Elian in Cuba after months of drama in US

Cuban security forces blocked access to the house, in the upscale Miramar district, which has been specially prepared to receive the motherless boy and his entourage before they return to their provincial hometown of Cardenas on the northern coast.

The freshly painted house, complete with swimming pool, is a good deal grander than Elian’s humble former home in a pot-holed street of the provincial Port Cardenas, or the modest house where he lived with Miami relatives after his sea-rescue.

But it is nowhere near as luxurious as Elian’s two most recent residences in the Washington area, where he was temporarily housed following the dramatic April 22 reunion with his father after US agents seized him from his Miami relatives’ home.

Elian disappeared from public view after he arrived, shy but smiling, at Havana’s Jose Marti international airport. His return to Cuba was broadcast live across the nation Wednesday evening. Hundreds of children cheered “Elian! Elian!” on the runway, and emotional relatives hugged, kissed and hoisted him onto their shoulders.

The Cuban government said he enjoyed a private reunion with relatives and friends at an undisclosed location in Havana, before retiring to the house.

The return of Elian, whose personal tragedy unleashed a bitter family feud and another flashpoint in the turbulent history of Cuba-US Relations, is a major political victory for President Fidel Castro’s government. Castro personally supervised an unprecedented patriotic crusade to bring home Elian, mobilising millions in rallies across the island.

On arrival, Elian was lifted out of the plane by his father Juan Miguel Gonzalez, a 31-year-old tourism worker who, with Castro’s backing, left Cuba for the first time in his life to travel to the United States and seek his son’s return.

The boy, who survived a November 1999, shipwreck that killed his mother and 10 other illegal Cuban migrants, sat on his father’s knee and waved as he was driven from the airport in a white Lada, a common car on the Communist-run island.

To prevent the boy from suffering “excessive emotions, tiredness or bother”, there were no street celebrations or other mass mobilisations planned, a Cuban statement said. Foreign media were kept away from the boy and were only allowed to record his arrival from an airport roof.The government said that according to plans worked out with his father, Elian would likely spend between two and three weeks in the Havana house. After that, he will enjoy a week’s holiday before returning to Cardenas.

Elian’s departure, carried live by all major US television networks, came hours after the US Supreme Court rejected an emergency request by the boy’s Miami relatives seeking to keep him in the United States. The court also turned down an appeal seeking a plitical asylum hearing for Elian.

The court’s action ended bitter legal wrangling over the child’s fate in a politically charged case that began when he was rescued by two fishermen from the ocean off Florida on US Thanksgiving holiday last November.