Remember Elian?

Jennifer Kay and Matt Sedensky

The Associated Press

MIAMI – When federal agents stormed a home in the Little Havana community, snatched Elian Gonzalez from his father’s relatives and put him on a path back to his father in Cuba, thousands of Cuban-Americans took to Miami’s streets. Their anger helped give George W. Bush the White House months later and simmered long after that.

Ten years later, the Little Havana home – for weeks the epicenter of a standoff that divided the U.S. – is a museum dedicated to Elian’s brief time in this country, but visitors are rare. Almost no one involved in the international custody case wants to talk about Elian, who is now a teenager back in Cuba.

Even most Cuban-Ameri­cans have moved on.

“It was a very sour taste left in their mouths,” said Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-Ameri­can Studies. “But, realistically, it was a battle to be lost.”

Elian was just shy of his 6th birthday when a fisherman found him floating in an inner tube in the waters off Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving 1999. His mother and others drowned trying to reach the U.S.

Elian’s father, who was sepa­rated from his mother, remained in Cuba, where he and Fidel Castro’s communist government demanded the boy’s return.

Elian was placed in the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, while the Miami relatives and other Cuban exiles went to court to fight an order by U.S. immigra­tion officials to return him to Cuba. Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton’s attorney general and a Miami native, insisted the boy belonged with his father.

When talks broke down, she ordered the raid carried out April 22, 2000, the day before Easter. Her then-deputy, cur­rent U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, has said she wept after giving the order.

Associated Press photogra­pher Alan Diaz captured Donato Dalrymple, the fisher­man who had found the boy, backing into a bedroom closet with a terrified Elian in his arms as an immigration agent in tactical gear inches away aimed his gun. The image won the Pulitzer Prize and brought criticism of the Justice Depart­ment to a frenzy. No one answered the AP’s repeated calls to a number listed for Dalrymple in the Miami area, and there was no response to interview requests sent through intermediaries.

Lazaro Gonzalez declined to comment, as did his daughter, Marisleysis, who became Elian’s surrogate mother dur­ing his U.S. stay. The Justice Department has never released the identity of the agent and did not immediately respond to an AP request this week for the agent’s name.

Clinton, who was in Miami last weekend, said he would still make the same decision because it conformed with international child custody law.

“I did everything I could to try to have this resolved in a peaceful way,” he said. “Believe me, I hated what hap­pened because I thought we would be able to do it in a dif­ferent way.” More than 300 protesters were arrested in the hours after the raid, and the commu­­nity’s outrage did not subside. Al Gore, the sitting vice presi­dent, lost Florida that Novem­ber to George W. Bush by a mere 537 votes, and with it the White House. Many pundits said the Elian debacle made the difference.