Both our parents wanted what seemed best. Elian's mother drowned when her raft capsized. She would never know the freedom she was longing to offer her young son. My own father was captured by the very people he had once supported. The insidious repression he was trying to uproot at its beginning has endured these past 40 years.
People still escape to freedom and others are still imprisoned.
Denounced as an enemy of the state and traitor to the revolution, he was silenced by a firing squad when I was 7. I feel as if young Elian will one day sit back, like me, and wonder why his life was so unequivocally disrupted. I would like to assure him that he is not alone. I grew up free to become an American citizen, with all the privileges and daily luxuries which that entails. I grew up free to learn whatever I wanted, but not free to indulge my longing to be reunited with my father.