Word: elian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there was something peculiarly awful about watching a parallel story of water, fate and power play itself out mercilessly upon a boy no more prepared for tragedy than any other six-year-old. Elian Gonzalez was dazed when fishermen picked him up on Thanksgiving Day, lashed atop an inner tube in the Atlantic off Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He too was half crazy--from dehydration, from the loss of his mother, from watching his other companions, after the small boat that had brought them from Cuba sank in heavy seas, slip one by one into the deep. And the sharks...
...weeks since Elian was delivered like some kind of Thanksgiving gift by two Florida cousins out trolling for dolphinfish, the outline of his 2 1/2 days on the blue water has been colored in with horrible detail. There have been tales of his boatmates who, when they realized their loved ones had drowned in the night, stopped treading water and went to join them. And hints of how Elian's mother Elizabet, 29, a woman with deep, happy eyes and a proud Latin gait, bound him to that inner tube even as she fought to stay alive. And even...
...needed it all. If his sea journey was difficult, his landfall has been little easier. Onshore, Elian has been both cradled and buffeted by the strongest emotion we have, the tenderness of parents toward children in trouble--their own and anyone else's. We sympathize with his father, who wants Elian returned home to Cuba. But then we remember that Elian's mother drowned trying to get him to freedom. And we're disgusted with both Castro and the anti-Castro zealots in Miami who are shamelessly using Elian and his father as fresh draftees in their tiresome feud...
More than simply landing in the middle of the always strained relations between the U.S. and Cuba, Elian Gonzalez arrived in the midst of a mounting national argument about who, besides parents, gets to have a say in how and where children are reared (see following story). This week the Supreme Court will take up a case in which grandparents are seeking more visitation with their granddaughters. And last week an Illinois court upheld the right of two white parents to keep and raise a black child they have nurtured for nearly four years. In these and other custody cases...
...case, Elian won't be going anywhere before January 18, when a federal court hears a challenge by his Florida family to the Immigration and Naturalization Service ruling that the boy should be returned to the custody of his father. The INS Friday rejected a second application for asylum on Elian's behalf, on the grounds that only Juan Gonzalez is his legal guardian and has the sole right to speak for the child. Still, that's not going to stop the Florida Gonzalez family, the Cuban-American activist community and conservative Republican lawmakers from fighting tooth and nail...