An American Son: A Memoir (19 page)

My first year in the legislature was like a redshirt year in college sports. Because I had been elected in a special election, the session didn’t count against my eight-year term limit. I would have nine months’ seniority and valuable experience by the time the rest of my freshman class arrived in November. I used the time to learn how the place worked, how decisions were made and how successful legislators accomplished things. I cultivated a relationship with Mike Fasano, who would serve as house majority leader in the new term under incoming speaker Tom Feeney, and I observed power beginning to shift from the current speaker John Thrasher to Tom in the closing weeks of the session. The nine months of seniority I accumulated would give the house leadership a rationale to promote me over other ambitious members of my class.

I had other things on my mind, however, in those early days in Tallahassee. Jeanette was nine months’ pregnant. I worried she would go into labor while we were in session and I would miss the birth of my first child. Luckily, I was at home for the weekend when her contractions started on April 3, 2000. We drove to the hospital and waited a couple of hours only to learn they were a false alarm. But since Jeanette was past her due date and we were at the hospital, her doctor decided to induce labor.

As every parent discovers, the birth of your child, especially your first child, is an experience unlike any other. Nothing really prepares you for the flood of emotions it summons, or the abrupt change in your priorities. It is the moment your heart admits a love that surpasses all others, and ego submits to a stronger attachment. You suddenly form a new consciousness, as if your life is turned inside out. It transformed me.

The very moment I first saw Amanda, I felt such a surge of devotion and protectiveness it overwhelmed me. She slept most of her first night of life, and I couldn’t stop staring at her, my mind gripped not only with unfamiliar sensations but with imagining the whole of her life. I pictured her first day at school and the day I would drop her off at college and the day I would walk her down the aisle at her wedding.

When we brought her home, I felt possessed by a responsibility greater than any that had ever been expected of me. Amanda was a colicky baby. She cried uncontrollably after being fed, her face red and her little body stiff in distress as we tried to comfort her. We suffered many anxious, sleepless nights our first months with Amanda, and even though honesty obliges me to confess I looked forward to getting some sleep when I returned to Tallahassee, it was still hard to leave her. But I did—the first of many separations I have regretted over the years.

Not long after Amanda was born, another child’s welfare captured my attention, and the attention of the entire country. In November 1999, a six-year-old boy and his mother boarded a small, crowded aluminum boat with a faulty motor in the hope of escaping oppression in Cuba for a better life in America. The mother and ten others perished on the journey when the motor quit and their boat swamped. The boy, Elián González, survived and was found floating on an inner tube by two fishermen who rescued him.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service placed him in the custody of relatives in Miami. Elián’s father, with the support of the Castro
regime, demanded his return to Cuba. Elián’s Miami relatives refused, and the stage was set for an intense confrontation that would divide the Cuban American community from many of their fellow Americans.

The vast majority of the Cuban exile community, including me, wanted Elián to remain in the United States, and his father to join him here. The notion that he be forcibly returned to a regime his mother had given her life to rescue him from was unfathomable to us. In the 1960s, hundreds of Cuban parents had sent their children to live with foster families or orphanages in the United States to save them from life under communism. For those who had lived through the experience, returning a child to Cuba against his dead mother’s wishes was too much to bear. To most other Americans, however, reuniting a motherless child with his father was obviously the right decision.

Attorney General Janet Reno set a deadline of April 13, 2000, for Elián’s relatives to turn him over to federal authorities while his custody case was adjudicated. They refused to surrender him, and a crowd of hundreds of supporters and media kept a constant vigil at their modest home in Little Havana.

The Elián González saga became more than a custody battle. It became a cause that polarized Miami and much of the nation. In some quarters, support for his father’s custody rights took on a distinctly antiexile undertone. Many longtime friendships between Cuban Americans and non-Cubans ended in bitter arguments over Elián’s fate. Many non-Cubans thought it outrageous that Elián’s relatives thumbed their noses at the authorities and dared them to take Elián forcibly from them. Many Cubans felt their antagonism was intended as a deliberate insult to their community.

The deadline came and went, and for a while it seemed the standoff would continue indefinitely. Jeanette and I were talking about the case on the evening of April 21. It was Good Friday, and I was home for the Easter break. I remember predicting to Jeanette that if the authorities were going to seize Elián that weekend they would do it the next morning, and not on Easter Sunday.

I awoke to Amanda’s cries at four o’clock that morning. After I fed her and she had fallen back asleep, I decided to go by the house in Little Havana where Elián was staying. I expected something could happen that morning, and I wanted to be there to see it. The streets were empty as I made the short
drive until I reached the neighborhood where Elián’s relatives lived, and found a police car with its lights flashing blocking an intersection. Seconds later several vans sped past me toward the house. I waited in my car at the intersection, and a few minutes later the same vans sped by me again traveling in the opposite direction. I parked my car and sprinted the three blocks to the house. Hundreds of people were wandering around in disbelief, many of them coughing and looking for a hose to wash pepper spray off their faces. Media trucks and camera crews were everywhere. Reporters interrupted early-morning broadcasts with breaking news that Elián González had been seized in a predawn raid by a Border Patrol SWAT team.

