Elian Returns to Cuba After Appeal Rejected

WASHINGTON —  Elian Gonzalez, the young castaway whose American odyssey became a metaphor for the changing relationship between the United States and communist Cuba, returned to his homeland Wednesday, bringing to an end a passionate and highly politicized international custody battle.

Perched in his father’s arms, framed by the doorway of a chartered jet, Elian smiled and waved a last goodbye to the country that was his home for seven months and three days. Several hours later, the 6-year-old shipwreck survivor and his father, stepmother and infant half-brother set foot in Havana--where they were greeted by a handful of relatives and officials and hundreds of schoolchildren waving Cuban flags.

“I want to thank the American people for the support they have given us,” said Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, in Spanish before boarding the chartered plane at Washington’s Dulles International Airport. Ten other Cuban friends and relatives who had joined the Gonzalez family in recent weeks left minutes later aboard a second chartered plane.

“We are very happy to be going home,” Elian’s father said.

In an earlier statement, Fidel Castro’s government urged the Cuban people to allow Elian to resume a normal life. “Now more than ever, our population must behave with the most dignity, serenity and discipline,” it said.

The family’s exit from the United States came less than half an hour after a court injunction requiring them to stay in America expired at 4 p.m. EDT. About five hours earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected without comment or dissent a request by Elian’s Miami relatives to extend the injunction. The court also refused an appeal by the relatives to take up the custody case.

The Supreme Court’s action ended a lengthy legal battle that began shortly after Elian was rescued from the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast on Thanksgiving Day. Clinging to an inner-tube for hours in shark-infested waters, Elian survived a shipwreck that claimed the lives of his mother and 10 others fleeing Cuba for the United States.

Elian was taken in by Lazaro Gonzalez, a great-uncle who lived in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. Lazaro and other U.S. relatives sought an asylum hearing in an effort to keep Elian in the United States. They later refused to turn the boy over to his father, who came to the United States to take Elian back to Cuba.

Elian ultimately was reunited with his father on April 22 after armed federal agents, acting at the direction of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, seized the boy from Lazaro Gonzalez’s home in a dramatic early morning raid that provoked a political firestorm across the nation.

Confrontation With Reporters

In Miami, Lazaro Gonzalez reacted with fury to Wednesday’s Supreme Court action, swearing and veering toward reporters as his daughter, Marisleysis, sought to hold him back.

“Man has decided, but God will have the final ruling,” Armando Gutierrez, a family spokesman, told reporters later.

Although the memory of his seven months in America may fade, Elian is leaving a lasting imprint on the U.S.-Cuba relationship, with business, humanitarian and labor interests challenging the political hegemony of the now-weakened Cuban American lobby.

The international custody battle over the little boy came to crystallize the bitterness felt by Cuban exiles over the legacy of Castro’s communist regime in the country they fled years ago. But it also pitted the exiles against the U.S. government, which had generally supported them in the past, and a majority of Americans, who said in surveys they favored reuniting the boy with his father.

Just this week, driven in part by political fallout from the custody battle over Elian, congressional leaders endorsed a landmark agreement to ease U.S. economic sanctions on Cuba. The compromise, which is expected to pass both houses, will allow direct sales of food and medicine to the island nation for the first time in four decades. It comes as the Clinton administration, over the last two years, has quietly instituted a series of measures making it easier for Americans to visit Cuba, open offices there and send money, food and medicine more freely.

The Elian affair “has really changed the atmosphere, the climate in which debate about Cuba policy takes place,” said Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “People just got pushed a little bit too hard by being asked to keep a father and son apart in order to punish a dictator on an island. It just didn’t sit right. Their discomfort allowed them to think differently about Cuba policy.”

Even before Elian’s arrival in America, the traditional clout of conservative Cuban American groups that oppose any accommodation with Castro seemed to be waning. Opposition to the U.S. embargo had been building for years among farmers, religious groups and younger Cuban Americans. Last year, the AFL-CIO called for an end to the embargo, reversing labor’s traditional hostility toward Castro’s government.

Elian added new momentum to those forces.

