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When they met at last, face to face, Reno urged Juan Miguel to sit down with his Miami relatives and try to work things out. But it's too late for that, he said. There is too much anger and pain. He showed Reno his baby pictures of Elian and talked about their closeness. She told him, in Spanish, "It seems that Elian is a wonderful, bright and charming little boy. You and your wife did good work." Replied Juan Miguel: "All of the goodness you see is the goodness that comes from how we raised him."
By the time it was over, Reno had witnessed firsthand the devotion seen by INS officials in January, after they initially interviewed Juan Miguel at length and found that he was the kind of father who knows his child's shoe size and the names of his favorite teachers. He wanted Elian back, and he had no desire to live here. "Mr. Gonzalez and I do not share political beliefs," Reno said Friday afternoon. But "it is not our place to punish a father for his political beliefs or where he wants to raise his child." To do so, in fact, would "change the concept of family for the rest of time."
Even as she spoke, Juan Miguel's uncle and cousin were in the air, heading from Miami to Washington to try to get Juan Miguel alone and persuade him to come to Miami for a summit, show him the error of his ways, give him a taste of a new life. The family's options were fast drying up, even as the crowds chanted "Elian will not leave" and talked about using women and children as human shields. But Juan Miguel was not in the mood to talk to his son's "kidnappers." He and his family went sightseeing. On the phone Friday night, according to Craig, Juan Miguel told Uncle Delfin Gonzalez that no big family meeting was possible until Lazaro takes Elian by the hand, brings him to Juan Miguel and says, "Here's your son."
When Elian was rescued from his inner tube by fishermen on Thanksgiving Day, the first information he gave was his father's name and address in Cardenas. And ever since then, the true relationship between father and son has been a central mystery to this tale. Elian's relatives in Miami say Juan Miguel knew that his ex-wife was planning to flee to America with Elian, and they produce a Sprint phone bill to prove he had called to alert relatives to look out for them. They even say he had applied for a visa for himself on a number of occasions--all of which fueled the speculation last week that if only he could get to the U.S. and finally speak out without fear, he would never want to leave.
And so he arrived at last, only to confound all those who cannot imagine that a man might prefer to raise his child in Cuba than in America. But interviews with family and friends in Cuba paint a clear portrait that the Miami branch of the family cannot stomach: namely, that Juan Miguel might be both a good father and a good communist, one who loves his son and truly believes he would be better off growing up in the faded, sandy precincts of Cardenas than in the hectic hothouse of the Cuban-exile universe in Miami. "It's an assault on the Manichaean mind-set of so many Cuban exiles," says Max Castro, an exile himself who teaches at the University of Miami. "To them, anything that's in Cuba is hell, anything here is paradise. If Juan Miguel wants to live in Cuba with his son, then they insist he's a diabolical father."