The power of a child….Elian, 10 years later

Ten years ago I “cheated death”. I beat a leaky appendix—a condition I ignored for months.

On April 18th, 2000 at the behest of two friends--a treasure hunter in the Florida Keys and a gal pal in Texas--I went to the hospital to get “checked out”, and the emergency room nurse decided I needed to “check-in”.

I was--as I lay curled up in the fetal position on a gurney in the E.R. -- in need of emergency surgery.

That brings me to ten years ago today and the early morning hours of April 22nd.

I was prone on my couch, recovering from the surgery and had passed out watching television in a pain killer-induced half sleep the night before; leaving my television to default to the test pattern of Miami’s WSVN in the early morning hours.

There was a sudden flash of light as the station went “live” with hysterical screaming. I groggily awoke and struggled to focus on the television screen.

Through the fog of the pain killers, and tear gas disbursed at the scene on the screen, I managed to see a van driven by a uniformed City of Miami police officer and a determined looking female running towards that vehicle with a horrified child pulled tightly to her chest—“they” were taking Elian Gonzalez from his Miami home!

The raid was one that was promised locally as “would not happen”-- yet it did, as ordered by then Attorney General Janet Reno. It was conducted by an estimated one hundred thirty INS personnel, and an elite team of eight from the U.S. Border Patrol’s BORTAC unit.

Shocked by what I’d witnessed, I spent the remainder of the day listening to the media rhetoric from both sides of the Elian debate, and the hate speech that spewed from Americans about “Cuban rafters”.

During the early 1990’s, I’d flown numerous missions with groups like Brothers to the Rescue, Freedom Flight International and the Cuban-American Pilots Association. I’d also spent many hours at the House of Transit on Stock Island, near Key West, in those days.

The hate that streamed from the television on April 22, 2000 in no way reflected what I experienced as we flew those flights in search of families fleeing Fidel’s island of Hell— I only saw families in search of the freedoms most Americans take for granted.

For years after--as a bar stool Captain in my favorite Key West bars-- I’d told the tales of what I’d witnessed from my perch a mere fifty feet above the ocean’s surface, safely inside the cockpit of my crew’s Piper Apache 235. We were N13BR, “los Gringos al rescate”—an American flight- rescue team.

For years, my friends told me, “Matt, you gotta write a book!” and for years I always promised I would.

I started my first on April 22nd, 2000.

It was the confluence of a tap on my shoulder from the man upstairs, the realization of having had another brush with death, and the betrayal of a little boy that set me on my path to writing.

It wasn’t as if I had to create stories, I just had to write them. I’d seen them develop on the waves below me with my own eyes. I’d heard them from those rescued and living at the House of Transit.

Within a few days of Elian’s forceful removal from his Miami relatives home, I e-mailed my first pages to my Texas gal pal prompting her to ask me where “the darkness” had come from.

“The truth”, I told her.

Those very pages became Chapter 9 in my first book, “Dying to Get Here: A Story of Coming to America", a fictionalized version of a Cuban family’s harrowing escape to freedom that was published in 2004 as an attempt at explaining the plight of balseros.

Five years later, with the help of my co-author, three-time Pentagon appointee Thomas Van Hare, we published, “BETRAYAL: Clinton, Castro & The Cuban Five”, a non-fiction compilation of the evidence surrounding the shoot down of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996.

Amazingly, I now realize, both books were born of one President’s administration and its failure to navigate the churning waters between Havana and Miami.

The “Cuban Crisis” would be one of many Clinton would be remembered for; and most likely cost Al Gore a major block of voters in Miami’s Cuban exile community—one that had supported and then like Elian, found itself betrayed by his predecessor.

Ten years after “cheating death” and Elian, I’ve been able to publish three books.

Each and every year since, I’ve been able to thank my friends-- the treasure hunter and my gal pal from Texas--for the sage advice they gave me ten years ago—I credit them with saving my life—and in part, my writing career.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to thank Elian Gonzalez for his part in inspiring me to write, and from the looks of the recent photos of him in Cuba, it’s doubtful I’ll ever have the opportunity to do so.