What's missing — Claire E. O'Hanlon

On my first day in Cuba, we traveled to Cárdenas, a little town just east of Havana on the coast. It’s quaint and run-down and is said to have a similar vibe to Charleston, South Carolina, and I can see the resemblance.

Cárdenas is famous for a few things: it was the first place the Cuban flag was ever flown, it has the original factory where the Arechabala family first made Havana Club rum, and the main form of transportation are coches (horse-drawn carriages) with hilarious names like this:

Cárdenas is also where Elián González is from.

When I learned we were going to what our guide called “the Elián González Museum” in Cárdenas, I thought back to April 2000, just a few days shy of my 13th birthday. I was swimming at the DoubleTree hotel pool before dinner at Havana Harry’s or Las Culebrinas on our annual Easter pilgrimage to our domestic facsimile of the motherland. I was playing with a plastic turtle I found by the pool, and I turned a Frisbee upside down to make a little boat for him. I named the turtle Elián. I pushed Elián’s plastic namesake around the pool, the waters choppy with the splashing of other kids enjoying their Spring Break, thinking about his 90-mile journey.

Non-Cubans might be hazy on the details from this news story that started almost 20 years ago. In November 1999, Elián González was found attached to an inner tube in the ocean by fishermen off the Florida coast. He had been on a boat with twelve other people, ten of whom died on the journey, including Elián’s mother and her boyfriend; the boat’s engine had failed during a storm. Elián’s family in the US fought for custody, over the objections of his father, who remained in Cuba and had not known about Elián’s mother’s plan until after they had left. Over the next few months, the events that unfolded probably comprise the most famous custody battle of all time, and probably the only custody battle that has ever influenced the outcome of a Presidential election.

The Elián González museum’s real name is the Museum of the Battle of Ideas. It traces the history of US-Cuba relations, with a large room on “the Elián González Affair.” After a night of no sleep and struggling to recall my extremely limited Spanish, I eventually gave up on understanding the guides and displays, so I focused on the artifacts and visuals.

As I walked around, I noticed something strange. The only thing I had expected to see was nowhere to be found.

Do you know what I’m talking about? Think back to what you remember about Elián González, and I bet you see the same thing in your mind that I do.

At first, I couldn’t understand why this photo was nowhere to be found in the museum. A few nights later, I recounted this observation over dinner to a woman on a trip to Cuba with the Center for Democracy in the Americas; she shared that they had seen another Elián display elsewhere in Cuba, and she realized that this photo was nowhere to be found there either.

Have you ever wondered why this photo even exists? Elián’s family in Miami knew that the federal agents were coming. They allowed an Associated Press photographer into their home to wait for precisely this moment. This photo tells the story from their side. This photo says: look at our brutish government, terrorizing this poor child, all to send him back to that wretched island.

The photos in the museum show a totally different narrative. Many of them document a series of protests - I only knew what they represented because I had just read Vicki Huddleston’s book. These displays show schoolchildren declaring “Salvemos a Elián” and the “Combatant Mothers” demanding the return of “their” son. They tell a story of the people triumphing over the evil imperialists. Neither of these depictions represent the cooperation between the US and Cuban governments that brought Elián back to his father in Cuba.

The day the agents came for Elián was the night before Easter. I remember my Dad driving the rental car down Calle Ocho as crowds yelled and cars honked and people leaned out of windows waving Cuban flags. I wanted to open my window and yell and shake my fist too, but my father, unusually on edge due to the riot we were apparently surrounded by, would not let me. Although my parents agreed that Elián should have been sent back to his father, this view was not popular among our relatives. I could see both sides. Children belong to their parents, but his mother had died in the pursuit of a better life for them both.

The odds of surviving an attempt to get to La Yuma (Cuban slang for the US) by boat or raft are not good. I read somewhere that the US Coast Guard believes that for every Cuban rescued at sea, another perishes.

That is a lot of dead Cuban people.

One estimate from the early 2000s claimed that 78,000 Cuban people had died attempting to reach La Yuma.

But nobody really knows.

There aren’t photos.

What is missing is often as important as what is there.