“There is an increasingly large and rather eclectic group of special interests, from academia all the way to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that for a variety of reasons all have a common interest in greater interaction with Cuba,” said Georges Fauriol, a Latin America analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The debate over Elian focused the nation’s attention on “the peculiar nature of our relationship with Cuba,” Fauriol said. “And out of that came the consensus that something had to change.”

Administration officials reacted with relief Wednesday to news of the Supreme Court decision.

“The law has provided a process, and this little boy now knows that he can remain with his father,” Reno said in a statement. Reno, who grew up in Miami and took a special interest in Elian, weathered heavy criticism for the raid that returned the boy to his father. The Justice Department said it had spent $1.8 million on the case through June 11.

“All involved have had an opportunity to make their case, all the way to the highest court in the land,” Reno said. “I hope that everyone will accept the Supreme Court’s decision and join me in wishing this family, and this special little boy, well.”

At the White House, President Clinton said he wished the case had unfolded in a “less dramatic, less traumatic way for all concerned.” But he said the effort to let Juan Miguel Gonzalez take his son home was warranted.

“I think that the most important thing is that his father was adjudged by people who made an honest effort to determine that he was a good father, a loving father, committed to the son’s welfare,” Clinton said. “And we upheld here what I think is a quite important principle, as well as what is clearly the law of the United States.”

Members of Congress who wanted to keep Elian in the United States decried the Supreme Court decision and the boy’s departure.

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), one of the GOP’s most dogged critics of Castro, said the court decision “casts a long shadow over our tradition of freedom.”

He said Elian’s return to Cuba “is the direct result of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy of appeasement. It is an appeasement that conveys weakness to the very kind of international thugs who only respect strength.”

Bad Light on Exile Community

Many lawmakers who favor lifting the embargo on Cuba said their cause had been helped by the custody fight over Elian. The spotlight it turned on the Cuban American community was unflattering and helped weaken the group’s grip on U.S. foreign policy, some said.

“This little kid brought a face to those people in Miami, a face that showed hatred, a face that showed ignorance,” said Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.).

The Gonzalez family clearly was in no mood Wednesday to prolong its stay in America. Shortly after the Supreme Court decision was announced, the family members set off for the airport from the Washington mansion where they had been staying as guests. Dogs sniffed the Cubans’ luggage before it was loaded onto the planes.

The night before, the family and their Cuban friends held a farewell party at the mansion for their U.S. lawyer, Gregory B. Craig, his family and other American supporters.

In Havana, a deliberately low-key ceremony awaited Elian when he set foot on Cuban soil for the first time since he and his mother set sail for America in a refugee smuggler’s rickety craft.

A delegation that included the boy’s grandparents, uncle and cousin--along with Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon--met the plane on the runway. Hundreds of Elian’s uniformed schoolmates, who were bused to the capital from his hometown of Cardenas nearly two hours away, waved Cuban flags and shouted their welcomes.

The subdued tone of the ceremony was in keeping with Castro’s vow not to transform the event into a political carnival, a frequent charge the Cuban leader leveled against the boy’s U.S. relatives during Elian’s long stay in Miami’s Little Havana.

Several communiques read on state television throughout the day recommended that the homecoming in Cuba’s highly regimented society be “disciplined and organized.” And in the streets, most Cubans reacted with thanks and relief that the national struggle for Elian, which included scores of mass demonstrations, was at an end.

Still, state television also proclaimed it “the biggest triumph” since the CIA’s ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba nearly 40 years ago, and announcers remarked that “the battle is just beginning.”

Officials said Elian and his father would be taken to an undisclosed location to visit privately with his grandparents. From there, they were to go to a renovated two-story seaside villa in Havana’s Playa neighborhood that was prepared for the boy and his family several months ago.

The house belongs to the Young Communists Union, which organized many of the protests that gathered hundreds of thousands of people to call for Elian’s return. Cuban officials have converted it to what they describe as a “readaptation center” for Elian, who was raised as a communist in a small fishing village but was introduced to Walt Disney World, Batman and luxury accommodations during his stay in America.

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Times staff writers Jacqueline Newmyer, Janet Hook and James Gerstenzang in Washington and special correspondent Dolly Mascarenas in Havana contributed to this story.