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• Mr. DIAZ-BALART. Mr. Speaker, I had the pleasure of reading these articles by James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal regarding the case of 6 year old Elian Gonzalez. I would highly recommend them to all who are interested in learning the truth about that sad case from someone who has thoroughly researched it with great insight and sensitivity and submit them for the Record.

Miami.--No aspect of the Elian Gonzalez debate is more galling than the way Fidel Castro and his U.S. supporters have posed as champions of family unity. Havana routinely divides families by preventing children in Cuba from joining their parents in America, with nary an objection from the National Council of Churches and its allies in the fight for Elian's deportation.

There are no official statistics on the number of separated families; Cuban-American leaders here offer estimates ranging from hundreds to thousands. Many stateside family members hesitate to go public for fear of retaliation against kin in Cuba. But in three weeks, a new group called Mission Elian has documented 32 such cases. In some, children in Cuba are separated from both parents in America.

Typical is the story of Jose Cohen, the 35-year-old owner of a e-commerce company here. He had worked in Cuba's foreign-investment office, entertaining guests from abroad. Visitors told him about the outside world and whetted his appetite for freedom. So in August 1994 he, his brother Isaac and two other men crowded into a tiny two-seat motorized raft for a three-day voyage to America. Mr. Cohen left behind his wife, Lazara Brito Cohen, and his children, stepdaughter Yanelis, now 15, daughter Yamila, 11, and son Isaac, eight.

When Mr. Cohen became a U.S. resident in April 1996, he applied for and was granted U.S. visas for his family. Mrs. Cohen applied to the Cuban government for exit visas. Hearing nothing for a year, she began sending letters to Cuban officials, from Fidel Castro on down. Mr. Cohen produces a sheaf of photocopied responses on Cuban government letterhead, each informing his wife that her case is being referred to another agency. Mr. Cohen says even the evasive answers have stopped since Mr. Castro made Elian's case a case celebre.

Mrs. Cohen's experience can't be chalked up to mere bureaucratic inefficiency. When she tried to enroll Yanelis in high school in 1998, the school director told her that teens with foreign immigration visas are not permitted to study beyond junior high. Mrs. Cohen also has received menacing unsigned notes slipped under her front door. `Forget about leaving Cuba. You will never leave Cuba,' one said. Declared another: `Your husband has a wife in the U.S.' She once showed one of the notes to a bureaucrat at the immigration office. He read it and smiled.

Another time, a man with a government ID card appeared at Mrs. Cohen's door. `We want to help you,' he said--and then tried to seduce her. She rebuffed his advances and threw him out.

`Every time we see the hope of living like every other family, it's not in the near future,' Mr. Cohen says. `My wife and three children are hostage of the regime.'

Bettina Rodriguez-Aguilera, a 42-year-old motivational speaker who heads Mission Elian, grew up in a family divided by Fidel Castro. She was a baby when her parents moved to the U.S. in 1959, taking her and her teen brother with them. Her father later returned to Cuba, where he wrote to her brother, who had stayed behind in America, asking him to apply for a visa waiver to speed his return to the U.S.

He mentioned in the letter that he didn't intend to join the local Communist Party cell, known as a block party. For this he was charged with `counterrevolutionary activities' and imprisoned for 14 years. Ms. Rodriguez-Aguilera didn't see him until he came back to the U.S. when she was 17. His many years as a political prisoner had broken his spirit. `Even though he was out of prison, his mind was still in prison,' she says. He died in 1988.

Sometimes the Castro government boasts to families that they are being held hostage. In 1991 Maj. Orestes Lorenzo, a fighter pilot in the Cuban air force, flew his MiG-27 to the Boca Chica Naval Air Station in the Florida Keys, where he defected. He left behind his wife and two young sons. They were summoned to the office of Gen. Raul Castro, the dictator's brother, and told they would never be allowed to leave Cuba. `He has to return,' Gen.

Havana's practice of taking families hostage shouldn't surprise us. It is part and parcel of a totalitarian ideology enshrined in laws giving the state limitless power over the most intimate aspects of the lives of Cubans--including children. Article 5 of Cuba's Code of the Child, enacted in 1978, stipulates that anyone who comes in contact with a child must contribute to `the development of his communist personality.' Article 8 calls for `efficient protection of youth against all influences contrary to their communist formation.' Many Cubans here tell stories similar to that of Miami architect Ricardo Fernandez. His cousin in Cuba was summoned to meet her daughter's teacher, who demanded to know why she was sending the girl to church.

