Photo: Ian Hunter

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Cuba

January 2000 / Squall Download 3, March/April 2000, pg. 10.

Demonstrators gathered outside the US embassy in London, January 2000, to protest over America’s refusal to return a six year old Cuban boy found at sea in the Florida straits.

Eilan Gonzalez was taken from Cuba by his mother, after she was persuaded by her boyfriend to board a boat illicitly ferrying Cubans to Florida for cash. The boat sank in a storm and both Eilan’s mother and her boyfirend died, leaving Eilan clinging to an inner tube. Anti­castro movements in the US are now conspiring with politicians to keep Eilan in America despite pleas from his father for his son’s return to Cuba.

This anti­Castro coalition of politicians and interest groups is strong in Florida and well­funded by right wing corporations like Bacardi.

They are claiming that Eilan’s future in wealthy America is preferable to his return to his natural father in Cuba. Now stalled in legal processes, Eilan remains on US soil as an ideological battle is waged over his future. His great aunt and great uncle, who are Cuban exiles living in Florida, have been wheeled out to lend distant genetic credence to the anti­Castro movement’s legal arguments.

During his stay in the US, Eilan has been given designer clothing, play stations and coca-cola and carted to Disneyland and numerous political conventions. Cuba demands his immediate return and has slated American attempts both to keep Eilan and to corrupt the child’s mind by showering him with allures and parading him as a political pawn.