George Magazine
May 2000
Elian - The Untold Story
Four survived and 11 died in Elián's tragic shipwreck. This exclusive report reveals details of their doomed trip and their lives.
Saturday night in late November: Fifteen Cubans ranging in age from five to 65, straggled through a cluster of mangrove trees to the marshy shoreline of Cardenas, Cuba. They huddled around a 16-foot aluminum handcrafted boat with a 50-horsepower motor. Swiftly and quietly, they loaded the small craft with what little they would be taking: food, water, and some blankets. All the cash they had in the world was stuffed in their pockets.
The group included two extended families, friends of longtime standing. There were the Rodriguezes, with their two sons, a daughter-in-law, and a next-door neighbor. And there was the Munero clan: Rafael, 49; his wife, Maria Elena, 48; and their two sons, including 24-year-old Lázaro — the mastermind, boat builder, and driving force of the escape. Accompanying Lázaro was his girlfriend, Elizabet Brotón, a shy, sweet-faced woman of 30 with long dark hair and bangs along her broad forehead. With Elizabet was her five-year-old son, Elián González.
Also making the journey were another man and woman, and he five-year-old daughter. This couple, unknown to most of the others, were the only ones who had paid Lázaro for passage on the boat — $2,000, according to a Miami police report. Roughly half of the group were poor swimmers, and some could not swim at all. Several had a dread of the sea. Maria Elena Munero had never learned to swim and had a heart condition. She did not feel well and had had an ominous premonition about the crossing. But family was the cornerstone of her existence; if her husband and sons were going, so was she.
All 15 had their own reason for attempting the treacherous 90-mile journey, their own expectations, their own dreams. Some were seeking opportunity, some were fleeing a spouse, some loathed communism, and some simply wanted sharper clothes and a bigger house. But there was one immutable tie that bound them together — love and family, the twin casualties of the 40-year Cuban-American cold war.
Soon after arriving at the shore, Rafael Munero heard footsteps behind him and, alarmed, swung around. It was his brother Dagoberto, who had secretly followed them to the boat. Rafael sighed with nervous relief.
Five days earlier, Rafael had confided to his younger brother that he and his family planned to flee the country, and asked him to come along. Dagoberto refused. He'd had other opportunities to defect — when two other brothers had done so — but leaving was not for him. For days, the two argued. At times, Rafael would change his mind and say he wouldn't go, but after a pep talk from his son, Lázaro, he would recommit to the trip. On and on it went. The night before the journey, Dagoberto believed he had finally talked his brother out of leaving Cuba. Infuriated, Lázaro threw Dagoberto out of the house. Even at the farewell dinner of roast pork and rum in Rafael's apartment only an hour before leaving, Dagoberto and his brother argued. "Up until the last hour, my brother was more or less convinced not to go," Dagoberto told me, "but at the last minute, he said he was leaving."
Still, Dagoberto could not bear to lose Rafael, who had raised him after their father died when Dagoberto was still a teenager. He decided he would trail him brother to the sea and inspect the boat.
Circling the narrow, homemade craft, Dagoberto saw rusty spots, as well as repairs to the boat's bottom made with packing materials. "I can't believe you're leaving on this piece of shit," Dagoberto bellowed. "This is not a boat. It's garbage! You're crazy." But Rafael didn't want to hear any more. "We're leaving on it," he answered, his voice pitched with anger, "and if you're not coming with us, get out of here and leave me alone!"
Angry and wounded, Dagoberto shuffled away. "I didn't say goodbye to him. I left him alone," mumbles Dagoberto. "I left and I never saw him again."
Four days later, at around 6 a.m. on November 25 — Thanksgiving morning — a fisherman named Juan Ruiz and a friend were coming ashore after an evening working off Florida's Key Biscayne. They saw two people shivering together on the dock. Nearby lay a large Russian-made truck inner tube that had carried them ashore. The young couple were the fleeing lovers — 33-year-old Nivaldo Hernandez and his 22-year-old girlfriend Arianne Horta. "They were in really bad, bad condition," Ruiz said. Their bodies were latticed with sting marks from jellyfish; the man was almost delirious.
"They kept asking for water. We called the police and I ran to my truck and got some dry clothes. Their skin was a sickly purple color, all ripply with wrinkles. I wanted to help them take their clothes off, but the material was welded into their skin, and I was afraid that their skin would tear," Ruiz said. "The lady told us they had left Cuba with 12 others, but that everyone had drowned, including a little boy."
Three hours later and 35 miles to the north, off Ft. Lauderdale, two other fishermen spied a large black inner tube bobbing in the Atlantic. A small child was clutching its inside. The trembling boy was Elián González, who, in a matter of hours, would become the poster boy for ideological foes on both sides of the Florida Straits.
The three were the sole survivors to reach the United States. There is also a fourth boat survivor, Arianne Horta's daughter, Estefany. She is in Cuba, separated from her mother, just as Elián in Miami has been estranged from his father in Cuba.
Elián's mother, Elizabet, and her boyfriend, Lázaro Munero, the expedition's leader, had drowned, along with Lázaro's brother and his parents. Not far Elián's inner tube, the body of 61-year-old Merida Rodriguez, tethered to the end of a long rope, was found floating on the waves like bait. She had been the last of her family to die, after witnessing the drowning of her two sons, her husband, and a daughter-in-law. Some of the bodies were found as far away as 100 miles north, swept there by driving Gulf Stream currents.
