Three bare-chested boys wearing faded shorts and carrying a neon yellow snorkel were on their way to the beach in the upscale Miramar neighborhood when they were stopped by a policeman.
After explaining that they just wanted to ease the summer swelter with a swim, the teenaged boys were turned away.
No one, except nearby neighbors, selected diplomats and party officials, is allowed within 10 blocks of the house where Elian Gonzalez, his family and schoolmates are staying.
“He’s just a boy like us,” a boy grumbled as he turned away from the officer. “Why do they give him everything?” another said. “He should go back to Miami and bring us a pair of Nikes.”
Elian, returned to Cuba on Wednesday after a seven-month legal battle in the U.S., is housed in a converted school as a team of child psychologists and teachers “readapt” him for Cuban society.
But even the government’s predictions of Elian’s future here seem contradictory.
“Our dedicated teachers should carry out the task of converting him into a model boy, worthy of his history, his charms and his talent, so that he may always be a normal citizen, as well as a symbol, an example and a glory for all the children of our nation, and a pride for Cuba’s teachers,” an official communique said Thursday.
The government said Elian would likely spend two to three weeks in the Miramar house, which is surrounded by foreign embassies and dozens of police officers.
After that, the family is to take a week’s vacation before returning to its hometown, Cardenas.
Some neighbors seemed annoyed by the district’s limelight.
Others were pleased to have Elian in their midst.
“If they took him back to Cardenas immediately it would be too much of an emotional shock. Bringing him here is like Cubanizing him, making him feel Cuban again,” said Marta Rodriguez, 35, who teaches English at her home just a half-block away.
Elian’s readaptation is cloaked in secrecy, puzzling some Cubans.
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Their only information about what was going on behind the barricades came from official statements, which have said little more than that the group would remain in the house “for the minimum time he needs to reinitiate his life in the country in the most normal and tranquil conditions possible, and to complete his 1st-grade studies and those of his four accompanying classmates.”
A Cuban dissident, Pedro Pablo Alvarez Ramos, whose Havana-based organization seeks to unionize workers, questioned the need for a halfway house.
“Nobody knows what the readaption process is, or what methods will be used,” he said. “We don’t know why he should be isolated.”
Cuban exiles have worried that Elian would be brainwashed.But some Cuba experts saw a far less sinister process.
The extraordinary circumstances that surrounded Elian from the moment he stepped on the doomed boat with his mother in an escape from the island contribute to the extraordinary care the Cuban educational system is extending to him, said Sheryl Lutjens, a Cuba authority at Arizona University.
“I don’t see it in the sense of his being a special political project,” said Lutjens.
“In any society, no matter where, education always has political objectives–to socialize our children and our youth into the norms that are expected in the culture and the political culture.”
Gary Prevost, a Cuba expert at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict in Collegeville, Minn., said Elian’s stay at the Miramar home is “simply a continuation of his treatment in the United States. To expect that he would walk off an airplane and would go back to his relatives in Cardenas, that’s unrealistic.
“I suspect most of what’s going on is a 6-year-old getting reacquainted with his friends and life in Cuba.”
In televised replays of Elian’s airport arrival, the Cuban government on Thursday continued to tout what is often described as a David versus Goliath victory over the United States.
Cuban President Fidel Castro has vowed that Elian’s homecoming will not end efforts to change U.S. policies, trade sanctions and immigration laws that, it says, encourage the kind of illegal migration that led to Elian’s plight.
One of the first announcements Cubans heard Wednesday afternoon on state television and radio told of a rally of 200,000 people planned for Saturday in the southeastern city of Manzanillo.
Alvarez Ramos, the dissident, said the embargo and U.S. immigration policies are largely scapegoats for the island’s economic woes.
“Ten years ago we didn’t talk about the embargo or the Cuban Adjustment Act because we received aid from the Soviet government. But as the crisis grows so does the pretext of blaming the embargo for all of Cubans’ problems.”