Elian Gonzalez raid: 10 years later (w/slide show)

[Mika]

Elian Gonzalez raid: 10 years later
http://postpix.palmbeachpost.com/mycapture/folder.asp?event=981343&CategoryID=49309&ListSubAlbums=0

Six year-old Elian Gonzalez was the subject of an epic tug of war between Cuba, the U.S. government and the boy's Miami relatives.

He was the boy whose story hit Miami with the force of a Category 5 hurricane, the boy whose mother died at sea when their boat sank in their escape from Cuba. Adrift alone, the boy clung to an inner tube for two days before he was rescued by fishermen.

He came to live with his closest living relatives, the Gonzalezes of Northwest Second Street. In the early morning hours of April 22, 2000, Elian was taken at gunpoint from his Miami relatives and delivered to his father, who waited with Cuban government escorts in Maryland. Two months later, after a family battle in the courts, the boy's father took him back to Cuba.

?

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[Judi Lynn]

1. That mural simply takes one's breath away, all these years later.

That's one busy painting. Magic mushrooms driving the artist?

Mika, these photos are great. Did you notice the photos showing Elian joyous in being reunited with Juan Manuel Gonzalez are mysteriously missing?

http://www.cronicadigital.cl.nyud.net:8090/img/ELIAN_GONZALEZ.jpg http://www.coverbrowser.com.nyud.net:8090/image/time/4031-1.jpg
They forgot to include these more recent ones:

http://havanajournal.com.nyud.net:8090/images/uploads/elian-gonzalez.jpg http://www.siporcuba.it.nyud.net:8090/Yadira%20Garcia%20Elian%20Gonzalez%20y%20su%20padre.jpg

http://www.foxnews.com.nyud.net:8090/images/380800/1_61_061608_elian_gonzalez2.jpg http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com.nyud.net:8090/j/ap/b7802762-d45e-4997-b9b2-b1eb8d947d51.widec.jpg http://www.allhatnocattle.net.nyud.net:8090/elian-gonzales.jpg
One of the photos from the Miami Hairball showed a painting was left on the fence at Lazaro's depicting little Elian hanging on a cross, with a flag of Cuba under his right hand, and a U.S. flag under his left nail-scarred hand.

These Miami reactionary guys have very colorful imaginations, don't they?

Thanks for the link. It's great seeing so many Elian photos. Most I've ever seen in one place.

[subsuelo]

2. I love that painting

thanks for the link

[Judi Lynn]

3. I can't figure out the thumbs! Either they are on the wrong hands, or the owner of the hands

is hanging upside down, facing the viewer. Real scary.

http://www.karcreat.com.nyud.net:8090/SCTV-CountFloyd.jpg
Who's the innertube guy? I'm afraid of the disembodied heads in the giant scales. They are snarling.

[Mika]

4. What's with the guy w/the sword about to stab Pope Jon Paul in the head?

Also, it looks like Elian is reaching up toward Castro, who's behind the Statue of Liberty.

Must be some crazy good shit they're smoking in lil' Havana. :crazy:

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[Judi Lynn]

16. Yeah! That kind of thing could be dangerous, Mika! He's also dragging around a small scales. n/t

[Vogon_Glory]

6. Where Is That Mural, by The Way?

It's a lovely mural. Where is it?

[Billy Burnett]

7. It was hanging on the drunken uncle's neighbors house.

Tio Delphin owns the house now. It's supposed to be "The Elian Museum".

The neighbor breaks it out and hangs it for anniversaries and when a hot rumor of Castro's death is circulating (which is about once every couple of months).

I was doing some reporting on the Elian event while it was happening, for CNN's US/Cuba relations blog, onsite at the house during some organized demonstrations there and also for about a week right before the INS takedown. I was hanging around with some of my CNN audio uplink tech crew buddies in several of the 18 wheeler network media uplink centers. Generally unreported was that the house behind Lazaro's had been rented for armed CANF hired security (sweaty young thugs smoking cigars with heavy semi auto assault guns pulling 24/7 guard duty in case (no shit) Castro sent some special forces or those Nazis Janet Reno and Clinton came in to attack). That house was heavily busted by FBI SWAT teams 30 seconds before INS/BP went in for Elian at Lazaro's house. If they had not, there would have been a Waco level bloody shootout. MSM did not report that at all.

?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=77BFBA49EF878921F7C3FC3F69D929FDA19735868E982FB7F34FF9D411F7416B64DECA787C684F45F06BF04B24B4128C

[flamingdem]

11. Billy that's incredible, is there more information to read on this?

Wow. I never heard about the CANF doing that!