The bodies of Elizabet and her lover, Lázaro; his younger brother, Jikary; and Merida's husband were never found. They joined the thousands of other failed seekers of a better life in the world's largest aquatic graveyard — the Straits Florida. Seeking to put a face on Elizabet, Lázaro, and all the others on the boat, I went to Cárdenas, Havana, and Miami. For three months, I met with dozens of their relatives and friends, piecing together the story of Elián's boat.
Arianne Horta and Nivaldo Fernandez
I first visited the two adult survivors, Arianne and Nivaldo, in early February. They were living in her aunt's small home on a torn up, potholed street in Hialeah, the working-class Cuban community that borders Miami. The strains of their ordeal and their new lives were painfully evident. They had no money, no jobs, no clothes, and they did not speak English.
Arianne is a small, dark-haired, sultry cubana with a beauty mark on her chin. Outwardly, she seems to have emerged from her ordeal entirely unscathed, her gaze riveted on the present and the future. She promptly enrolled in an English school in a Hialeah shopping mall, attending class every night. Soon after her miraculous crossing, she even went to the local peluquería and had dagger-length acrylic nails applied to her fingernails.
Nivaldo, a pensive man, seemed particularly stressed, his legs bobbing nervously, his face drawn and wounded. A light-skinned black man with translucent hazel eyes, he said he awoke every night, reliving the shipwreck. "When we remember everything that happened, we feel it deeply," he said softly in Spanish, "having seen so many people drown."
Moreover, after surviving three excruciating nights and two days in the raging Atlantic Ocean, Nivaldo found himself in a home with Arianne's relative, feeling not entirely welcome. When I spoke with Arianne's aunt in Miami, she was very candid. Repeatedly tapping her forearm with two fingers — a Cuban gesture signifying that someone is black — she sighed and explained that Nivaldo's "the first person in our family who is black." Indeed, racism among Miami exiles, nearly 90 percent of whom are white, is not uncommon, and it has been widely speculated that had Elián González been black — as are some 50 percent of Cubans on the island — "he would have been tossed back into the sea," as one caller put it to a Miami talk radio program. "For us," said the aunt, "it is a very big thing. We accept [Nivaldo] because he is a good hardworking man. What can we do?"
Over several interviews spanning two months, Arianne and Nivaldo slowly pieced together their ordeal. The voyage was ill fated from the beginning. They left Cárdenas at about 2:30 a.m., to evade the Cuban Coast Guard. Arianne had brought along her beautiful, peripatetic daughter, Estefany.
Within two hours, the motor sputtered and died. "We could still see land," Nivaldo recalled. Using oars, they paddled back to the nearest key off Cárdenas, where they hid for 14 hours, until sunset. At 6 p.m. they paddled back to shore.
Despite the poor omen, Nivaldo said, the group was determined to try again. But Arianne had second thoughts about bringing along Estefany, who was frightened and crying. Elián's mother, Elizabet, however, could not bear to part from her son. Moreover, she had unwavering confidence in Lázaro. After all, he had made the trip twice before, with less of boat than they had.
While the men repaired the engine, Arianne walked her daughter back to her mother's home and returned to the boat alone. It was a fateful, prescient decision that she is certain saved their lives. Had she struggled to save her daughter after the boat capsized at sea, as the Munero and the Rodriguez family members had done for one another, they probably both would have drowned.
"They fixed the engine," Nivaldo told me. "Everything was perfect." Having lost a full day, they motored off again at 3 a.m. on November 22. In lieu of life jackets, they took along three gomas — large black inner tubes used on the Russian-made trucks in Cuba. Originally, they planned to carry seven, but Lázaro decided they could make do with three.
Only hours later, in the glare of daylight, they were spotted by two cruisers from Cuba's Guardia Frontera. The guardsmen ordered them to return.
Impulsively, Nivaldo said, he seized Elian and held him high over his shoulders. "We have kids in here!" he called out. "There's five, maybe six children aboard." The Guardsmen backed down but continued to trail them for another hour. Before turning back, they radioed the American Coast Guard and relayed the boat's position, but the U.S. Coast Guard never located the craft.
The group worried about the Coast Guard. They knew that under current policy, they would immediately be returned to Cuba. To qualify for residency, they had to make it ashore. The "wet foot/dry foot" policy, a humdinger created in 1994, grants any Cuban who makes it to land the right to apply for asylum and stay. Haitians, Dominicans, Mexicans, and everyone else get kicked back.
Notwithstanding its heavy human cargo, the boat zipped across the Straits of Florida. In roughly 19 hours, they had gone two-thirds of the way and were within 35 miles of shore. Then suddenly, the sky blackened and the ocean roiled furiously beneath them. They had steered directly into a storm, a nasty northeaster. Bitter, cold winds and torrential rains lashed at them. "There were very big waves, a lot water was getting into the boat," recalled Nivaldo. Frantically, they tried to bail the water out of the overloaded boar, but they couldn't do it fast enough. "Then the engine stopped," Nivaldo said, "and we were nervous and afraid."
The winds jostled loose one fuel tank, spilling gasoline that burnt a hole in one of the inner tubes. And then, Nivaldo said, at 10 p.m. on November 22, "a huge wave hit and flipped the boat over." All 14 were thrown into the storm-tossed ocean. Through the night, they clung to the edges of the boat calling out to a few passing ships. No one heard their cries. "The first day we were all together holding onto the boat," said Nivaldo. At daylight they were able to flip the boat back over, but it was taking on too much water to be seaworthy. The men cut the ropes from the side of the boat, freeing the inner tubes. Two oars and the damaged inner tube floated downward. The 13 men and women and one child were left in the Atlantic, clinging onto the two remaining inner tubes. What few possessions they had brought, including most of the drinking water, disappeared into the sea.
