In the morning, Craig met with Fidel Castro himself in an office at the National Assembly. Castro was reluctant to let Juan Miguel accompany Craig to the United States. “It looks like a rescue mission,” the Cuban dictator told the American lawyer. “I don’t care what it looks like,” Craig says he responded. “I want Juan Miguel to come to the U.S. now. Now is the time.” For three and a half hours, the American lawyer and aging Cuban dictator wrangled. Finally, Craig suggested a compromise: he would travel home alone. Juan Miguel would go separately. But it had to be soon: Craig wanted Juan Miguel in the United States by 9:30 the next morning, Thursday, when lawyers from the Justice Department would be sitting down again with the lawyers of Lázaro González–one of Elián’s great-uncles–in Miami to discuss turning over the boy. “Let’s do it that way,” said Castro. Craig looked at his client Juan Miguel. Elián’s father flashed a thumbs-up.
Last Thursday, just after dawn, Juan Miguel González stepped off a private plane at Washington’s Dulles Airport, just in time for the morning talk shows. He appeared somber and stiff, but convincing in his pained desire to be reunited with his shipwrecked 6-year-old boy. Suddenly, the international crisis over Elián González seemed to be heading toward a resolution–a messy one, perhaps, with a real risk of unrest or riot, but an outcome that will reunite father and son at last.
The new NEWSWEEK Poll shows that Americans believe, 53 percent to 30 percent, that Elián should be returned to his father, but by 59 to 23 percent they believe that he would have a more normal life if he stayed in the United States. In truth, Elián’s chances for a normal life are not good no matter where he lives. Since his mother died at sea last November fleeing Castro’s Cuba, leaving him floating in the Atlantic, little Elián has become a pawn in an extraordinary international game laced with ancient cold-war rivalries and the raw emotions of a custody fight. The Elián melodrama is no doubt gripping, providing fodder for the media and for politicians, but one thing is for sure: this is no way to treat a child.
The endgame remains uncertain. Having recklessly declared that he would refuse to help the Feds enforce the law two weeks ago, Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas more sensibly called for calm last week. But the hotheads were still linking arms outside the modest bungalow where Elián lives, and his two great-uncles and their phalanx of lawyers were in effect daring Attorney General Janet Reno to brave the mob. By midweek, the INS will transfer legal custody of Elián to his father, and order his Miami relatives to turn the boy over at a still-unspecified time and place.
Political passions and legal skirmishing may dominate the headlines again this week, but the less obvious story–a broken family’s struggle over a winning little boy–may be the more compelling tale. It can be reconstructed from the father’s own testimony to American government officials–and from the story told by his great-uncle Manuel González to NEWSWEEK in a series of interviews during the course of the long standoff. It is a drama of disaffection and confusion, but also of devotion and a genuine desire, missing from so much of the public carrying-on, to protect Elián.
Last December, some three weeks after fishermen found Elián floating in an inner tube off the Florida coast, an official of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service called on Juan Miguel at his home in the coastal city of Cardenas, about two hours outside Havana. Silma Dimmel, who runs the small INS office in Havana, later wrote in the official report that Juan Miguel “did not appear at all nervous or intimidated.” Although Juan Miguel, who is 31, asked to be interviewed in the presence of his own parents, he did not seem “in any way influenced,” as the INS put it in bureaucratese, “by some unknown person or persons.” Juan Miguel proceeded to tell a tortured, but affecting, story of fatherhood.
“In between relationships,” Juan Miguel recounted, he spent a good deal of the previous 15 years with the boy’s mother, Elisabet Brotons. “We wanted a child very badly, and she had a few miscarriages,” he said. Though divorced in 1992, Juan Miguel and Elisabet “got together again because we wanted to have a child.” When Elián was born in 1993, “it was a miracle… we were very happy,” said Juan Miguel. The couple split up again, but remained friendly. Juan Miguel paid more than the legally required child support and provided extra food and clothes for his son and ex-wife. Elisabet and her new boyfriend came over for dinner. Elián spent more nights with Juan Miguel than with his mother, in part because she lived in a tiny single room and he had his own apartment.
Elián is my life," Juan Miguel told the INS. “He is my first son. Wherever I went he went with me. I taught him how to swim, do karate; he has a parrot here, dogs, a bicycle, and all kinds of toys. As a matter of fact, I haven’t been to the barber because he isn’t here, since we always went together… He slept with me. That’s how close we are.” Juan Miguel was stunned when his ex-wife and her boyfriend fled Cuba in a small and unseaworthy boat, along with Elián and 11 others.
