Elián

(EDITOR’S NOTE: for many years Enrique wrote a column at the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel newspaper. We are collecting some of the best ones, and will share them here.)

On the day of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, also the anniversary of JFK's assassination, the boy is found.

By fishermen, men like Jesus' apostles. He has survived miraculously where others, including his mother, have drowned. Dolphins, they say, kept guard against the sharks that roam those waters. And even after that terrible ordeal the child looks angelic. A winsome face with a hint of sadness, a face that will not change no matter how often it will appear on TV screens and newspaper front pages over the next months.

"A golden child, my mother says."

Those are words of one Cuban-American demonstrator keeping watch over what appear to be the child's last hours on American soil. She tells her friend, "And my mother always adds, '24 karat gold!'"

The golden child's own mother becomes a memory, a ghostly absence. She has sacrificed herself to the cruel sea, "in order to give the child life," the child's compatriots in exile will say.

The father, across the Straits, looks just like the child. But the boy's sweet innocence has been replaced by a tight-lipped reticence. And, when the father finally appears in the United States, the serious suits he wears make him look like a little boy dressed up for church.

After his rescue from the sea, a rescue that resonates with Cubans who have always said prayers before an image of the Virgin Mary saving a boat of fishermen from an ocean death, the boy lives with Miami relatives.

There is a great-uncle, a handsome, raffish, mustachioed man, young looking enough to appear, in the images of his taking the boy to school, more like a father than a grandfather. And there is a young cousin who becomes a surrogate mother.

She is attractive -- this is a good-looking family -- and emotionally frail, precisely the kind of young woman who will trigger that erotic mix of macho and fatherly feelings many men are prone to.

Two of Latin America's greatest writers cannot resist actually writing some of the story. Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a man of lifelong leftist militancy and a friend of the Cuban leader, weighs in with a story of the mother's flight with the boy. And the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whose parents were founders of Cuba's Communist Party, writes about the politics of the case in the light of Cuba's powerful traditions of African religion. Unlike his Colombian colleague, however, the Cuban is an archenemy of the Cuban regime.

Halfway through this story, the boy's grandmothers make an appearance. After tortuous negotiation -- everything in this story requires tortuous negotiation -- they meet the child at the home of a Catholic nun, president of a local college. Yet soon after their visit, the nun, whose house had been chosen precisely because of her neutrality, sides with the exile family and declares the child should stay in the United States.

And one of the grandmothers declares, as if telling a charming family anecdote, that during her meeting with her grandson she bit his tongue and inspected his genitals.

Non-Cuban Americans do not understand much of what is going on, or if they seem to understand they disapprove.

Clinging to family values and the law, they insist the boy belongs with his father. And they look at the Miami Cubans with increasing fear and loathing. Those people are breaking the law, they say, though no one has been prosecuted for lawlessness.

Indeed, much of what is happening is being carried out by lawyers.

When there is the opportunity to send the child's father to claim his son, the Cuban leader threatens to send a team of psychiatrists, the head of the National Assembly, the child's classmates, and his school desk for good measure.

Spanish language talk radio in Miami addresses no other topic.

Cuban-Americans pray in church to their patron saint, the Virgin Mary, for a miracle. For some, that Virgin is also Ochun, the African goddess of flowing waters, of sweetness, of women's sexuality. And believers in Santeria see in the uncle's name, Lazaro, the Christian "saint" who stands for an African deity, Babalu-aye.

Walking away from the watch over the nun's house, where the child and his exile family await the moment of contact with the child's father, I mention to a compatriot the great-uncle's name, Lazaro.

As if conjured by my words, two men turn a corner and walk in my direction bearing a life-size statue of St. Lazarus, a bearded man in a loincloth, leaning on crutches and bearing on his torso sores that resemble stigmata.

The American media gathered at the watch will probably see yet another sign of the Cuban-American community's Catholic piousness. Cubans, on both sides of the Florida Straits, will continue to see portents, meanings.

Stories not just of laws and families and politics, but, as in Indonesian puppet theater, of good and evil, men and gods.

from the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, 4/13/2000

Alapa-dupe

BABALOO!

That was Desi Arnaz's signature call, which he sang while hitting a big drum hanging on his hip from a shoulder strap and dancing a conga step. The wily Arnaz had lifted the move and the song from Miguelito Valdés, a popular Cuban artist known as Mr. Babalú (the Spanish spelling of the word).

Arnaz was America's notion of a Cuban, Ricky Ricardo in the TV series. Mild Latin lover charm and sex appeal, thick accent in English, and exasperated outbursts of rapid-fire Spanish (sometimes laced with profanities the audience could not detect) when wife Lucy's antics became too much, as they did week after week.  He was a lovable Latino, a threat to no one, and cute when he got mad. He was laughable because, after all, this was a comedy. 

Years ago a colleague who shall remain nameless and today writes for a major publication, was a bit of a wag. In the office of our publication, which was major in a minor mode, he took to calling me "Babaloo." Obviously, I reminded him of Desi/Ricky, and though I didn't do conga steps down the newsroom slapping a drum, I was the designated Latin music critic. 

I knew from early school years that showing irritation at a clever nickname was a surefire way to make it stick. So I showed none when he called me Babaloo. One day though, I said, "Do you know what that word means?" And I proceeded to tell him about Babalú Ayé, an orisha, or as popularly known, a "saint", in the Yoruba pantheon of Afro-Cuban religion. A powerful deity in Santería, evoked by the song Miguelito Valdés and later Desi Arnaz sang. 

"He oversees your feet and your legs", I said. "Which is why he is depicted as a cripple on crutches." And I added, matter-of-factly. "He determines if anything will happen to those parts of your body, if you will walk or be a paralyzed invalid for the rest of your life."

My colleague looked dazed and confused as I explained the backstory of that cute Cuban Desi Arnaz and his signature chant.

And he never again called me Babaloo.