The group split into two: The men huddled on one inner tube, the women and Elián on the other. Some hung onto the sides; others, the non-swimmers, were tethered with ropes. They succeeded in tying the two tubes together — and keeping the group together. Lázaro and some of the other men threw their bodies over Elián, who was draped across one of the tubes, to protect him from the waves.
Slowly, hunger and dehydration took their toll. After sunset on the first day in the water, 17-year-old Jikary Munero, Lázaro's brother, began to hallucinate. "Look: land. There's land, an island. I can see lights," he shouted as he swam off to find it. Lázaro immediately went to rescue him. Then the others heard calls of "Help! Help!" and Nelson Rodriguez swam to the aid of the brothers.
It was an unforgiving, stormy night bereft even of moonlight, and no one could see anything. But when none of the three young men had returned, after 15 minutes, the group knew that the worst had happened. Elizabet began to mumble over and over again: "I think they drowned...I think they drowned."
The next casualty was Lirka Guillermo, a 23-year-old pharmacology student who planned to reunite with her boyfriend, who had sailed to Florida a year earlier with Lázaro. "I want black beans and rice," she cried aloud, then suddenly let go of her inner tube. Juan Carlos Rodriguez, a 35-year-old maintenance worker from Havana whose brother Nelson had already drowned, tried to save her. He failed, and was never seen again, either.
Fatigue soon brought down Rafael Munero and his wife, Maria Elena. Neither seemed to have the will to hang after their two sons perished; they soon slipped away.
The following day, at sunrise, the survivors saw that Manolo Rodriguez, who had witnessed the drowning of his sons, had disappeared, too. Then, Nelson's wife, Zenaida, who had a lifelong fear of the ocean and couldn't swim, slid under the water.
Merida Rodriguez, having watched her entire family drown, barely clung to the tire with Nivaldo and Arianne. "Merida kept trying to drown herself, slipping into the water. She was saying, 'I want to die. I want to die," recalled Arianne. Nivaldo would push her back up and comfort her, telling her that they would be rescued. "Leave me alone I want to die," she mumbled like a chant. Nivaldo dozed off and when he awoke, Merida was no longer crying. She had slipped away. The coroner said she died of a heart attack — no doubt from heartbreak — and then drowned.
"People were drowning," said Nivaldo, "until it was just Arianne, me, Elián, and Elizabet." Strangely, Elián seemed removed from the entire drama. Before the shipwreck, Nivaldo said, Elián seemed excited about the journey. "We used to say, 'Popi [Elián's nickname], where are you going?' And Elián would say, 'Me voy para La Yuma' — I'm going to the U.S."
Now, draped across the tire, Elián dozed much of the time. "He was just sleeping, and when he was awake it was like an adventure for him. He wasn't panicked at all. And he would wake up and say, 'I'm hungry.' Elizabet couldn't say nothing because there was no food." But she covered him with her jacket, protected him from the grilling sun, and gave him their last bottle of water.
Elizabet's strength was ebbing. She had seen Lázaro, the great passion of her life, die, and now she struggled to live only to protect her son. "I want to die," she murmured. "All I want is for my son to live. If there's one here who has to die, let it be me, not him."
The following morning, November 24, Nivaldo and Arianne awoke and found themselves bobbing alone in the immense Atlantic. Sometime during the night, the rope that bound the two inner tubes had torn apart. Nivaldo and Arianne said they had no idea what had happened to Elián and Elizabet, but they knew one thing: Elizabet could not swim. "In the morning we couldn't see them anymore," said Nivaldo. "She could have lost her strength or a shark ate her. Something big must have happened, because her body never turned up."
As the day continued, Arianne and Nivaldo felt fish nipping their legs and arms. They saw dolphins everywhere, and prayed they would keep the sharks at bay.
That night, for the first time, they glimpsed the distant lights of the Florida shoreline. The current was against them at first, but by daybreak, they could see that were closer. They swam and paddled exhaustedly — their arms and legs thrashing at the water until they made it to shore. They were "dry footers." They could stay.
Elizabet Brotón
Cárdenas, once a bustling Spanish colonial seaport, is 90 miles east of Havana and 90 miles south of Miami. Notwithstanding a population hovering near 90,000, it has a small-town feel, where people meet and greet each other with affection and embraces. Sustained by Varadero — Cuba's most lucrative tourist resort — a half hour away, Cárdenas enjoys one of the island's highest standards of living. But that hasn't lessened its appeal for balseros (rafters) who favor the coastline, with its ocean currents that glide toward Miami. Thousands have chosen Cárdenas as their point of departure, where smugglers charge anywhere from $500 to $10,000 per person depending on the seaworthiness of the craft. Still, only about half of those who attempt the crossing are believed to make it alive.
Once the "Elián show" became the centerpiece of Cuban foreign policy, Cárdenas got a makeover. Street banners proclaiming the town's love for Elián were hung across a half-dozen streets. The entire block on Cossio Street where Elian lived was completely repainted, as was his schoolhouse. Gossip had it that even a hole in his desk had been repaired. Although most folks were bone weary of the relentless Elián exploitation, no one thought that the government was on the wrong side. Most cringed as the thought of being in the shoes of Elián's father, Juan Miguel: having their child snatched by angry Miami relatives who wanted to get even with Fidel Castro. "Qué desgracia!" they howled.