To develop the `communist personality,' Havana harnesses that most potent influence: peer pressure. Mr. Cohen says Yamila, his 11-year-old daughter, was hustled with her classmates onto a bus earlier this month for an impromptu field trip. Destination: the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, where the children were told to join a rally demanding Elian's return. On the phone later, Mr. Cohen asked Yamila why she had gone along with the order. `I was very nervous about what the rest of the children would say,' she told him.

This is the society to which the Clinton administration is trying to repatriate Elian--a society in which the government demands ideological purity even from six-year-olds. How can this be in any child's best interest?

Havana's efforts at thought control work. The image of a mental prison recurs often in conversations with Cuban immigrants here. They talk about wearing la mascara--the mask--to hide their true feelings. They describe a process of self-censorship in which they don't allow themselves even to think certain things, lest a counterrevolutionary sentiment slip out in an unguarded moment. Since the government controls the economy, unemployment is among the risks for those who deviate. Mr. Cohen says his brother David, once a physician at a Havana clinic, was fired for wearing a Star of David necklace. The Cuban government has also blocked David Cohen's effort to emigrate to the Dominican Republic.

It is in this context that we must evaluate Elian's father's refusal to come to the U.S. for a reunion with his son. He may well be a hostage, wearing la mascara and reading a government script. Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, the nun who oversaw last week's reunion between Elian and his grandmothers, has said she sensed at the meeting that the women were being manipulated by the Cuban government. On Thursday Sister O'Laughlin issued a statement saying the meeting had changed her mind: She now believes Elian should stay.

Gen. Rafael del Pino, who was the No. 2 man in the Cuban Defense Ministry when he defected to the U.S. in 1987, knows what it's like to have a custody dispute with the Cuban government. He escaped on a small plane and brought his wife, their two children and a teenage son by his previous marriage. His former wife later appeared on Cuban television and before the National Assembly, Cuba's one-party legislature, accusing her ex-husband of kidnapping and demanding her son's return.

But in 1995 she herself escaped on a raft. Mr. del Pino says she told him her complaints had been coerced by Havana. Reached by phone at her home in North Carolina, she refuses to say, pointing out that her mother and daughter remain in Cuba.

This story leads Mr. Lorenzo, who made his own freedom flight four years after the general's to speculate: What if, like Mr. del Pino's ex-wife, Elian's father eventually decides to escape? `I wonder if we'll find that the father left the island with Elian, and they all died at sea,' Mr. Lorenzo says. `Who are we going to blame for that?'

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Miami: It's hard for people who have never lived under communism to comprehend the passions the Elian Gonzalez case has ignited in the Cuban-American community. Just as white people can't completely understand what it's like to feel the sting of racial prejudice, those of us lucky enough to have grown up in a free land can't fully fathom the meaning of totalitarianism. But the lawmakers, judges and bureaucrats who control Elian's fate have an obligation to try. By contemplating the lengths to which people will go to escape, they can at least glimpse a shadow of the horror.

Elian and his mother were traveling with 12 other people, two of whom survived. Nivaldo Fernandez, a chef in a five-star tourist restaurant who was separated from his wife, and Arianne Horta, a single full-time mom, had been dating for less than a year when they decided to leave Cuba together. They have kept a low profile until now because Mrs. Horta fears for her five-year-old daughter, Estefani Erera, whom she left behind in Cuba. On Friday Ms. Horta went public with her plight at a press conference here organized by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.).

A few days earlier, I sat down with Mr. Fernandez and Ms. Horta to hear an account of their harrowing voyage. This is their story, as translated by Carlos Corredoira, Mr. Fernandez's best friend.

Fifteen Cubans from the coastal city of Cardenas boarded a 17-foot boat bound for America before dawn on Nov. 21. Along with three survivors and Elian's mother and stepfather, the group included Ms. Horta's young daughter and two families, the Muneros and the Rodriguezes. A Rodriguez family friend was also aboard. Aside from the two children, the youngest member of the group was 17.

The trip was troubled from the start. Their outboard motor failed almost immediately, and they spent the day on a small island just off the coast trying to repair it. As Elian and Estefani played together on the island, Elian was exuberant; he kept shouting `Me voy para la Yuma!': `I'm going to the United States!' (La Yuma is a Cuban colloquialism for the U.S.) But Estefani was scared and cried much of the time.

In the evening they returned and got the motor fixed. Ms. Horta decided Estefani was not up to the trip. She faced an agonizing choice: her daughter or her freedom. She decided to leave Estefani behind with her grandmother and send for her after she settled in the U.S. She had no idea the trip would turn into an international incident.

Just before dawn the next morning, they set off again. Two hours later, Elian saved their lives. Two Cuban patrol boats pulled up, one on each side. They tried unsuccessfully to capsize the little boat by moving from side to side, making waves. Then a sailor on the large vessel threatened to sink the boat with a water cannon.