>>>>Lazaro's had been rented for armed CANF hired security (sweaty young thugs smoking cigars with heavy semi auto assault guns pulling 24/7 guard duty in case (no shit)

[Mika]

12. Billy was doing great reporting there.

I found the CNN US-Cuba forum during Elian too, although I was too busy to participate in posting. US-Cuba Relations was a single thread forum and thousands of posts were put up on any given day from people around the world.

Billy was regularly posting pictures from the daily/nightly scenes in front of the drunken uncle's house, including some pix of the machine guns in the trunks of the security punks cars. Scary place then. What I learned at that time was the level of management of the scene that the media undertook. Billy would report that Miami local news crews would arrive with groups of exile stooges to be used as props, arrange and position them for maximum stagecraft value - even bringing their own barricades - lining them up to pretend to smash them down in defiance agin' Castro and Clinton and Reno. All staged outrage that was then shared with (purchased by) the national TV & cable networks.

What the networks didn't show, that Billy did, was the lunch/cafeteria trucks and ice cream vendors and tail-gate beer parties going on there on the block in front of the house. It was a party when the TV cameras were off, but as soon as the cameras went on they would line up the mob behind their own barricades and start chanting and waving their bloodied crucifixes and Clinton/Reno=Nazis posters around. Without Billy debunking much of the action at the house, there would have been a definite information vacuum for those of us keeping up with events on CNN.

After Elian went home Billy started discussing the media networks complicity in the manipulation of the event, including CNN's own participation. For that they canned him.

At that time it was from Billy that I, and others, found out about this brand new forum called Democratic Underground right after the SCOTUS Bush vs Gore ruling. Billy and I were among the first 100 registered users here.

Then, 9-11 happened and CNN shut down their discussion forums soon after.

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[Vogon_Glory]

13. Nice Mural, Though, Even If I Don't Agree With The Message

It was a nice mural, though, even if I don't agree with the message (I don't agree with the great masters' painted praises of kings, cardinals, and bishops either, but I enjoy their art anyway). If the mural isn't an integral part of the house, I hope it gets preserved so people can enjoy it in some saner, more rational future time either in Cuba or South Florida.

:dem:

:patriot:

[flamingdem]

5. gak!! Those photos are too much!!

:bounce: :wow:

Hooray for the safety of Elian.

Whatever happened to Marisleysis??

[Billy Burnett]

8. Wow. That long ago. It was during this event that I met Judi (virtually).

Astonishing time frame. But we had some fun pounding down some of the nastiest exiles, didn't we Judi?
Jean Sawyer. Remember Zeke? John Banghart. Douglas Graham. Bev Burns. Diane Headrick. Lydia Allen. Walter Stockhecker. Lou Huston. Michael E Miller (Coralsea). David Baker!
Oh man! What times. A lot of laughs and some serious outrage on many late nights during Elian's stay in the US. Remember that it started because of the WTO meeting in Seattle, and Castro was supposedly jetting in to give a speech. Ninoska Perez seized the Elain hospitalization after the drowning of his mom to use photos of him on a USCG stretcher for their protest posters against Castro in Seattle. Without her the boy would have been returned to his dad as per a phone call between Juan Miguel and the boy's attending DR at the hospital, as per normal procedure, sadly, done hundreds of times. Then the CANF stepped in and entrapped Uncle Lazaro's family, who initially wanted to return Elian to his family in Cuba, but when the CANF took over the case and lawyered-up everyone they were trapped by the virulent and dangerous elements of the anti Castro diaspora in Miami who perceived returning the boy as "soft on Castro". The family was cornered and being used by vultures in a feeding frenzy of media and industriousness, and Marisleysis had several nervous breakdowns requiring hospitalization and treatment facilities during the tense event.

Still here. Same shit, different day.


To you, Judi, for all of the kicking_ass_and_taking_names you've done over the last decade. :toast:

:party:

[Judi Lynn]

9. The NAMES! Holy smokes! Fantastic. The hired hands of the CANF tag teamed us, didn't they?

It got so you could almost predict when some went "off the clock" and their replacements checked in. As soon as some got taken down, they would IMMEDIATELY be replaced by identical CANF idealogues. That system was still in place to the very last day CNN's message board was in operation.

I'll never forget as soon as I saw that enormous board with messages shooting past at such speed I started taking notes so I could look up the information and mark where I had stopped reading before I could go to sleep. I got the fastest and most explosive education in my life, it was WONDERFUL. You and Cassandra were widely regarded as the best, and you and Bev Burns had enough material and energy available to go over to Yahoo and take on those total no-holds-barred fanatics. It didn't even seem they had moderators over there!

Those hardliner guys had/have insane, uncontrollable tempers. No facts, just tempers. One of the members, a guy started his own message board and quickly had his pickup vandalized immediately, and a storm of personal physical problems the moment he opened it, and the Cuban original "exile" BeATrice from Miami also taunted him, Martin, about it at CNN.