Still, one of Elián's school chums told me that the all-Elián-all-the-time activities in school were "very boring," adding, "We want Elián to come home so we can do something else."
The grief was still palpable in early February at the Hotel Paradiso-Punta Arena in Varadero, where Elian's mother, Elizabet, and two other boat victims — Zenaida and her husband, Nelson Rodriguez — had worked. While sunlicked Canadian and German tourists buzzed about sipping tropical drinks, the staff seemed listless, stunned by the loss of three of their own.
Lisbeth Garcia was Elizabet Brotón's best friend, and Zenaida was the godmother of Lisbeth's daughter. I found Lisbeth on the fourth floor, where the three women had worked together as maids. She had been close to Elizabet, whom she called Elisa, for more than 10 years — since Elizabet's marriage to Juan Miguel. She described Juan Miguel as "a very good man, simple, simpatico," adding with a smile, "not necessarily an intellectual, but from a good family." She stated that Elizabet was similar to Juan Miguel: both were quiet, unassuming people with an underlying decency. "She had a great passion for her son. All her heart was for her son."
Like nearly everybody else in Cárdenas, Lisbeth lives with an extended family — her mother, daughter, some in-laws, in a typical house, similar to a New York floor-through, with an added front porch and small, raggedy backyard. And, as in many Cuban homes, there is no hot running water. Water for cooking or bathing has to be boiled.
"I have five paternal uncles in Miami," she said matter-of-factly. But many have been less fortunate. "The sea is a cemetery of people," she said.
Lisbeth learned that Elizabet and the others had fled the way Cubans learn nearly everything, by la bola en la calle — street gossip. "Then I went to see if Elizabet's mother [Raquel] knew. She told me that Elizabet had sent her a letter saying that she had had problems with Lázaro and she was in Havana, and that when she returned she would live with her again. I told Raquel the truth. She started to cry because she still wanted to believe the note."
As she was speaking to Elizabet's mother, Lisbeth told me, Juan Miguel raced up the stairs. "He found out from a mutual friend. I didn't have the strength to tell him myself." Juan Miguel said he had just learned that Elizabet had left the country. "I told him that it is true," Lisbeth continued, her face flushed with emotion. "That she had left and took the boy. He started to cry inconsolably — for both of them. He loved her. She was the mother of his child, and they were good friends for 20 years."
But three days later, when Elian was plucked from the sea, an exultant Juan Miguel rushed to his home and began putting his papers in order: his wedding and his divorce papers, Elián's birth certificate. He knew he would need them to claim his child. He told friends he would soon have his son back.
For years, Elizabet and Juan Miguel, who began dating when she was 14 years old, had tried unsuccessfully to have children. She miscarried seven times, and then in 1989 was devastated when she lost a pregnancy in the seventh month. The couple redoubled their efforts, seeking obstetric care. In 1993, they finally had Elián. "Elián was a child very much wanted by her and Juan Miguel," Lisbeth said. His name is a fusion of their two names.
A few years after Elián's birth, however, the couple drifted apart. Elizabet, who held a fairly important position as a hotel-worker representative in the local Communist Party, moved back in with her mother and stepfather in large apartment over a pharmacy. Elizabet and Juan Miguel were formally separated by 1997, but remained friendly and shared custody of Elián, with considerable help from their parents.
Vivian, a neighbor whose children played with Elián, told me that Juan Miguel doted on his son. "He was always fretting about the boy. Always bringing him gifts, toys, taking him out for visits and spending the weekend with him "
One day, as I was chatting with some of Elián's classmates outside of his father's house, a van suddenly pulled up. Out stepped Juan Miguel, Elián's two grandmothers, and their spouses. Everyone headed into the home of Juan Miguel's parents, Mariela and Juan González, and I trailed along to get a look at the family without any handlers around.
Both grandmothers, Raquel and Mariela, said they were so troubled by Elián's listlessness during their February visit with him in Miami that they have come to believe he "was drugged," or under medication. "This was not the same boy," Raquel kept saying. "This is not the Elián we know." Raquel is a small woman whose face is etched with grief. Friends are concerned about. "She has always been a woman with a nervous condition, taking little pills," said one friend.
Juan Miguel and his wife, Nersy, 23, live next door to his parents in a house where Elián had his own room, a rarity in Cuba. They have an eight-month-old baby boy named Hianny — Elián's half brother. Nersy said Elián adored his little brother. Wearing a sleeveless denim jacket vest over a black T-shirt and pants, Juan Miguel looked like he had put on weight recently and seemed painfully ill at ease; his eyes were bloodshot — from weeping, friends said. At times, he looked truly miserable, his eyes curtained by a "wake-me-when-this-is-over" glaze. I asked him if he had spoken with Elián. "Not today," he said, "but yesterday we talked for 40 minutes." Then, his voice thickening with feeling, he added, "I miss him. I love him."
A few months after Juan Miguel and Elizabet split up, she fell in love with Lázaro Munero, a high school dropout who was six years younger than she. Bold, aggressive, and entrepreneurial, Lázaro couldn't have been more different than reliable, staid Juan Miguel. "Lázaro liked to party," said Lisbeth. "He liked discotheques. He had lots of spirit, lots of ideas...But he wouldn't think things through. He was very wild. He was called El Loco...and, at times, he could be a spoiled brat." But Lisbeth said that Elizabet "was lost in love" for Lázaro — "too much in love."