`We have kids in here!' Mr. Fernandez shouted. `We have five or six kids!' He backed up his bluff by hoisting Elian. The sailor backed down. The patrol boats continued to follow for an hour, turning back when they reached international waters.

Things got much worse that night. The motor died. High waves tossed the boat about. Water splashed over the sides of the craft, threatening to sink it. A fuel tank tipped over. The gasoline burned a hole in one of the three large inner tubes the group had taken along in case of emergency. Seconds later, the boat capsizes.

The 14 Cubans spent the night clinging to the hull. Several cruise ships passed by, but no one heard their cries for help. At dawn they tried to turn their boat over. Instead it sank. Their food was gone. They grabbed the inner tubes and held on for their lives.

As the boat sank, Ms. Horta snatched a jug of water. She told Elian's mother, Elizabeth Broton: `Only give this water to Elian.' That selfless act may well have saved Elian's life.

By evening, the Cubans were dehydrated, and

Suddenly all was quiet. In the space of seconds, three men had died, and two women had become widows. Elian's stepfather's parents had also seen two sons perish. Mr. Fernandez struggled to keep their spirits up. `Lets pray together,' he told them.

Hunger and hallucination killed more that night. The Rodriguezes' friend, a 25-year-old woman named Lirka, was starving. She swam away, shouting, `I want black beans and rice!' Mr. Fernandez tried to save her. She drowned just as he reached her. When he returned to the inner tube, it was empty. Elian's stepfather's parents had drowned, too. Later the widow Rodriguez started swimming and shouting. `There's light over there!' Her brother-in-law tried to save her. Both drowned quickly.

The group had dwindled to six: Mr. Fernandez, Ms. Horta, Elian, his mother, and the parents of the two dead Rodriguez men. Mr. Fernandez and Ms. Horta, exhausted, fell asleep clinging to their inner tube. They awoke to find that the elder Rodriguezes had drowned overnight.

All the struggle and death had worn Elian's mother down. `I want to die,' she said. `All I want is for my son to live. If there's one here who has to die, it's me, not him.' Elian was begging for milk; his mother had given him her sweater to protect him from the chilly waters.

Mr. Fernandez and Ms. Horta dozed off again. Hours later they were awakened by sharks nipping at their legs. (Both showed me their scars: Mr. Fernandez has several dozen small tooth marks on his ankles; Ms. Horta has three larger wounds on her thighs.)

They were alone. The rope that held the inner tubes together had come loose as they slept. Mr. Fernandez, who had tried to lift the others' spirits, found himself losing hope. `I'm tired,' he told Ms. Horta. `I can't make it. I want to die.'

As night fell, the couple saw lights in the distance. They tried swimming toward shore, but the current was against them. Again they slept.

They awoke at dawn on Thanksgiving Day. Closer to shore, they began swimming toward land. They arrived in Key Biscayne, Fla., yacht harbor. They had made it.

Exhausted and dehydrated, they collapsed. Later Mr. Fernandez, lying in bed in a Miami hospital, told police there might be other survivors. A cop showed him a photo: `Did this little kid come with you?'

`Yes, Is he alive?' Elian had made it too.

After leaving the hospital, Mr. Fernandez and Ms. Horta went straight to the immigration office and began the process of becoming Americans. Their new lives are a classic immigrant struggle. Ms. Horta is going to school to learn English. Mr. Fernandez, the erstwhile five-star chef, is looking for work; last week he had an interview for a job washing cars at an auto dealership.

Nivado Fernandez is full of faith in his new country. `I was born on July 3, 1967,' he says, `I was born again on Nov. 25, 1999, because that's when I came to the land of liberty.' Would he do it again if he knew how harrowing the journey would be? `Yes. Even if I died in the middle of the sea, I would have died with dignity, trying to come to this country.'

Arianne Horta longs to be reunited with Estefani, her five-year-old daughter. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, the selfsame agency that is demanding Elian's immediate deportation in the name of family reunification, tells Horta it can't do anything about her little girl until Ms. Horta attains residency status, which won't happen until next year. In contrast to Elian's father, last seen ranting on ABC's `Nightline' about his desire to assassinate U.S. politicians, Ms. Horta maintains a quiet dignity. `I cry a lot,' she says.

This week Congress will take up legislation to declare Elian Gonzalez a U.S. citizen. It should extend the same privilege to Estefani Erera. There's no guarantee that Fidel Castro would allow her to emigrate, but such an action would remove the obstacle on this side of the Florida Straits. Making Estefani an American would be a fitting tribute to her mother's heroism--and to the memories of the 11 who didn't make it.

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