Elián Gonzáles as the Moses of the Third Millennium

The Elián González drama has commanded America’s attention. Various segments of our population have reached differing conclusions about what resolution would best meet the emotional needs of a severely traumatized six-year-old boy. In the absence of significant and relevant details about Elián, his family relationships and the life that would await him were he to return to Cuba, we all can project our fantasies.

One can find reasons to view all of the major characters in a sympathetic light. These include Elián; his father, Juan Miguel González; the great uncle, Lázaro González; Elián’s cousin and self-appointed surrogate mother, Marisleysis; and the Cuban Miami residents. Elián González’s great uncle has two brothers who Castro imprisoned as dissidents. Elián’s father describes himself as a devoted father who is agonized by the endless delays and obstacles that interfere with his resumption of his more normal life with his son. Elián has been characterized as having bonded intensely with Marisleysis, and the bilingual psychoanalyst who spent two days with the boy, Dr. Perdigo, formed the impression, despite his preconceptions, that Elián would be further traumatized by losing a second “mother” should the child be cut off from his cousin, Marisleysis.

All of this allows us to identify with or disassociate ourselves from the competing and con-

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flicting claims that the father and the surrogate mother’s family are making. One’s perspective is shaped by one’s membership in various groups. These include fathers whose crucial parental roles are underestimated; mothers who care deeply about nurturing the unprotected motherless child; the poor and disenfranchised and their spokespersons who dislike the upper middle-class Cuban community’s receiving special attention and exercising their political clout. Also included are people who have struggled through custody battles, single parents, surrogate parents, adoptive parents, adults who have survived serious childhood trauma, religious groups identified with either the Catholicism of the Miami Cubans or Protestant groups that are making in-roads in Cuba, and all of us who have suffered the inevitable losses that parental death brings to the survivors. My own nine-year-old son projects onto Elián the picture of a child who has relevant opinions and is capable of using a mind of his own. He also projects his own wish not to be constrained by either parental or governmental authorities.

Another reason that Elián has commanded such attention is that he is viewed as a hero, a child who has endured in a way that is hard to imagine. His mother apparently dressed him in orange, which probably saved his life, because the color orange reportedly repels sharks. The idea of a small boy staying afloat in a tube that a mother ties her son into, while knowing that she will surely drown, is the stuff of mythology. Such a mythic figure is supposed to survive and flourish. The story of Moses begins with a mother placing her precious baby in a basket of reeds with an undercover made of tar, hoping that he will stay afloat and be rescued from tyranny. In Elián’s case, however, we witness a situation where every possible outcome is dire, and where he and many of the major characters are now destined to suffer additional losses.

Finally, there is something compelling about a drama where the needs for love and for freedom are at odds with one another. I recall the movie Born Free where the baby lion, Elsa, is raised by a game warden and his wife. They adopt her after circumstances force the game warden to shoot and kill her mother. This moving film dramatizes the couple’s struggle to help the lion regain its freedom, while neither endangering it by releasing it prematurely into the wild nor protecting it by sending it to live in a zoo. What makes the Elsa and Elián stories so engaging? In the Elián situation, political values determine what outcome one considers to be the equivalent of sending Elián to the wild or to the zoo. Regardless of political considerations, the dilemma touches something core in our nature, something that makes us care to see that a child’s loving bonds are not severed while also wanting that child to have the freedom to live fully.

And what of the psychology that leads to competing assumptions about what the applicable legal principles are that should govern in cases such as Elián’s? It is not that long ago that women were considered the property of men, and children, the property of their fathers. These attitudes still prevail in some parts of the world. Perhaps we are not as free of these beliefs as we would like to think. The Elián situation implies a larger question: At what age and to what degree do we consider a child competent and entitled to determine its destiny? The Elián saga provides us with an opportunity to evaluate how we regard children within our society.

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