Estefany Horta
A few blocks away from Elián's house, I met the fourth boat survivor, five-year-old Estefany Rodriguez Horta, Arianne's daughter. Estefany, whose features have a dusky, exquisite beauty, is a child of skittish, mercurial moods. During my first visit, she charged around the house like a sprinter, pausing only to grasp at her grandmother as she flew by.
Estefany's hyperactivity requires psychological counseling. And her grandmother says her condition has worsened since her mother left. "Arianne needs to be with her only daughter," said Arianne's mother, Elsa Alfonso. "I miss my daughter, I love her. How must she feel about this one that is here? No matter how much I love Estefany, I am not her mother."
But under American law, Arianne cannot apply for her daughter's visa until after one year. Even then there may be a further impediment: Estefany's father, Victor Herrera. I caught up with Herrera — a stunning man with dark, perfumed skin and hair — at his job, tending bar at the Hotel Internacional in Varadero. He said flatly that "Estefany is not going anywhere. She has her grandmothers, her father, her friends, her school, and her neighbors," he said. "Maybe when she's 15 or more, that would be okay."
In Miami, Arianne counters that Victor was not much of a dad until after she left. "He was the richest man in Cárdenas, but he didn't pay for anything," she fumed. "Saying that he takes care of the girl is a lie." Nivaldo added: "When I first met her, the girl didn't even have panties or shoes to wear I bought everything for her. When Arianne speaks with her, she always wants to talk with me."
But however belatedly, Victor, who describes himself as "a revolutionary," now visits Estefany regularly and is keenly involved in her life. Even Arianne's mother nodded in approval of his parenting.
Lázaro Munero
According to the Cuban government, Elizabet's lover, Lázaro Munero was a petty criminal. According to his relatives in Miami, he was intense, hardworking, and fearless. Friends and family in Cárdenas say he was a bit of both: a charming, hot-tempered mujeriego (skirt-chaser) who often had troubles with the law.
Then he met Elizabet in early 1997 and became a changed man. "She wanted to get pregnant with him," said Lisbeth, "but never could."
Lázaro's Aunt Milagros Garcia in Miami said that he was arrested in 1992 for going AWOL from the Cuban Army and spent 14 months in a prison in Matanzas. But his uncle and half brother in Cuba said that Lázaro was jailed after slicing three fingers off a man's hand in a bar fight. After his release, according to Lisbeth, "he sold cigarettes and liquor at a kiosk in Varadero for a short time and also used his car as a botero, an illegal taxi service." He was soon arrested for driving the taxi, and in jail, he was beaten so seriously that he needed to be hospitalized, his aunt said. His mother filed a complaint with the local authorities concerning the incident.
In 1998, after he was arrested again, this time for "black-market activity," Lázaro decided to leave the country. On June 15, 1998, he fled with his close friend Humberto Perez Castro, an uncle, and another friend. The four men successfully crossed to Florida in under 24 hours in an aluminum boat with an outboard motor, similar to the one he used on his final trip.
Yet, after risking his life to reach Miami, he stayed only five months. In his West Miami home, Lázaro's Uncle Jorge Munero described his nephew's state of mind in Miami to me as he faced a large portrait of his brother, Rafael, who died with Lázaro. "My nephew spoke about Elizabet obsessively. He was really in love. It was incredible. He kept talking about going back to get Elizabet and Elián. He didn't really want to admit that it was because of her. He started making excuses like he missed his family. But he made a huge mistake. He got desperate because he missed her."
Lázaro's mother, Maria Elena, suspected he was planning to return to Cuba. Fearing the worse, she wrote Jorge, begging him to keep her son in Miami: After having written to [Lázaro] trying to make him think things through, we turn to you... You can just imagine the fright and fear at the idea of him doing something crazy that he would regret for his whole life...Coming this way, and no even counting the danger [the trip] would entail, what could be waiting for him is mistreatment, martyrdom, and prison. And that, I believe, my hear would not be able to handle... It seems like he only things of himself and his woman... Talk to him, and make him see life as it is."
Lázaro ignored his mother's pleas. "Every day it was the same thing, arguing why he wanted to leave," Jorge recalled. "I told him that what he was doing was a mistake. But he preferred either dying in the sea or jail."
In October 1998, Lázaro bought an inflatable raft with a small motor for $1,000 in Key West. Alone, he set sail for Cuba. Miraculously, he nearly made the trip without a mishap. But just short of land, his motor broke down and he was arrested as he re-entered Cuban waters. He was taken to prison in Santa Clara, several hours from Cárdenas, where, he told his aunt, he was beaten. "At first he was not allowed visitors," Elizabet's friend Lisbeth told me, "but then, Elizabet went many times — four, maybe six times." Two months later on New Year's Eve, he was released.
Initially, Lázaro moved back with Elizabet at her parent's place. But that arrangement soon became untenable "because her mother did not like Lázaro," recalled Lisbeth. Not surprisingly, Elizabet's parents were concerned about Lázaro's police record and checkered past as an "undesirable." Almost from the start, Lázaro had become a wedge between Elizabet and her mother, Raquel, with whom she had always been very close.
Undoubtedly, some of Raquel's distress and self- recriminations stem from asking Lázaro to leave her home, knowing that her only child would follow him. The couple moved into a small place rented some of the $1,800 he still had left from what he had saved working in Miami seven says a week in a car wash.