Juan Miguel told the INS that he did not want asylum in the United States for his son, who had been turned over to his great-uncle Lázaro after his rescue on Thanksgiving Day. He wanted him back in Cuba. At first, he went on, his uncles Lázaro and Delfín González agreed that “Elián should be returned immediately to me. Then all of a sudden,” he said, “things changed.” His uncle Lázaro began arguing that Elián should stay in Miami and even offered Juan Miguel money (reportedly $2 million) to give up his claim to the child. “I tried to convince him rationally,” said Juan Miguel, but Lázaro replied that he couldn’t “back off.” Why? Because he would “look bad in front of the Cuban people in Miami.”
Juan Miguel had another uncle in Miami, Manuel González. Slight and intense, Manuel, who works as a bus mechanic, is what the Latinos call muy recto–a straight arrow. He was, at least until tragedy overtook the family, in effect the patriarch among the three González brothers who fled Cuba for Miami in 1984. His nieces and nephews called him “grandfather” because he was the father figure who could be counted on to tell them to be dutiful, to do the right thing and not just run with the crowd.
Over the phone from his home in Cuba, a tearful Juan Miguel pleaded with Manuel to reason with Lázaro and Delfín. Manuel had gone to Spain on vacation right after Elián was rescued, so he had missed the early frenzy in Little Havana over Elián, who was being quickly transformed into a heroic and religious icon. Manuel readily agreed to help Juan Miguel get his boy back, in part because he could empathize: he had lost a son of his own, to cancer, at the age of 14. Manuel went to Lazaro’s house on Northwest Second Street in Little Havana, but was rudely rebuffed. Instead, Lazaro and Delfin publicly castigated their brother as a secret Castro sympathizer.
About once a week during the four-month standoff over Elián, Manuel spoke by telephone to Juan Miguel. (Castro had moved the father from his home in Cardenas to an apartment outside Havana, perhaps to keep a closer watch on him.) From the very outset, Manuel told NEWSWEEK, he urged his distraught nephew to come to the United States to press his case for the boy in person. All winter long, Manuel tried begging, cajoling and shaming Elián’s father, who seemed fearful and confused. On several occasions, Manuel recalled, he threw down the phone in his dining room over his nephew’s apparent lack of resolve. He tried taunting his nephew, pointedly asking him if he was free to speak his own mind and exercise his own free will. Still, Elián’s father did not budge.
A good communist who held a cushy government job as a cashier at a beach resort for tourists and well-connected Cubans, Juan Miguel viewed the U.S. government with suspicion. In his emotional phone calls with Juan Miguel that winter, Manuel tried different arguments. He told Juan Miguel that he had been reassured by a U.S. senator–Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in early March–that the father would not be kept waiting if he came to the United States to claim his son. Juan Miguel was not persuaded.
As it turned out, however, Leahy had performed a greater service than a good legal argument: he had found Elián’s father a good lawyer. At about that time, the Vermont senator contacted the Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, a human-rights activist and former general secretary of the National Council of Churches who had been working to reunite Juan Miguel with his son since Elián’s rescue at sea. “I think you need a lawyer,” Leahy told Brown Campbell. “I know one who can do it and would do it.” His name: Gregory Craig, a former senior State Department official who had defended President Clinton in his impeachment hearings.
Craig, whose fees will be paid by money raised by the United Methodist Church, flew to Havana to meet Juan Miguel in early March and assure himself that the boy’s father was not a stooge for Castro. But when he returned to Havana last week “we didn’t know what would happen,” he told NEWSWEEK. He was uncertain whether Juan Miguel would agree to come home with him, and unsure of Castro’s intentions. Castro had been talking about sending an unwieldy delegation of Cubans, including Elián’s teachers and classmates and a couple of psychiatrists. Was it all political posturing? But after a night and a day of negotiating, when Castro personally put Juan Miguel on the plane for the United States in the predawn darkness of Thursday, the only Cubans with him were his new wife and new baby boy. Presumably, Castro had some assurance that Juan Miguel would not embarrass him by defecting.
In Miami, meanwhile, the negotiations over Elián’s return were going badly. The tone had been set on the second day of talks, when Lázaro’s legal team asked for some water to drink. The government lawyers shrugged, so one of Lázaro’s lawyers left to buy some Evian bottles from the cafeteria. As the days dragged on, the running joke became, “So, are you guys going to give us some water today or not?”
