Television critic Glenn Garvin, who also happened to be responsible for Fidel Castro’s obituary for the Miami Herald, takes a look at a CNN documentary about the custody fight over one famous Cuban boy by the name of Elian Gonzalez:
Elian offers, in painful detail, the whole saga of 5-year-old Elian’s 1999 voyage from Cuba to Miami on a boat that broke up and sank somewhere in the Florida Straits. His mother managed to get Elian into an inner tube before slipping beneath the waves with 10 others. The inner tube drifted to Miami, where Elian became the center of an epic tug of war with Havana that ended with federal agents kicking in the door of the home where he was staying, and snatching him at gunpoint so he could be shipped back to Havana.
The Elian story triggered much journalism that ranged from uncomprehending to obscene. Be my guest at choosing which label Eleanor Clift, then of Newsweek, should get for cheerleading the Clinton administration’s decision to send Elian back to Cuba, where “he doesn’t have to worry about going to school and being shot at, where drugs are not a big problem, where he has access to free medical care and where the literacy rate I believe is higher than this country’s.” (And no, she didn’t send her own kids there.)
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