Raquel was blunt on the subject of Lazar. "I would rather not talk about that person," she told me, her eyes welling up. "I don't want to know anything about him."
After Lázaro's death, Jorge and his wife, Maria, discovered a five-page letter from Elizabet written in her exquisite penmanship on a yellow legal pad, along with three photographs of her and Elián. "It was a love letter," said Maria. "She [described] how sad she was with him gone, that she was often in bed crying like she was dying. [Elizabet] said she didn't come [to Miami with him] because she didn't want to leave her mother and didn't want to risk Elián's life on the sea. We realized that Elizabet was planning to leave [Cuba]. The letter describes all of it. We then realized that was when Lázaro told her to wait for him."
A special investigative report one the shipwreck in the February 8 issue of Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist party, had depicted Elizabet Brotón as a sweet, hardworking woman bullied into leaving by her dominating, violent boyfriend, Lázaro Munero. He is described as a rogue who forced Elizabet and Elián onto the boat and who was to blame for the entire tragedy.
But although Elizabet's letter is hardly a smoking gun, it seems to prove the Elizabet was not forced to leave her country, as the Cuban government claims.
When Elizabet and Lázaro finally fled, Lisbeth and many other friends were stunned. Lázaro had convinced them that he loathed Miami to hide his real pains. Lisbeth said that she doesn't believe anyone forced Elizabet onto the boat. "She knew where she was going," Lisbeth said. "She was timid, but she was not dumb. She decided to leave because she was in love."
Nor does she believe that her friend fled to give her son more opportunity. "That is a bunch of lies that `the boy should go to the land of liberty,'" she said irritably. "Those thoughts were never expressed by Elizabet. They were never her ideals nor her thoughts. I can say that for sure. She would have followed Lázaro anywhere in the world," she added, "and she loved the boy too much to leave him."
Zenaida and Nelson Rodriguez
In mid-February, I drove over to Zenaida and Nelson's old apartment in what is called El Pulmon. Literally, it means "the Lung," but the description is too kind. El Pulmon is made up of rows of unforgivably ugly, four-story, Russian-built concrete housing. We climbed to the top and knocked on the door of what was once Zenaida and Nelson's apartment. A man opened the door and explained that he and his family lived there. Less than two months after Zenaida and Nelson left, the apartment had been reassigned by the government. Housing is so scarce in Cuba that any property is coveted, even a dreary Pulmon apartment filled with family ghosts.
A few blocks away, we found Zenaida's aunt, who rocked in her chair, fighting back tears. She had seen her niece the day before Zenaida had left; it was Zenaida's thirty-eighth birthday. "There was no indication," her aunt said. "If she had talked with me, she wouldn't have left."
Zenaida's mother, Sara Sanabries, lives on the outskirts of Cárdenas, 20 minutes away. A small, sad woman with leathery skin, Sara seemed listless. She showed me photos of her daughter, a slim, light-skinned mulata with a shy smile. "I don't know why she left," she said. "I found out two days after she had gone. I went to the in-laws [the Rodriguez home] and people told me that the boat had turned over. I started to cry so much that I became ill, I couldn't function."
Sara said that her daughter had been married for seven years to Nelson Rodriguez, who, at 29, was nine years younger than Zenaida. "He was a very good man," Sara said. "He helped her when she had a spinal column operation. I loved him very much.
"I had a bad feeling because I had already lost a son over there," she added. "My son did not leave; he was thrown out of here. I pleaded and I cried. But my son had to leave." A year ago, her son was killed in a car accident in Miami. "I want to say that I do not like 'over there.' Every time one of my children arrives there, something happens to them."
Sara said she never got official notification from the government that her daughter had died at sea. "No one said anything to me," she said bitterly. "I turned on the radio. Her name was the second one, and that's when I knew for sure." She wiped at her tear-filled face with a wad of Kleenex. She looked up at me, her eyes darkening. Zenaida, she said, never would have even considered such a journey, except to be with her husband. "You know that Zenaida always had a tremendous fear of the sea. She never bathed at the beach. She couldn't swim"
The Munero Family
Rafael and Maria Elena Munero lived in a particularly funky part of El Pulmon in a ground-floor apartment looking out on a scruffy lawn littered with odd bits of garbage. Upstairs, I chatted with neighbors, the Diases, a black family whose home was bereft of virtually anything but a color TV, a slim bench n the living room, and a few bare light bulbs for the entire apartment. Blacks suffer more in Cuba because they are less likely than whites to have family in the U.S. Therefore; they do not share in the estimated $1 billion sent back by American relatives every year. And although Cuba has made huge strides in dismantling racism, dark-skinned blacks are not often employed in the hotel industry, Cuba's money pit.
The Diases spoke glowingly of their former neighbors. Ricardo Dias, a car mechanic, said that when his father died a year ago, Rafael and Maria Elena stayed up comforting him from 4 p.m. until 6 in the morning. He described Rafael's son, Lázaro, who had striking resemblance to his father, as a stand-up guy. "He didn't care if you had money, position, status — he treated everyone the same." Ricardo's sister Yaima stepped into the darkened room and joined the conversation. She said that they often saw Elián at the Munero' and that Lázaro seemed especially fond of him. "He was very good with the boy," Ricardo said. "He called the boy 'Pipo.'"
