After reading the Mailbox on Sunday, April 30, I had to comment. It seems that only one person writing about the Elian situation (Molly Bundy-Toral) actually listened to the facts in the case. The rest are playing politics.
The facts are that Elian's mother did not bring Elian here for freedom but to follow her boyfriend who wanted to live in Miami. Then when she died, Elian's great uncle, Lazaro, was given temporary custody. The INS judged that the father should have custody of his son, which is the norm in this country.
It is not our place to decide what is best for Elian just because we don't like what Castro stands for. That's his father's decision.
We don't know if the Miami relatives want to keep Elian because he's a nice boy who happens not to be a real close relative, or if they are like most of the Cubans in Miami who are just anti-Castro. At any rate, these relatives who didn't even know Elian before he came here do not have any say over what his father wants to do.
Janet Reno revoked the temporary custody the Miami relatives had and asked them to turn Elian over to his father. They refused, saying come and get him, knowing that the government did not want a bad confrontation. Many of the Cubans in Miami had said they would die before they let Elian go back to Cuba. And for the people who say the government should have gone after him in daylight, you'd have to be a fool to think they could walk in there without guns, without thousands of demonstrators there and have the relatives peaceably hand over Elian without incidence and not have many people injured or killed.
Come on, get real. We may not like the way the government agents went in, but by catching them off guard, no one was killed and Elian is now with his father where he belongs.