Section A · Page 6
The University Daily Kansan
Monday, April 24, 2000
Red Lyon Tavern
944 Mass.832-8228
Elian, father spend Easter in seclusion
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Elian Gonzalez spent a secluded Easter with his father, insulated from the clatter in two nations' capitals and a Miami shaken by the armed raid used to take him away.
After a day of raw anger, street fires and violence in the Little Havana neighborhood, Miami, still under tight police control after more than 350 arrests, fell quiet for Easter celebrations yesterday morning.
"We will celebrate in tears," said Sergio Perez, a Miami neighbor of the relatives who kept Elian for five months until federal agents seized him before dawn Saturday.
Later yesterday, scores of chanting protesters returned to the neighborhood. In Washington, near the heavily secured air base where the 6-year-old Cuban boy is staying, a congressional Republican leader, sickened by the use of force, said hearings were certain on Capitol Hill.
"This is a frightening event — that American citizens now can expect that the executive branch on their own can decide on whether to raid a home," said House Republican whip Tom DeLay, of Texas, joining criticism made by presidential candidate George W. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi.
"There was no court order that gave them permission to raid the private home of American citizen," said DeLay, who was appearing on NBC's Meet the Press. "This has been a bungeled mess."
But a top Justice Department official said the only regret was that authorities waited as long as they did.
"We were forced into the action we took by the intransigence of that family," said Eric Holder, deputy attorney general. "We probably should have taken a decisive action sooner."
Holder, also on NBC, said a previous court ruling upholding the government's general actions in the case, combined with an order from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, sufficed as legal grounds for moving in.
He acknowledged the administration's concern that Elian may be used by Cuban President Fidel Castro as a political trophy.
"That is Fidel Castro's history," Holder said. "He has shown that he has always
Indeed, Castro called Saturday "a day of glory for our people" as some 400,000 Cubans, summoned to a rally, celebrated the father-son reunion.
tried to use whatever he can for his own political advantage."
Praising U.S. officials for their forceful action, the communist leader declared a truce in his enduring Cold War-era struggle with the United States, but said, "Tomorrow the battle continues."
U. S. officials, anticipating Elian will go back to Cuba when court appeals are finished, hoped to influence Cuban officials about how the boy is treated in his homeland.
Elian, for once, was out of earshot of all
the Pass. He joined his father, stepmother and baby halfbrother Saturday in private quarters at Andrews Air Force Base, the home base of Air Force One.
"Finally they have some time together, some space together, some privacy together, some silence around them so that the circus atmosphere and that environment down in
Elian: Spent Easter with his father at an air base.
Miami (are) no longer inflicted upon this boy," Gregory Craig, lawyer for the father, said on NBC's Meet the Press
Elian was rescued at sea on Thanksgiving Day after a boat carrying him and other Cuban refugees sank. His mother drowned.
Miami relatives, flying to Washington soon after Elian was taken from their arms, were rebuffed again yesterday in trying to get on to the base to see him.
"I will not leave until I see this boy," Marisleysis Gonzalez, the 21-year-old cousin who acted as Elian's surrogate mother, told a Washington news conference. "I know he's not OK."
With Juan Miguel Gonzalez holed up with his two sons and second wife at Andrews, the only accounts of Elian's state of mind since the reunion came from Craig and another supporter, Rev. Joan Brown Campbell.
She said on ABC's This Week that Elian acted like a very happy, mischievous, normal little boy when she visited Saturday.
Community building
Catherine Denning,
Lawrence junior,
and Brianna Duffy,
Wayzata, Minn.,
junior, cut siding
for a Habitat for
Humanity house.
Denning and Duffy
spent Saturday afternoon
volunteer work as
part of a social
welfare class.
Denning said she
liked doing hands-on
work for the
community. Photo by
Selena
JABARA/KANSAN
There was a brief skirmish yesterday afternoon when two young women carried signs
Miami upset with boy's exit
350 protesters arrested as talk of strike buzzes
During protests that lasted into yesterday morning, police clad in riot gear arrested more than 350 people and cleared away thousands more from Little Havana. Protesters set more than 200 fires, burning mostly tires and trash.
The Associated Press
MIAMI — Easter, one of the holiest of days in Little Havana and the rest of the Christian world, found Marta Rodriguez praying for a little boy she knows only from a distance but, like many, calls by his first name.
"He should never have been treated this way," she said. "My heart is broken."
"Pobre Elian," the 71-year-old Cuban immigrant said after Mass was celebrated at St. John Bosco Church, where Elian's great-uncle and cousins have attended services.
supporting Attorney Janet Reno's order to raid.
"Not here! Not here!" the protesters yelled, trying to hit one of the women and pulling her hair as she was escorted away by security guards. Few were seriously injured.
At St. Michael the Archangel Church, another Roman Catholic church in Little Havana, parishioners held radios to their ears as Spanish-language radio buzzed with talk of a strike tomorrow. If the idea catches on it could shut down much of Miami, as there are 800,000 Cuban Americans in the area.
Postal worker Nick Perez Caurel listened to the announcements from his home a few miles away and vowed to take part.
"I haven't missed a day of work in six years. But in my own peaceful way, I will show my feelings," said Perez Caurel, whose parents sent him from Cuba to the United States in 1962 when he was 12 years old.
The former Boy Scout and Vietnam veteran also showed his displeasure Saturday when he came home from work, pulled an American flag from
his hallway closet and hung it upside down in his front yard with a black scarf pinned to it.
Neighborhood residents have photocopied and circulated an Associated Press photograph of an armed federal agent with his hand extended to grab a crying Ellian. Some versions replaced the faces of federal agents with those of Attorney General Janet Reno, who gave the go-ahead for the raid, and Cuban President Fidel Castro.
A poster-sized reproduction attached to the Gonzalez family's front door included this label: "Federal Child Abuse."
But not everyone in Little Havana was upset.
"I'm in agreement that his father is his only family," said 77-year-old Virginia Escalona, pausing before adding, "Well, his grandmothers, too."
As she stood outside on her apartment stairwell, her husband came out to try to quiet his wife, one of a few people becoming braver about a view that had been all but squelched in the neighborhood.
“Are you crazy?” Escalona's husband said. “You don't have to talk to the whole world.”
"I say what I like," she said. "This is America. no?"
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