When the news leaked out, Yaima said, "Everyone was crying, worried, and feeling the pain. But we don't talk about [the deaths] here. The only thing that is talked about is what happened to Elián." Emboldened by his sister, Ricardo chimed in, and disputed the news in that day's Granma. "I don't believe that Lazar put a knife to the mother so she'd leave."
Ricardo took me a few blocks away in El Pulmon and up four flights of unlit cement stairs to the apartment of Rafael's youngest brother, Dagoberto Munero, who had followed Rafael to the shore and pleaded with him not to go. Dagoberto, a disabled petroleum worker, lives in four cramped rooms with his wife, his son, his pregnant daughter-in-law, and another young son, an asthmatic with an alarming cough. Dagoberto was still deep mourning, and there was much in the crowded apartment to remind him of his loss. Nearly every amenity — a color TV, a stereo system, a new refrigerator, a washing machine, a stove — was given to him by his brother the night he left, luxuries Rafael was able to afford by working as a bartender in a Varadero hotel.
Holding a framed photograph of his brother on his lap, Dagoberto described their last days in Cuba, roughly wiping the tears from his face with the back of his hand. "My brother didn't have that much desire to leave but he was going because of the family — his wife, sons." Dagoberto said. Tears rushed down his face as he spoke of his brother: "Rafael knew four languages. He spoke English, Italian, Spanish, and German. He was really talented and smart. My brother was a good worker; he had been working 20 years in the petroleum industry and 10 years in Varadero at the Kawama Hotel.
"My nephew Jikary was a nice, typical teenager who was always running after the girls — just like Lázaro," said Dagoberto. "My sister-in-law, Maria Elena, was a good, good woman."
"Elián was a lively boy," Dagoberto said. "He'd enter the house and in five minutes he'd have everything turned upside down. To my nephew, Lázaro, Elián was a son. He would take him to school and would bring him home. He loved him a lot."
Dagoberto took out a photo of Lázaro at the baptism of Lázaro's own son, a three-year-old from a prior relationship. "He never took care of the boy. He had no relationship with him," Dagoberto said. In Miami, Lázaro's Aunt Milagros agrees. "Lázaro had his own son in Cuba, but her would say that the boy was not really the one — that Elián was."
But the Cuban government claims, as does the family of Lázaro's ex-girlfriend, that Lázaro attempted to bring his son on the trip. He showed up at the boy's house on November 21, asking to take his son with him to his mother's house. But the child's mother hid the boy, saying that she was suspicious of Lázaro's intentions.
Dagoberto wouldn't disparage his nephew, but said he felt sure that the insistent Lázaro had convinced his own mother to make the journey, and she in turn, convinced her husband. Dagoberto also reported that Lázaro had complained about life in Miami, saying that he didn't like it "over there." He told him he came back only for Elizabet.
"The first time Lázaro left," Dagoberto said, "he was with Humberto Perez Castro, Lirka Guillermo's boyfriend. In Miami, they both missed their girlfriends. He missed Elizabet, and Humberto missed Lirka. Humberto said to him, 'Go back to Cuba and bring Lirka and Elizabet.' Lázaro made this trip in order to get his girlfriend, her son, and his friend's girlfriend, Lirka. It was all about love."
Lirka Guillermo
Lirka Guillermo's grandmother Rosa Betancourt, with her sheet-white hair and wobbly gait, looked older than her 68 years. A framed, 8-by-11 Technicolor print of Jesus rivets one's attention in her comfortable living room. The coffee table has been made into a shrine to Lirka, featuring a large framed portrait of the pretty girl with long, soft brown curls. Underneath its glass were Lirka's high school and college diplomas, letters of recommendation, and photos of her as a Pioneer (young Communist), in a bathing suit, and in a Halloween costume.
In 1994, Lirka's mother, Silvia Lluis, fled to the States and settled in Phoenix. Lirka wanted to stay and finish her studies to become a pharmacist. But government officials seized their home and evicted Lirka, saying that the spacious house was needed as a medical clinic. Lirka was told she would get another place but never did. She moved into her grandmother's home on Calle Spriu, joining her father, her stepmother, and her uncle, a well-known doctor in Cárdenas. Her father worked at a hotel, and the family had a car, good food even a telephone.
For five years she campaigned to get a home for herself, even writing Raul Castro in 1997: "I think my situation should have an immediate solution. Return my house or get me another, because I cannot pay for my mother's mistakes. My mother left her country. I stayed. So why should I pay? What message is there in that?"
Holding a flimsy plastic produce bag on her lap, Rosa pulled out a front-page obituary from El Nuevo Herald and pointed to a photo of Lirka's mother weeping at Lirka's funeral in Miami. "She died because they took her house away."
But more than a home, Lirka died for love. Pining for her boyfriend, Humberto, she had tried and failed to win a lottery slot to emigrate to the States. Without her own home or a job, she was determined to be reunited with Humberto. For the last year, she had been plotting with the Rodriguez family. They would leave together with the Rodriguez sons, their daughter-in-law Zenaida, and her friend Elizabet. But Lazaro had written Elizabet and told her it was too dangerous to try to come without him. Wait, he told her after consulting with Humberto, I will come and get all of you. So they waited.
Every Sunday, Silvia Lluis would call from Phoenix and speak with her daughter. On November 21, she learned from her Rosa that Lirka had run off to try her luck on the sea. "How could you let my daughter do that?" Silvia cried into the phone.
