Word: juan
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...those who have known Juan Miguel longest say he has always been content in Castro's Cuba. His father Juan Gonzalez was one of eight brothers and sisters, of whom five fled Cuba for the U.S. while three, including Juan Miguel's father, remained behind. "They sympathized with the communists and Castro," says cousin Marcia Gonzalez in Miami. Over the years the Miami branch often urged the others to join them. But INS officials say they have no record of Juan Miguel's ever applying for a visa, and friends in Cuba say he had made his peace with...
Cardenas is a pretty, poor fishing town of palm trees and empty streets--few people can afford a car--and Juan Miguel lives, by relative standards, the good life. He is among the lucky elite who are paid in dollars, in his job as a guard and cashier at the Varadero tourist resort, Cuba's version of Cancun. Altogether, in wages, tips and bonuses, he earns more than 10 times Cuba's $15 average monthly salary--enough to afford to buy Elian imported Power Ranger toys and birthday pinatas fat with Italian hard candy and German chocolates...
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...
...When Juan Miguel learned that Elian had survived the shipwreck and was safely in the hands of the Miami branch of the family, Lazaro and other family members immediately began quietly working out how father and son would be reunited. But that was before Castro began making his public demands that the Miami family return the boy, and before the leaders of the exile community swooped down on Lazaro's small house in Little Havana and drew the family deep into the local political swamps. Robinson Crusoe did not have the misfortune of washing ashore in a swing state...
...weeks that followed Elian's rescue, Juan Miguel watched from a distance as his son was ushered into the American Dream. Congressmen like Dan Burton flew to Miami to meet him and report to the waiting media circus that they had discussed every Yankee virtue from the Federalist papers to 401(k)s. Elian went to Disney World, hugged Barney, celebrated his sixth birthday with the gift of a toy gun. He fell in love with chocolate milk; a Florida cousin who visits regularly told TIME that whenever Elian's cousin Marisleysis poured him a glass, she made a point...