Miami Virtue
Carlson, Tucker
Miami Virtue The citizens of Miami are indignant, determined—and right. BY TUCKER CARLSON Miami, March 30 According to the Miami police, there are 20,000 people lining the streets of Little...
...No fewer than seven cameramen crowd in to film it...
...Finally, a man in a torn Chevy T-shirt emerged from a back room...
...Many supporters came to believe that the dolphins were guardian angels, sent by God not simply to protect the boy's life, but as a sign of the boy's destiny as the redeemer of Cuba...
...Those who don't have headphones can get the news from civic-minded radio owners...
...Tourists come to have their pictures taken in front of the police barricades...
...The people beneath him are almost totally silent...
...Sanchez is Miami's acknowledged master of political street theater...
...In 1995, a boat in one of Sanchez's "flotillas" sank in rough seas, leaving one man dead...
...No one thinks Sanchez is bluffing...
...There are Christmas lights hanging from the rain gutter, and two enormous flags, Cuban and American, fluttering on the lawn...
...Elian's relatives in Miami did little to dispel such talk...
...The way to reach Ramon Saul Sanchez, it turns out, is on his cell phone...
...Both events were widely taken as evidence that God was using Elian for His own larger purposes...
...A few days before, employees at a nearby bank had discovered what they believed was an apparition of the Virgin, visible to some in a streak on the building's front window...
...If the local Catholic authorities were offended by such obviously blasphemous sentiments, none said so officially...
...It's not that Sanchez has come to accept Castro...
...Whether because he doesn't trust the government or because he cannot decelerate from the intensity of the day before, Sanchez is all but ignoring the news...
...A radio powered by a car battery that has been tied to the rear fender has been secured to the handle bars with electrician's tape...
...More than 100 members of the news media sit beneath tents across the street staring at the house all day long...
...He went on hunger strikes...
...Vendors hawk T-shirts, Cheetos, and cold drinks...
...A couple of neighborhood oddballs shuffle back and forth talking to themselves...
...Outside the González house on Thursday afternoon, Ramon Saul Sanchez clearly does not have religion on his mind...
...government doesn't give us an option, we will take action...
...He may have been a gun-toting radical in his younger years, but these days he dresses like a real estate agent, in a blue blazer, button-down shirt and tie...
...He lifted his head for a moment when I entered, didn't say a word, then went back to sleep...
...The boy's Miami relatives, primarily his father's uncle and the uncle's daughter, have cared for Elian since his mother drowned while bringing him to America in a small boat in November...
...Shortly after he was pulled from the ocean last November, the boy told rescuers about a group of dolphins that had followed him as he floated alone in his inner tube...
...It isn't always easy to get a meeting with Sanchez...
...And many are indeed just standing...
...He began organizing protests off the coast of Cuba designed to draw attention to the plight of refugees...
...There have been a number of developments in the Elián case over the past 12 hours, and for the moment, any federal attempt to take the boy from his relatives' house has been postponed until next week...
...Only last year, officials at the Miami airport briefly banned the sale of Cigar Aficionado magazine on grounds that the cover story was too friendly to the regime...
...Elián González's house may be the most famous landmark in Miami these days...
...Another sign was more explicit: "Elián is Christ...
...Like virtually all Cubans in Miami, he hates Fidel as much as ever...
...Sanchez is sometimes referred to as the Al Sharpton of the Cuban exile set...
...Uno, dos, tres," the chain recites, marching loudly in place...
...They are for the most part middle-aged, middle class, and well behaved...
...Sanchez begins with a pep talk...
...I unzipped his fly to see if it's grown...
...A man walks through the crowd selling chewing gum...
...Sanchez promises to close the airport, blockade the Port of Miami, and ring the little boy's home with concentric circles of 18-wheelers...
...It's steaming hot, but just about everyone is freshly scrubbed, many in ironed polo shirts and blue jeans with dry-cleaning creases...
...And that's it...
...The 1997 death of Cuban-American National Foundation head Jorge Mas Canosa left Miami exiles without a universally recognized leader...
...For believing Christians in Miami, it is not a stretch to see the fight over where Elian should live as a fairly straightforward battle between good and evil...
...At the intersection of 8th Street and 19th Avenue, the center of the cross, a priest stands atop a stage to address the crowd...
...If the U.S...
...Ten feet away, a woman has slung a booming boombox from the handle of her baby carriage...
...Sanchez refused to testify...
...Most have come from more affluent parts of Miami, or from neighboring Broward and Palm Beach counties...
...The Juicy Fruit vendor, the shuffling oddballs, the chatting middle-aged women—suddenly they don't seem like harmlessly charming characters...
