Elián González: A Blast from the Past

Elián Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who became a political football during the Clinton Administration, is back. The saga of little Elián dominated cable news for months. I would have volunteered to take him back to Cuba just to get his dysfunctional family off my TV.

In 2000, I wrote:

For more than two months, Elián’s best interests have been sidelined as politicians pander to Cuban exiles. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 900,000 Cubans in the United States, including 474,000 naturalized citizens. The relative small number of Cuban Americans belies their political influence in Florida…

The battle over Elián is fraught with irony. Polls show a majority of Americans support the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s decision to return Elián to his father. Yet leaders of the self-proclaimed party of "family values" would deny Juan Miguel González custody of his son and grant Elián citizenship in the name of "freedom and liberty."

Then as now, Cuban Americans are threatening to remember in November. Politico.com reports:

Having two top advisers who played key roles in the episode — Greg Craig, who represented Gonzalez's father in Cuba, and Eric Holder, then a Clinton administration deputy attorney general when federal agents stormed the Miami home of Gonzalez’s relatives to remove the then-6-year-old and return him to Cuba — Obama now finds himself on the wrong side of an emotional issue in a battleground state.

While Cuban Americans dominate politics in South Florida, they now represent a minority of Hispanic voters statewide. Also, Hispanic Democrats outnumber Hispanic Republicans for the first time in the state.

According to an analysis by NDN:

As there are more than a million Hispanics in the Florida electorate, this type of big shift can mean a shift of hundreds of thousands of votes over time, clearly enough to swing a state decided by a mere 500 votes in 2000.

Importantly, a majority of younger Cuban-Americans agree with Sen. Obama’s policy of easing restrictions on travel and remittances to the island nation while maintaining an embargo. This position, long advocated by NDN, is directly at odds with Sen. McCain’s position, which simply extends the Bush Administration’s hard-line policy.

So while Elián is back, it may not be back to the future.