I also loved reading the conversations between Charles Mirabal and Neil Ackerman with the South Americans who participated, Charles Mirabal with Larry from Chile, and Maria Lamoretti from Argentina, and Neil Ackerman with the group of Colombians. I got such an education just thinking about what they said and doing research. It was fascinating. I still recall frequently things I picked up from them which started the process of digging in and looking for more information. It was as if the hemisphere exploded into color just following the Cuba message board, watching and learning, listening to the people, discovering from my own research who was right, who was there to cause trouble, who was evidently crazy or drunk (!) and my life will never be the same! Never again. I was pulled right out of the fog by that experience.

Sure wish it could be a working system now. There are some superior DU members here who would enjoy the hell out of it! What a force that would be. Incomparable. World beaters!

You were the ass kicker, name taker, Billy Burnett. No question about that. You brought them the awareness it was NOT going to be a battle they would win, which drove them berserk, spitting mad.

They even got one of their head political powers, (can't remember his name) who came in to throw his weight around, to be the "voice of authority," and it took Jean Sawyer to point out to me he was a main heavyweight in Miami Cuban politics among the next generation of Castro haters.
It was an honor being there, seeing you riding herd above the idealogues! Ha ha ha. Wonderful. :toast: :hi:

[flamingdem]

10. Was there a Cuba subgroup here? These were DUers or "visitors"? nt

[Billy Burnett]

14. Oh, that was funny.

At that time I did some trolling around on Yahoo groups after some hints that the CANFerous a-holes had a debate tactics and strategy group there. I found it because the numbskulls didn't figure out how to make their group private. LOL. Many were young RW Cuban-American lawyers. Then we had a leg up on their next propaganda tactics on CNN forums and comments sections. After that Zeke, Bev, Michael Miller and I pounded them silly by neutralizing their next attack by preemptive discussions on their planned topics before they even brought them up. We had them going so crazy that they created a list of us Kastro kommunist posters who they agreed they would not attempt to debate because we were "too good" at it. Funny stuff, that was.

Remember that CNN's forum logs were not secure for a time and that led to some planting of key tracker spyware on some of our computers, and we were all installing Zone Alarm to block spyware? Zeke and I tracked some of it to foggy bottom, DC.

Then there were the internet death threats made against some of us too. We (Zeke and I) responded fast and with extreme prejudice. (I won't mention how, here.)

Interesting times.

:hi:

[Judi Lynn]

15. I remember some of you guys were discussing having attacks on your computers,

people trying to break in, and I became terrified they might come after me, too, and I didn't know enough about computers to realize if they'd hacked my computer or not.

One night some man showed up late at our door claiming he needed directions somewhere and he was wearing a lot of gold chains, very NOT ordinary in Kansas City and suburbs, and I was terrified it was all over for me, that they'd come to shut me up! :scared:

The hardliners apparently were so accustomed to having people back down to them in their ordinary lives they weren't prepared to see so much INFORMED opposition on the internetS.

[flamingdem]

17. I am enjoying this glimpse of history, amazing and I want to research

more about this. It seems relevant still with so many Cubans and C-As in the US still believing Elian would have been better off here. Boggles the mind.

[Judi Lynn]

23. You know the brainwash is successful when they'd rather see the child torn from his father,

his four grandparents, all his aunts, uncles, cousins, his half-brother, step-mother, schoolmates, teachers. neighbors, exiled from everything he knew, and forced to live in a country surrounded only by strangers.

The only one of the Floridians he knew was the drunken grand-uncle Lázaro González who visited Elian's father when he came to Cuba on vacation, and Elian's father Juan Miguel slept out in his car so Lázaro could have a nice rest each night in his bed, during his stay. Lázaro rose each day and headed off to fish, then spent his evenings in the bars. This was learned by reporters who went to Cuba and questioned neighbors, relatives, etc. and published it in their articles in George magazine, etc. and books.

Some great visit! He gave them a goat as payment for his room and board before he headed back to Miami. That was Elian's introduction to this guy. Pretty impressive.

He's the one who would have been his host until he turned 18 if the idiots had won.

[flamingdem]

18. Billy did you save any of this written stuff?

I'd like to compare then and now and see how attitudes have changed, and how the players have rebranded themselves in the Obama age.

[Judi Lynn]

19. I have looked and looked in vain for any trace of the old CNN message board messages,

and so far I can't find a trace. I would dearly LOVE to find any remnant of that extraordinary exchange. It ended near the time D.U. opened.

It was astonishing, a real crash course in Cuban history, and Latin American history, and interrelated relations between Cuba and Latin America, and the U.S. history of actions, behavior toward Cuba, and Cuban "exile" activity here, and even as participants in Operation Condor, and another anti-communist extremist organization which was covert and world-wide, featuring assassinations, etc.

