MIAMI.
STARING at the computer-printout photo held high above Dubi Zeledon’s head, the woman gasped.
The woman clutched her chest, staggered into her friend’s arms and broke down in tears.
Several men also saw the picture of a petrified Elian Gonzalez staring into the face of a gun-toting INS agent.
“Those sons of bitches!” screamed a man outside Elian’s Little Havana home.
What the photo displays is a graphic, horrible, sad but necessary conclusion to the overdrawn Elian saga.
It was necessary because the Miami relatives were given several opportunities to hand over the boy to his father – and they didn’t.
Elian’s former caretaker and great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez refused because even if he did the right thing, the Miami community would brand him a traitor.
Several Cubans have admitted that getting one up on Fidel is worth the price of Elian’s reunion with his father.
But whether you hate Fidel Castro or not, reuniting a traumatized 6-year-old with his father is far more important than pursuing political agendas.
But yesterday, the Miami exile community was distressed.
Outside Elian’s former Little Havana home, they were all complaining about the trauma the child endured at the hands of INS agents during the raid.
Or were they?
They lost their symbol of freedom – a piece of human flesh that they were using to stick it to Fidel Castro.
Perhaps the protesters – and the mothers and fathers of New York – should imagine for a moment what it would be like to be separated from their children.
The folks who cry foul hate Fidel Castro so much they are blinded to the very simple God-given rights of a father.
For example, Zeledon, a father of three, held the graphic photo high because “I think it’s an injustice. It shouldn’t have happened.”
Antonio Albanes, 41, for the past few months used handcuffs to affix his arms to an eight-foot-tall cross to form a life-like crucifix a block away from Elian’s former Miami home.
“What saddens me the most is that Jesus couldn’t save him,” Albanes said as his tears streaked down his face and dripped on the American flag wrapped around his waist.
Lenia Fernandez, 53, who immediately showed up at Elian’s former home, sat in the middle of the street and ran her thin fingers over the beads of her rosary.
Distraught and teary-eyed, the woman’s voice was hoarse from screaming at the INS officials who raided the house. She remained seated on the hot pavement for hours.
Miami Mayor Joe Carollo emotionally called the INS raid a “crime,” apparently forgetting that it was the Miami relatives who disobeyed an order to hand Elian over to his father.
Eli Hernandez, a 37-year-old Air Force veteran stood motionless, holding a large upside-down American flag on a pole.
“When you display a flag upside-down it is an SOS. It is a distress call,” Hernandez said.
Yes, the Miami exile community was distressed.
But Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, has suffered most of all.
And if he decides to return to Cuba, defect or go to Tahiti with his boy, it is his business – no one else’s.
The trauma so vividly displayed in Miami doesn’t measure up to the heartbreak of the separation of a father and his son.
Surely, from now on, father and son will be forever inseparable.