"Her dog is very sad because he misses her," Rosa told me. "I had a mass for her at church. Me and the neighbors. We always used to listen to music. But we have not played any more music here since she left. She was my only granddaughter."
Merida, Manolo, and Juan Carlos Rodriguez
Across the street at the boarded-up house of Merida and Manolo Rodriguez, the tragedy took on a searing dimension. Five members of the family had drowned, leaving only their son Orlando, 25, with whom they planned to reunite in Miami. He lives with Carmen Brotón, Elizabet's 21-year-old niece. The two had left Cuba a year earlier.
The family lived in Cárdenas but had come from the country town of Maximo Gomez. Manolo, 65, was retired. A serious but friendly man, he spent every afternoon sitting in front of his house talking with the neighbors. "Manolo farmed rice and would bring sacks of rice for the whole year," said Rosa. "He raised pigs. He didn't need to leave."
A family reunion had been planned for his mother's ninety-third birthday in early December. So it seemed inconceivable that he would leave in November.
"They were very good, decent people," said Rosa, standing in her doorway. "He should have waited a little. His family [from the States] were coming [to celebrate]. But he was in a rush. They left on Sunday, and on the next Friday, his sisters and their husbands arrived for the mother's birthday. They came here and left the dead there."
Down the street, I chatted with a neighbor who is a rare breed in town — a woman who vents her rage at the government with the same effortless fury as the exiles sipping coffee on Calle Ocho in Miami. "Todo el mundo tiene cinco caras!" she said, loudly enough for all the neighbors to hear: "Everyone has five faces! They are hypocrites. Not me. I am against everything here. Everyone partied and danced at a Revolutionary party on the twenty-eighth — even the ones who left and died. I know Juan Miguel's whole family. They are good people; the ones over there [in Miami], too.
"The Rodriguezes were very decent, honest people. Manolo was a political prisoner. Jailed two years. Their son Juan Carlos lived in Havana," she said. Juan Carlos, who perished, left his wife and nine-year-old daughter behind in Cuba. His wife had had an unsuccessful kidney-transplant operation and could not make the trip.
Another neighbor approached me and furtively handed me a large black-and-white photograph of the family. It shows Manolo and Merida with their young granddaughter, Taime, who's about 10 years old. I promised to return it promptly. "Don't mail it back to me," she says with a nervous laugh. "My husband is an official in the Party. Send it to her."
The sister of survivor Nivaldo Fernandez is another resident of El Pulmon. In the doorway of the apartment she shares with her father, Marta told me that her brother was blinded by love. "He was struck," Marta said, "by a golpe de amor" (a thunderbolt of love).
Only two years ago, Nivaldo and his wife of 10 years, Rosita, a pretty, freckled, light-skinned mulata, had bought themselves one of the nicest homes in Cárdenas. It had wrought-iron gates, a small pillared porch, and even air-conditioning. Both had high-paying jobs as chefs in Varadero hotels and were able to afford virtually everything they wanted, including Nivaldo's spiffy motorcycle. Rosita and the family were planning a lavish tenth anniversary party when Nivaldo secretly fled.
Marta said that, like Rosita, she knew nothing about Nivaldo's romance with Arianne. "We met her [Arianne] for the first time on TV," she said, with an amused smile. Although Nivaldo insists he left "for freedom," Marta disagrees. "He went only for her." Arianne's mother, Elsa Alfonso, agrees. "They met on March 26, 1999," she told me, "and it was love at first sight."
In mid-February, I went to see the couple who had been struck by a golpe de amor. Arianne and Nivaldo had moved out of the aunt's house into a one-bedroom place of their own a few blocks away. Both were working at an auto dealership — Arianne doing clerical work, Nivaldo fixing the cars — owned by a board member of the Cuban American National Foundation, the organization that has led the crusade to keep Elián in America. Nivaldo, wearing a blue pinstriped uniform with matching blue cap, sat next to Arianne and went through photos of their families I had brought back from Cárdenas. Their recollection of events had remained essentially consistent, but details continue to vary over time.
Wide fissures had developed between the couple and the relatives of those who drowned. Members of both the Munero and Rodriguez families believe that the boat was dangerously overloaded, and might have made it with a few less people. They said that Nivaldo was only an acquaintance of Lázaro, that he begged his and Arianne's way aboard, and paid for the privilege. Nivaldo claims that Lázaro was his good friend, and now contradicts his and Arianne's initial statement to Miami police and the Border Patrol that the couple had paid $1,000 each for passage.
Some friends and relatives of those who drowned are haunted that "two outsiders" and not their loved ones were the only survivors. Aunt Milagros and Ricardo Garcia stared glumly at the white tile floor of their home, where Lázaro lived for five months on his trip to Miami in 1988. Aunt Milagros' brother had made that trip with Lázaro, and had been fearful about Lázaro's return. "My brother always said that the worst thing is to cross the Florida Straits with family," Milagros told me. "Everyone tries to help each other and everyone drowns. And that's exactly what happened. That's why the couple lived. They weren't beholden to anybody but themselves."
Nevertheless, like everyone on Elián's boat, Arianne and Nivaldo have paid dearly. The last time I saw here, Arianne read me her night-school homework, a long essay she had written in English about how much she missed her little Estefany. "My life is not what I want because I miss my daughter," she wrote. "I am very sad. I am not complete because I miss her and need her in my life."
But it is unlikely that Arianne will see her daughter soon. As students of exile politics well know, the most enduring legacy of the Cuban revolution is the shattered family.