I enetered during Elian's hostage stage under his drunken grand-uncle Lazaro's roof, but most of the people there had been posting well before that event. They had a full blown super-active dynamic community with waves of "exiles" hurling themselves at them daily, only to fall away after getting themselves banned, or exhausting themselves.

[Mika]

21. I loved when you and Billy would post charts refuting their absurdities.

Especially the Opensecrets chart on the approx. 50/50 R/D split in contributions large and small from Cuban-Americans.

Then they'd attack Opensecrets as a communist source - when actually it is a search engine of the FEC database. LOL

Everything and everyone they disagreed with was communist. Then they were getting banned for that so they changed the term to "steak eaters".

Then the next shift would come in and repeat the exact same thing, as if it was a talking point. ;)

Remember the David Baker rafter reports? Hillarious. There were some great writers there too.

I saved a shitload of pages of it, but my old blue iMac went belly up years ago so they're gone.

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[rabs]

20. And don't forget

The lady from New Zealand who took an interest in Elian.

Then there was dejadecuentos (she sent me a book about her travels to Cuba) and Saywhat (kept in touch with her until my computer crashed and lost her email. Last I heard about dejadecuents was that she had health issues. I hope she is well.

Shoobs and La Lamoretti had a little cyberthing going. They both loved to bash BeATrice.

Then there was the incredibly intelligent Cuban gentleman -- for a while he sure sounded like Fidel himself, but I suspected that it was a Cuban diplomat stationed in D.C.

A DUer who see occasionally on other forums is Catherine Vincent, who happened to be watching TV as the raid to rescue Elian took place. She scooped everyone on the CNN forum at that early morning hour.

Neil is still around, spoke to him last night and he is cautionally optimistic about Mockus, but he is still concerned about massive uribista fraud putting Chucky Santos into the presidency.

Ten years already? Those were the days.

[Judi Lynn]

22. OMG. That Cuban! I remember him, and wondered about the same possibility, as well.

He certainly had a very distinct presence, didn't he? Wow.

Catherine Vincent had a lively, unique presence, herself. Wonderful, and so wildly comical at times she could almost make a reader scream with laughter.

SayWhat is a wonderful character. I think she's back around San Francisco now, last time I heard. She has stopped by a few times to post here over the years. No one like SayWhat. Admire her so deeply, her fantastic quickness, fearlessness, wit. She had an amazing energy. Astonishing. You may remember she said she had traveled south, herself, and she traveled constantly here, in the U.S.

As a newcomer, I was terrified by both Cassandra, who was oddly, from Canada, and Jean Sawyer, who ALSO lives in Canada. They BOTH could, chew people up and spit them out in small pieces, they BOTH knew tons about Cuba, both traveled there, and both would
reduce the unprepared people to piles of skin and bones in a heartbeat. So cool. Cassandra works with the Canadian legal system in processing immigrants, working with them, has met Cubans that way, too. Jean Sawyer's step father was a Canadian reporter working in Cuba during the revolution. They BOTH hate ignorance, and disinformation, and they beat people down with cyber baseball bats who tried to spread that stuff.

And the "exile" guys kept coming back with EXACTLY the same material, a short list of topics, which had been knocked down only the day before or so, as if it had never happened! Of course it makes them look like idiots, and it reveals they are hoping to catch someone new off guard who hasn't seen the previous discussions. What a bunch of crooks!

Do you remember a Cuban who participated a lot who had his own website? He was around a LOT at certain times, and his website was perfect for sending people there who couldn't grasp how Cubans survive using common views of their monetary system based on US standards. They don't realize there is a CHANGE which is necessary to grasp and that a dollar HERE is not a dollar THERE. I think his name may have been Julian.

I have looked for that site, but failed to remember his name. I'm certain it's still in place. You may remember he had made a few trips to the U.S. for conferences, etc., and had visited places here, even had a picture of himself at McDonald's. Ha ha ha.

Do you remember that great writer, Maria Perez? Many loved her lengthy writings so much, but her writing infuriated the right-wingers! I'm almost convinced she was Cuban, at least she had been there over long periods of time. I think she said she had musician friends living there now.

There were also two guys who didn't write as often, who seemed a little less experienced with English, (but very capable of communicating) who appeared to be Cuba Cubans. One of them added his own computer-generated very skilled drawing of an airplane and instantly got banned by the CNN moderators, for some reason. Do you remember that? Their excuse was VERY flimsy and stupid, and arbitrary, and seemed bery excessive for such a tiny "transgression." The other guy faded away, too, after that. It could easily be they just wanted them gone from CNN.