controversy involving the governments of Cuba and the United States; his father, Juan Miguel González Quintana; his other relatives in Cuba and in Miami; and Miami’s Cuban-American community.
His mother, Elizabeth Brotons Rodríguez, drowned in November 1999 while attempting to leave Cuba with Elián and her boyfriend to get to the United States. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) initially placed Elián with paternal relatives in Miami, who sought to keep him in the United States against his father’s demands that Elián be returned to Cuba.
A United States district court ruling from the Southern District of Florida that only Elián’s father, and not his extended relatives, could petition for asylum on the boy’s behalf was upheld by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, by order of U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, federal agents took Elián from the paternal relatives and returned him to his father in Cuba in June 2000.
After Elián was returned to his father’s custody, he remained in the U.S. while the Miami relatives exhausted their legal options. He returned to Cuba 7 months and one week after he had left there.
In Cuba, Elián became a member of the Communist youth league and supposedly became a good friend of Fidel Castro, who first met Elián at one of his filmed birthday parties.
In a November 2013 speech, Elián described his time in the United States as “very sad times for me, which marked me for my whole life”, asserting that the Cuban Adjustment Act led to the denial of his rights, including “the right to be together with my father, the right to keep my nationality and to remain in my cultural context.” However, he hopes to travel to the US again someday to “give his love to the American people.”
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