No one knew whether he’d always live with his real father in Cuba forever, but his father wanted him.
I could assume you are a Clinton-Reno tool, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt of being sadly misinformed.
I followed the Elian story as closely as anyone could.
I know of the phone calls from the father to Uncle Lazaro in Miami in which he expressed his desire for Elian to live in the U.S.
It was only after Castro got involved that the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez ( a member of the Cuban communist party) started to accuse the Miami relatives of kidnapping and even child abuse.
Outrageous charges - if one looks at how happy Elian was in Miami with his relatives.
I don’t fault the father. I know he was in an impossible coerced position, but to insist that the father wanted him returned to Cuba is an outright falsehood. Too many Freepers fell for that media and government line.
Or maybe you got sucked in by the Dan Rather 60Minutes interview with the father choking back tears. Well, it wasn’t the father on TV crying. That was the translator.
FYI: Elian’s mother and father were divorced.
Obviously, the mother didn’t want Elian to live with the father - else why try to escape? Sadly, she perished in her dream of freedom for Elian and herself.
You might also be interested in the Walter Polovchak case in which a 14 year old boy was granted religious asylyum by the Carter/Reagan administrations preventing his deportation to Russia in 1980. George Will called him ‘the littlest defector.” His case bounced around in the courts for 4 years until he attained the age of 18, and his Russian parents no longer could contest his choice of remaining in America.