Lázaro’s lawyers were very suspicious of Craig’s activities. When Craig began applying for visas for Juan Miguel and various teachers and classmates of Elián, one of the lawyers remembers wondering, “What the f— is that all about? Were they really negotiating with us in good faith?” And when Juan Miguel actually arrived on Thursday morning, it became clear that the government lawyers were not in a bargaining mood. The issue was not whether Elián would be turned over, but how. Washington would not even guarantee that Juan Miguel would stay in the country until the federal courts finished ruling on the appeals filed by the family lawyers, probably in late May. At about 4 on Thursday afternoon, the family lawyers got up and walked out. Elián’s Miami relatives would not stand in the way of the Feds when they came to get Elián. But neither would they help deliver him through the crowd.
In Washington, Attorney General Reno had wept back in January when she first read Juan Miguel’s anguished testimony to the INS official in Havana. She was moved again when she met with Juan Miguel, his new wife and baby in her office Friday morning. There were no Cuban officials present, and if Juan Miguel had wanted to seek amnesty, there was no better time or place. But he said that he wanted to return to Cuba with the boy. Reno told him that she would get his son back. The attorney general and Elián’s father embraced. Outside, Reno told reporters, “All you needed to do was listen to him and look at him and see how much he loved that little boy.”
The lawyers for Elián’s great-uncle Lázaro had demanded that a team of outside psychiatrists be appointed to determine if Elián should return to Cuba. The attorney general topped them by appointing her own team–two psychiatrists and a psychologist–to advise on the best way of turning over the boy to his father. Their answer was: right away, and with the support of all his family. Whether this can be achieved remains to be seen, but it appears that one way or another Elián will be given back to his father, probably this week. According to Craig, Juan Miguel is willing to stay in the United States while the appeals drag on–but only if he has a support group. Sending over a delegation of teachers and classmates is a “serious idea,” says Craig, not just Castro’s gambit to keep an eye on Juan Miguel.
With the right nurturing, Elián González may overcome his nightmares, but he has been scarred and prematurely aged, first by losing his mother in a terrifying accident at sea, then by the grotesque spectacle of his martyrdom in Miami. His extended family is probably permanently shattered. Last Friday, Uncle Delfin flew to Washington and went out to the Maryland suburb where Juan Miguel is staying in the home of a Cuban diplomat. Delfin was turned away. Back in Miami, Manuel is morose. He says he will not invite Delfin or Lázaro over to his house any time soon. Eventually, the slogan-chanting crowds will go away. “The party’s over,” he says, bitterly. “Now it’s the family’s turn to pick up the garbage.” Manuel at least has the consolation of knowing that he was thinking of Elián, and not himself.
title: “The Long Road Home” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-27” author: “Victoria Brister”
Sure, Europeans have made immigrant movies before. “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985), for one, depicted Pakistani immigrants “squeezing the tits of the system” in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. And as early as 1974, filmmaker Rainer W. Fassbinder explored African immigrants in Germany in “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.” But immigrant stories have never been central to European cinema the way the “Godfather” trilogy–not to mention “West Side Story” and even the recent “Gangs of New York”–have been to American film history.
Now that’s changing. A new crop of European films are bringing immigrant characters into the foreground. In large part, of course, that reflects the changing place of immigrants in European society itself. Half a million illegal immigrants come to Europe every year, and debates are raging over their status and benefits. On celluloid, immigrants are no longer limited to serving as waiters, maids and criminals; they’re now generating plots and playing starring roles. They’re featured in such mainstream films as the bawdy Swedish comedy “Jalla! Jalla!” and the hit British thriller “Dirty Pretty Things.” Last week producer Luc Besson opened the third in his phenomenally successful “Taxi” series, a smash-’em-up movie about a North African taxi driver in Marseilles who solves crimes his dim policeman buddy can’t.
Even Hollywood is looking beyond American immigrants to Europe’s own: Tom Cruise’s production company, CW Productions, recently commissioned a script based on stories of refugees sneaking from France to Britain via the Chunnel. Slowly, what was invisible is now becoming visible. “Why haven’t I seen you people before?” a white Briton asks a Nigerian immigrant in “Dirty Pretty Things.” “Because we’re the people you don’t see,” the Nigerian answers calmly. “We drive your cabs, and clean your rooms and suck your c–s.”
