Reading Elian

The camera doesn't lie. But it will confess to just about anything.

Charles Paul Freund from the July 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

The day after the Post printed the account of Reno’s liberal press policies, Tony Zumbado was taken to the hospital. Who’s he? He was the NBC cameraman on location the night of the raid, and the designated broadcast and cable pool cameraman. He and his soundman were alerted to the approach of the INS raiders moments before their arrival. Zumbado told The New York Times what happened when he attempted to cover the raid from inside the home. "We got Maced, we got kicked, we got roughed up."

NBC reporter Kerry Sanders, who was also outside the Gonzalez house on the night of the raid, described what happened to the right-wing Web site Newsmax.com, which has published the most detailed account.

According to Sanders, Zumbado encountered INS agents already in the house when he entered. Zumbado’s soundman, still outside, was hit in the head with a rifle butt and fell to the ground bleeding. Zumbado, the camera perched on his shoulder, fell backward when someone yanked the heavy video and audio cables that were attached to it.

"At that point," says Sanders, "somebody smacks him in the stomach. Tony is hit in the stomach and goes down. And then the agent puts his foot on Tony’s back and puts a gun to him and says, ‘Don’t move or I’ll shoot.’

"Tony tells me that as he looks up around, he sees the family there and he sees these little red dots on Lazaro’s [Elian’s great uncle’s] forehead, on Marisleysis’ [Elian’s cousin’s] forehead. Which of course are the laser sights from the machine guns. He sees them all trained there and then he hears what’s going on in the back room. But he’s not in that back bedroom because he’s now down on the floor with a foot in his back and a gun to his head saying, ‘Don’t move.’"

Zumbado had a pre-existing back condition that was apparently exacerbated when a federal commando planted a boot on his spine. The Wednesday after the raid, Zumbado, unable to move without pain, was removed from his home by stretcher and taken to a Miami hospital. While there, he would have been able to read about Janet Reno’s liberal press-coverage policies at his leisure.

"Father and Son"

By the afternoon of April 22, the day of the raid, those defending the decision took their most effective action in limiting raid-imagery damage: They offered counter images. Photographs of a happy Elian in his father’s arms at Andrews Air Force Base, and of the boy playing with his half-brother, were released to the press. The shot featuring the father was to accompany the raid pictures in much of the press coverage, and to dominate coverage in such major agenda-setting papers as The New York Times. Indeed, it was the cover shot of the next issue of Time magazine, which captioned it "Papa!" The photo was played with an air of denouement, of happy resolution. All’s well that ends well.

"Happy resolution" was precisely the narrative pushed by the Justice Department. "Earlier this morning," Janet Reno told reporters at an April 22 press conference, "federal agents began to reunite Elian Gonzalez with his father and uphold the rule of law." These were the first on-the-record words out of the attorney general’s mouth the day of the raid, and they established the themes that federal spokespersons were to pursue relentlessly in the weeks afterward. The raid, according to this story, was a necessary prelude to a heartwarming family reunion. No administration figure was to address the raid issue without at least once formulating a sentence referring to the benevolent reunion of a boy and his father.

The most florid of these father-son formulations came from Reno herself, during a bizarre May 1 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Sinking in an ocean of warm fuzzy rhetoric, Reno managed to evoke the Gonzalez reunion as a model for a great American joining of hearts. "I think it is time for us all to come together," the attorney general told the popular daytime hostess, "father and son, community, people who care about each other to make democracy work."

Who took the pictures of a happy Elian and his father? The father’s $850-per-hour lawyer, Greg Craig. (Craig had written to the major news media, calling on them not to cover the raid at all in the name of "decency.") Notwithstanding the attorney general’s embrace of openness and the free press, no reporter would be allowed to photograph the pair. The Air Force base, outside Washington, was closed to everyone–including, somehow, U.S. senators–in the interests of family privacy and healing.

Elian’s Miami relatives were to argue that the "reunion" images were fakes, a desperate and ill-considered charge that was quickly proved false. The pictures are real enough–why shouldn’t the boy be glad to see his father, especially given the violence with which he had been snatched from his Miami home? The question is, is the story that these pictures tell a false one?

The "reunion" pictures imply a resolution. Certainly, that is how the administration has used them, and how they have been treated by leading periodicals. But there is no reason to assume that the reunited Gonzalez family will now live happily ever after. If Elian returns to Cuba, he apparently will be housed in a state school for at least three months by a regime that considers children its property. Fidel Castro has promised as much. Thus, the Elian narrative may be far from completed: Lying ahead may be precisely the ugly possibilities that were all along at the heart of the Miami custody battle. Of course, if Reno had told the press or even Oprah Winfrey that "Federal agents have begun the process that will end in a Castro re-education facility," that wouldn’t have sounded so good. Better to pretend that a story has ended happily, than to admit that an unhappy story may be beginning, one that featured the armed connivance of the American government.

The "reunion" pictures also imply familial intimacy. Certainly, Janet Reno has cited exactly this excuse in keeping the press and everyone else away from the family. That wouldn’t be an unreasonable act, if it were true. But it is not true. (One notable exception occurred in May, when Elian was on display at a political dinner in Georgetown.) More important, perhaps, the family has been surrounded by a gaggle of Castro "diplomats" since the moment the boy arrived at Andrews, and this same extended "family" all moved in together at the Wye Plantation, a government-owned property across the Chesapeake Bay from Washington. In other words, Juan Miguel Gonzalez has almost never been out of sight of his Cuban overseers since his arrival in the United States, a circumstance that continues to raise questions about his free agency. Yet, the attorney general of the United States defines this situation as one of "privacy."

Cuba’s "diplomats" in Washington–they staff an "interests section," and not an embassy–are a notably thuggish lot. A few days before the Miami raid, a dozen of them emerged from their building to beat up anti-Castro protesters, men and women, who were demonstrating on a public sidewalk. Federal police who were guarding the building actually had to intervene. In the two centuries Washington has been the seat of government, foreign diplomats have used their immunity for a great many nefarious purposes, from stiffing the city on parking tickets to espionage. But the crude criminality of this attack may be a first. The administration has expressed its "concern."