...In it, he and Felipe Rojas, a heavyset aide who wears a diamond pinky ring, cruise the city for hours at a time, doing radio interviews and meeting with supporters...
...Though the González house is painted a fairly conventional shade of white, other homes on the street span the full supermarket spectrum: mustard yellow, tangerine orange, grapefruit pink, mint-jelly green...
...evening in the old neighborhood making a stand for the anti-Castro cause...
...Paramedics arrive, confirm she will be fine, then leave...
...For many the rally is a kind of reunion, a chance to spend an Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard...
...It is probably the largest prayer vigil in the city's history, and it has been organized to protest the Clinton administration's plan to send 6-year-old Elián González back to Cuba...
...From the beginning, there has been a mystical subplot to the Elián González story...
...It is true that both are confrontational and publicity-hungry, though unlike Sharpton, a pudgy former FBI informant, Sanchez has genuine revolutionary credentials...
...He has gathered the 40 or so onlookers at the scene and is teaching them techniques of civil disobedience...
...Cubans, he reminds the crowd, are not the sort of people who break things...
...By the end of last week, there was not yet a cult of Elián, but it was becoming easier to imagine one developing...
...Sanchez says he left prison a changed man, determined to follow the precepts of non-violence...
...A Spanish soap opera blared from a television in the middle of the room...
...Sanchez's real office is his car...
...There is nothing remarkable about the house itself...
...This must be among the least threatening crowds of angry people ever assembled...
...Today it is swelling with newer, poorer immigrants from Central and South America, becoming more like Little Managua every day...
...It is just that, like many in the exile community, Sanchez has been tamed by age, respectability, and the comforts of middle-class life...
...To hell with God...
...No, he said, Sanchez was not in, nor was he reachable or likely to be back in the near future...
...Satellite trucks line the street for blocks in both directions...
...He speaks slowly...
...He's in the streets," the man said, shrugging...
...The crowd is listening to find out if Elian Gonzalez's family has come to an agreement with the INS...
...The public, meanwhile, continues to show up at the house...
...A couple of his friends from Omega 7 are now serving life sentences for murder...
...The crowd is packed into about a dozen city blocks, and from the air, illuminated by thousands of flashlights, it can be seen forming the shape of a cross...
...They seem formidable, defenders of a boy's freedom, resisters against injustice perpetrated by their own government...
...This afternoon, he and Rojas are driving aimlessly around the neighborhood near Elián González's house waiting for one of the lawyers on the case to call with a news update...
...In fact there seems little danger of that happening...
...they shout, "Cuba libre...
...Small groups of Cuban men enter, exit, and take no questions...
...We are the ones who will protect Elián's rights," he says...
...No one is monitoring the news more closely than Ramon Saul Sanchez...
...He never says anything hot-headed or irrational...
...In 1982, Sanchez was subpoenaed by a New York grand jury looking into the activities of Omega 7, an offshoot of Alpha 66 (exile groups have a thing for cryptic number names) that had claimed credit for scores of bombings and at least 10 killings of pro-Castro Cubans in the United States...
...Many of the signs make reference to God...
...Spokesmen emerge for periodic briefings...
...On Wednesday he was summoned to a meeting with Miami's chief of police...
...At the first hint that federal marshals are on their way to collect Elián, Sanchez plans to shut the city down...
...No one is drinking...
...Within minutes Sanchez has assembled the small crowd into an orderly line...
...The uncle has petitioned for guardianship, which would allow Elian to grow up in Miami...
...But the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the INS's boss, Attorney General Janet Reno, have acceded to the alleged desire of the boy's father in Cuba (who had been estranged from Elian's mother) to take custody...
...They advance only a few feet, but the effect is jolting...
...The Communist regime is actively hostile to independent churches and to religious faith in general...
...Once or twice a day, Elián himself may come out to play on the yellow slide in his front yard...
...I don't believe in God," Elian's maternal grandmother, Raquel Rodriguez, announced in February on Cuban television, thereby confirming the worst fears of religious exiles...
...The lawyer doesn't call, so Sanchez decides to head for the house to see what is going on...
...The stoplight above him changes from red to green and back...
...A steady stream of protesters arrive with homemade signs on sticks...
...While court appeals continue, the INS is threatening to bring matters to a head by revoking the boy's visa...
...On the other hand, the INS negotiations are not a minor matter...
...They are listening to the radio...
...Things get a bit more exciting one morning when a female onlooker in her twenties is overcome by the heat...
...Friends help her into a chair, while someone calls the fire department...
...Last year, in protest of the Clinton administration's Cuba policy, he blocked traffic on a Miami bridge with his body...
