Reading Elian

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

Charles Paul Freund from the July 2000 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Finally, the "reunion" images portray a happy little boy. Elian may in fact be very happy, but not everyone is satisfied to take Greg Craig’s or Fidel Castro’s word for the matter. On April 29, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons released a letter to the INS expressing its concern that the boy’s medical treatment may have been politicized. It asked the INS "to disclose the names and backgrounds of all U.S. government-appointed medical personnel involved in the treatment or evaluation of the boy." The AAPS added that it was "not confident that the glowing reports from anonymous government doctors of the boy’s easy adjustment following a traumatic seizure at gunpoint are indeed, unbiased, or for that matter, first-hand." The government has since identified a social worker and a psychiatrist who have tended to Elian.

On April 27, Customs officials in Washington searched the bags of Elian’s Cuban pediatrician, who was en route to Wye Plantation, and found such sedatives as Miltown and phenobarbital. This discovery has fueled persistent claims that Elian may have been sedated following his seizure. In fact, there is no evidence that the boy has been mistreated in this way, but the AAPS’s point remains perfectly valid: There was no independent information about the boy during this crucial period, and neither the U.S. nor Cuba had any credibility on the subject.

The administration’s response to the raid imagery reflects the media strategy it has employed through two terms of scandal. It had on its hands a narrative it didn’t like, so it attempted to create a counter-narrative. That new story demonized Elian Gonzalez’s Miami family as disturbed and violent, celebrated government commandos as victims, subsumed inconvenient emotions within the person of an empathetic attorney general, and even appropriated the problematic imagery itself. Tacked on was a useful but false fairy-tale ending in which Little Elian lives happily ever after. But his story has not really ended at all. If Elian sails off into the sunset, he’ll land in Cuba. A lot of good Janet Reno’s empathy will do him there.