Such films are resonating strongly with audiences. “Dirty Pretty Things,” the story of Nigerian and Turkish refugees in London, was made by Stephen Frears, who also directed “My Beautiful Laundrette.” Superbly acted by Briton Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou, the French star of “Amelie,” the film chronicles Nigerian and Turkish migrants trying to dodge the twin threats of immigration authorities and criminals running a kidney-trafficking ring. The movie reveals a London unknown to those with Western passports: a city where desperate refugees opt to sell their kidneys, which are unceremoniously removed by quacks in cheap hotel rooms. Frears vividly evokes a neon-lit netherworld of minicab offices, greasy cafes, laundry rooms and the cracked linoleum of tenement flats. Though set in London, the film “could have taken place in five or six cities across Europe,” says Frears.
The European immigrant genre has blossomed just as the film industry as a whole has become more internationalized. “Ten or 20 years ago, films were American, British, French or Indian films,” notes Nick James, editor of the British Film Institute’s monthly magazine, Sight and Sound. “Now it is an international cinema scene.” Michael Winterbottom’s “In This World,” set for release this spring, is hardly a British film–despite its funding by the British Arts Council and the BBC. It follows the story of two Afghan refugees, Enayat and Jamal, making the treacherous journey from Peshawar to London. Shot in countries along the route–Iran, Turkey and Italy–and starring two young men from the actual refugee camps, it is a spare docudrama of flight. The film has plenty of echoes in real life, too; Jamal Udin Torabi, who plays the 12-year-old boy, was taken back to Peshawar after shooting ended, but returned to Britain on his own to apply for asylum. He was granted a temporary stay since he’s a minor, but will have to leave before his 18th birthday.
For directors, the immigrant quest is rife with inherent drama. “People are in situations that are so extreme that they are willing to take risks to make the journey to Europe,” notes Winterbottom. “That’s immediately an interesting [subject for a] film.” During an era in which jets, Nokias and modems have shrunk the world for the wealthy, and global elites swap metropolitan capitals like sweaters, distances for the immigrant remain huge. When Audrey Tautou’s Turkish character speaks of New York, where her cousin lives, she asks, “Is it true, they hang lights in the trees?” She might as well be talking about Oz. The money, guts and luck Enayat and Jamal need to make their journey show migrants don’t measure distance in air miles, like the rest of us. When Jamal sets off from the Shamshatoo camp, brusquely telling his clinging toddler cousin not to follow him, you sense the two will probably never see one another again.
With “In This World,” Winterbottom explores a quirky genre: the Euro-Western. Like many immigrant films, it is ultimately a movie about conquering an unknown frontier. His lonely travelers tell lousy jokes on camp beds before drifting off to sleep, like 21st-century cowboys. His shots of sunsets and buses rattling across flat, baking Iranian plains evoke John Ford Westerns and American quest movies like “Easy Rider.” “[I wanted to] make a road movie, and it seemed like this would be a very long road,” says the British director. “I had done a road movie in Britain. But I basically had to walk round in circles, since no road in Britain is long enough to make a road movie.”
Filmmakers are now tackling the subject of immigration through other genres, too, including film noir and comedy. French filmmaker Claire Denis’s “I Can’t Sleep” is a noir exploration of Parisian racism toward immigrants, notes Isolina Ballesteros, who is writing a book on the new immigration-film genre in Europe. “Jalla! Jalla!,” a risque comedy of manners set in Sweden, features a Lebanese migrant trying to duck an arranged marriage with a nice Lebanese-Swede. Shot with a digital camera by 23-year-old Josef Fares, the film became a massive hit in Sweden when it opened in 2001 and was later released in 20 countries.
But the biggest indication that immigrant films have truly arrived in Europe is that they are no longer necessarily sold as such. British Asian comedies like “East Is East,” which features a wacky British Muslim family, or “Bend It Like Beckham,” in which a young British Asian heroine wants to play football, are marketed not as “immigrant stories,” but as broader comedies, says British writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Tellingly, both successful comedies are told from the perspective of the second generation, born and bred in Britain, instead of the more “foreign” first generation immigrants. Backers and critics are more open to films that are cheerily multicultural than those overtly about immigrants. The reason, she says, is that newcomers have never been as celebrated in Europe as they are in America. “Politicians have been abysmal at telling the story of immigrants,” she notes. “In this country, there’s never been any affirmation of their value.” Perhaps this new crop of movies will succeed in finally giving them their due.
With Tracy McNicoll in Paris
