Word: cubans
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...never have to go back to Cuba. Castro would be denied his trophy, his revolutionary crowds would disperse, and attention would fall once more on the dissidents he keeps throwing in jail. Republicans would welcome two new voters, the Clinton Administration would celebrate the rule of law, and the Cuban expatriate community in Miami would put to rest the impression that they fled one totalitarian state only to set up a satellite version across the Florida Straits. No one would be asked to choose between freedom and love...
...apparently proved it to Reno, who talked with him, in the absence of any Cuban officials, for more than an hour Friday morning. She wanted to see for herself: Was he really a loving father--and did he really, truly want to raise his child in a country where milk is rationed for children over 7 and soldiers drown citizens who try to flee? On the way over in the car, Juan Miguel's lawyer Greg Craig told him outright, "You are meeting with the highest law-enforcement officials in the land. It is an entirely private meeting...
...branch of the family cannot stomach: namely, that Juan Miguel might be both a good father and a good communist, one who loves his son and truly believes he would be better off growing up in the faded, sandy precincts of Cardenas than in the hectic hothouse of the Cuban-exile universe in Miami. "It's an assault on the Manichaean mind-set of so many Cuban exiles," says Max Castro, an exile himself who teaches at the University of Miami. "To them, anything that's in Cuba is hell, anything here is paradise. If Juan Miguel wants to live...
Though he and Elian's mother Elisabeth were divorced, they remained close as they shared custody of their son; Elian typically spent four to five days a week at his father's house. Elian enjoyed that rarest of Cuban luxuries: his own air-conditioned bedroom. And before Juan Miguel sold it to pay, he says, for calls to Elian in Miami, the boy's father even had a car, a 1956 Nash Rambler, in which Elian rode through town like a prince, while many people relied on horse-drawn carts. "I'm not ashamed of the life Elian has here...
...help when, in January, Juan Miguel saw the TV pictures of Elian, dressed in a crisp new school uniform, heading off to a private school run by a Cuban-American political leader. Cuban psychiatrists had advised the father to tell Elian during their regular phone calls that the boy was "on vacation" and that they would be reunited soon. But starting a new school put a lie to that promise, and the family seemed determined to drag the case through the courts. Juan Miguel pleaded with INS officials to speed up the process, and they complied--worried that with each...