...The elderly receptionist was asleep face down on his desk...
...The country fair atmosphere outside Elián's house has vanished...
...There are a surprising number of couples with children...
...Like most in Little Havana, it is small and stucco and surrounded by a metal fence...
...An informal survey of protesters finds relatively few who still live in the immediate area...
...Hardly anyone looks desperate or dispossessed...
...The press horde is getting desperate for news...
...It could be the crowd at a Bruce Springsteen concert...
...Democracy Movement's headquarters is located on the second floor of a decrepit strip mall on the outskirts of Miami...
...On the night of the Little Havana prayer rally, a placard was raised outside of the González house: "Elián is the Child King," it said in Spanish...
...The lights were off...
...I took out his tongue and I bit it," Quintana said, explaining how she had greeted her grandson during her recent trip to the United States...
...One Dade County priest, the Rev...
...Sanchez wants to know what the government intends to do...
...Two old-fashioned bullhorn speakers are mounted on the roof, and both are blaring a scratchy AM signal...
...Rumors circulated that, once Elian was returned to Cuba, Castro would sacrifice him to the pagan gods of Santeria...
...In person, Sanchez doesn't come off at all the way one might expect...
...Bright colors are a theme in the neighborhood...
...Little Havana is where many of these people used to live...
...If all else fails, protesters will form a human chain of bodies outside Elián's front door...
...On one block, an elderly man pushes an Eisenhower-era bicycle down the street...
...Remain organized and restrained, the priest says, and do not commit violence...
...Sanchez runs an organization called Democracy Movement...
...A group of middle-aged women assembles every morning to chat and smoke under an umbrella...
...There is something postmodern about the scene—thousands of participants in a political demonstration not really participating...
...He spent the next four and a half years in federal prison for contempt of court...
...As an EMT talks to the woman, a network soundman dangles a boom mike overhead to capture the exchange...
...During the same program, Elian's paternal grandmother, Mariela Quintana, made Supporters throng the street in front of Elian's residence in Miami...
...They link arms, forming a human chain...
...Tonight, the radio is reporting recent developments in Elian's case...
...Gustavo Miyares, told the Miami Herald that in his opinion, "it is not so unusual that some people in Miami are seeing [Elián] as the new Christ...
...There is no freedom of worship in Cuba...
...Others are on their knees in prayer...
...By all accounts, the chief was very polite...
...Cuba libre...
...Many truck drivers in Dade County are Cuban-Americans...
...For the past week he has been threatening to do just that...
...First it is necessary to find him...
...Across the street, a van is parked in front of the premium pump at a gas station...
...If they break down, Elian could be returned to Cuba within days...
...Sanchez came to the United States from Cuba as a teenager in 1967 and promptly joined Alpha 66, the most militant anti-Castro group of the time...
...He spent more than 6,000 minutes on it last month...
...In countless television and radio interviews, Sanchez has described the various acts of civil disobedience he and his supporters will carry out if the feds attempt to take Elián González from his Miami relatives...
...Some hold crucifixes aloft...
...There isn't, in other words, a lot going on at Elián's house...
...Elián's relatives are downtown at the moment meeting with INS officials...
...what still ranks as the strangest statement of the whole saga...
...When I arrived early Thursday afternoon looking for Sanchez, the office was nearly deserted...
...The group has letterhead and sends out press releases, but it has skimped on the physical plant...
...Every cab driver knows how to get there...
...He is speaking softly, but his new students respond as if he has been screaming...
...Sanchez remains one of the few people in the city who on short notice can assemble a crowd of volunteers willing to get arrested...
...Within a short period he was carrying a gun (he was later arrested for pulling it on an undercover police detective) and making secret forays into Cuba with fellow Alpha 66 commandos...
...Late last month, the family announced that an image of the Virgin Mary had appeared on a mirror in Elian's bedroom...
...BY TUCKER CARLSON Miami, March 30 According to the Miami police, there are 20,000 people lining the streets of Little Havana...
...If Elian is taken from Miami, Sanchez plans to lead many more demonstrations in Little Havana, all less restrained than this one...
...Every third person seems to be wearing tiny, safety-yellow Sony headphones...
...Then without warning, as a group, they lunge forward...
...To keep abreast of demonstrations, the mayor's office and the police department monitor all three...
...There are three Cuban talk radio stations in Miami, and if you want news about what is happening in the city's exile community, you listen to them...
...Elian's return to Cuba would at the very least constitute a plunge back into state-encouraged atheism...
...Castro, they said, knew of Elian's power and feared him...
...A large shrine of candles, flowers, and petitions soon grew at the bank's entryway...
Vol. 5 • April 2000 • No. 29
