Posted on 09/10/2001 10:05:05 PM PDT by My Favorite Headache
'Reverse Elian' readjusting to life in America
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Associated Press
HOMESTEAD — A young American boy is relearning English and adjusting to his new life nearly a month after returning from Cuba where his mother had taken him during a custody dispute with her former husband.
Jonathon Colombini, 6, is starting to speak English again after forgetting much of it during his stay in Cuba. He now lives outside of Miami with his father, stepmother and their two children.
Jon Colombini and his 6-year-old son Jonathon play in their yard in Homestead, Sept. 9. Jonathon's mother, Arletis Blanco, took Jonathon to Cuba on Nov. 12, 2000, aboard a fishing boat accompanied by her younger daughter and her boyfriend, Agustin Lemus, and announced they were going to stay. A U.S. grand jury later indicted her on the parental child kidnapping charge. Blanco and the boy returned Aug. 16.
"I'm ecstatic," Jon Colombini, Jonathon's father, said about having his son back.
Jonathon's mother, Arletis Blanco, 29, took Jonathon to Cuba on Nov. 12 aboard a fishing boat accompanied by her younger daughter and her boyfriend, Agustin Lemus, and announced they were going to stay.
A U.S. grand jury later indicted her on the parental child kidnapping charge. Additionally, Monroe County officials accused her of embezzling $150,000 from her Florida Keys employer.
Blanco and the boy returned Aug. 16. Federal agents arrested Blanco shortly after she stepped off the flight from Cuba with Lemus and their daughter.
The boy's father, who won custody of his son upon his wife's return and arrest, will appear before a family court judge on Friday to ask permission to move to Alabama so he can start a new life.
Colombini wants to move out of state because he has two jobs lined up in Alabama, where his second wife's family owns 140 acres in Hope Hull, south of Montgomery.
"Has a nice ring to it," Colombini, 32, said. "I just want what's best for our family. The cost of living here is so high."
The boy talked with his mother last week for the first time since returning when she made a collect call to Colombini's house.
"He was a little upset at first. But he was fine 10 minutes later," his father said.
Jonathon has sometimes been called the "Reverse Elian," drawing comparisons to Elian Gonzalez, who became the center of international custody battle after he survived the November 1999 sinking of a boat bringing him and his mother to Florida from Cuba.
His mother died and the boy was turned over to relatives in Miami, who refused to return him to his father in Cuba. Federal agents seized the boy in April 2000 and returned him to his father.
1. this boy was not a geopolitical international pawn. If everything had been kept low key and Castro and Clinton had stayed out of it, everything would have been better.
2. Elian's mother had legal custody in Cuba and had been separated from the father for a long time.
3. Elian's father had known the mother and child were trying to go to the US and did not try to stop it and was acquiescent at the time.
4. It is doubtful that Elian's father had any free will in his decisions.
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