I, too, was in disbelief, but less so over the raid itself—I knew the government would eventually enforce its authority—than over the raid’s immediate aftermath. The Cuban exile community had always been a bastion of pro-American sentiment. Exiles loved America and Americans. My grandfather and parents had been deeply patriotic, and regarded their new country with reverence and gratitude. Most Cuban Americans were pillars of their communities, deeply invested in our nation and always on the side of law and order. Now, perhaps for the first time in their lives here, they felt they were on the outside looking in: raided by federal agents, vilified in the national media as lawless and disrespectful.

Some Miamians harbored deep-seated resentments for Cuban Americans. The controversy exposed many of those resentments and forced Cuban Americans to confront them. Many were shocked to hear from non-Hispanic friends how much it bothered them when they couldn’t place an order at Burger King in English or when Cuban associates at work spoke Spanish to each other in front of them. I think the discovery encouraged many Cubans to reexamine the way they lived and be more attentive to the sensitivities of non-Cubans.

The Elián González incident was a watershed moment in Miami politics and in the history of the Cuban exile community. Its most immediate impact was felt in the 2000 elections. Arguably, it cost Al Gore the election. Gore lost Florida and the presidency to George Bush by a little more than five hundred votes. Cuban American anger over the Clinton administration’s seizure of Elián and dissatisfaction with Gore’s ambiguous position on the controversy motivated most of them to vote to punish the administration. As for Elián, he returned to his father and Cuba, where he became
an active member of the Communist Party and loyal supporter of El Comandante, the ridiculous title given to Fidel Castro.

When the sad ordeal concluded, I returned to the pressing concerns of my fledgling political career. My primary opponent, Angel Zayon, whom I had very narrowly defeated, was making noises about challenging me again in August. He was convinced that low voter turnout in the special election had been the primary reason for his defeat and felt his chances would be much better in a regular primary, where the turnout would be higher and his name recognition advantage would be greater. I started knocking on doors in the district, raising money and sending every signal I could that I was prepared for battle.

In the end, it wasn’t necessary. Angel had been upset with me over a misunderstanding. I was being interviewed on a talk radio program, when a caller made a disparaging remark about Angel’s daughter. I had misunderstood his comment and hadn’t rebuked him. I met with Angel to discuss it, and subsequently apologized on the same radio program for unintentionally failing to reprimand the caller. In response to my apology, Angel announced he wouldn’t run.

Without an opponent, I spent the summer campaigning for Republican candidates who would be elected to my incoming freshman class. Supporters of Gaston Cantens’s bid for speaker misinterpreted it as further evidence I had ambitions for the office. I had signed Gaston’s pledge card at the end of the regular session, and I saw no harm in traveling the state and supporting my future colleagues. And if I helped myself in the process by making allies for a possible leadership bid in the future, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that, either.

In hindsight, I understand I should have handled myself better. Gaston had worked very hard to be elected speaker, and believed correctly that the house wouldn’t elect two consecutive speakers from the same region. If some of the freshmen I campaigned for that summer believed I was likely to run for speaker in the next election, they might be inclined to withhold their support from Gaston. I can understand why Gaston’s allies viewed my campaigning as a threat, and why they would continue to regard me suspiciously in the coming months and years.

I watched the returns on election night with friends from the Dole campaign in the living room of my former aide and Dole campaign alumna
Alina Garcia, who had resigned from my staff to run for a house seat. She lost, but by that point we were resigned to her defeat. We didn’t expect the unfolding drama of the presidential race, however. We monitored the returns on David Rivera’s computer, and David relayed them by phone to Al Cardenas, who was our party chairman. Al relayed them in turn to Governor Jeb Bush, who was sitting in the Texas governor’s mansion with his brother, the candidate. As the returns from different counties came in, I could hear Al swearing on the other end of the call.

Then the bottom fell out. NBC News called Florida for Vice President Gore. It seemed premature—some of the strongest Republican counties hadn’t reported their returns yet. Al and David argued that the result couldn’t possibly be known yet. But the rest of us thought they were crazy. The networks never call a race unless they’re certain they’ve got it right.

Soon thereafter, the counties David and Al had mentioned started to report their results, and the numbers started to move. Within the hour, NBC retracted its prediction, and put Florida back in the “too close to call” category. After pronouncing Senator Gore the Florida winner and retracting it, the networks then gave the election to Governor Bush. Gore called Bush to concede and then called him back to retract it. I finally gave up and went to bed around three o’clock in the morning, certain that when I woke up we would have our new president. But we didn’t. And I would begin my second year in the Florida House as the body was stuck in the middle of the most controversial presidential election in modern American history.

T
HE FLORIDA LEGISLATURE CONVENES AN ORGANIZAtional session after an election to swear in members, elect a speaker and pass rules for the new legislative session—it’s an occasion marked by a good deal of pomp and ceremony. As I drove to the capitol to begin my first full term as a member of the Florida House, it was quite apparent the session that began two weeks after the 2000 election would be special for reasons that had nothing to do with us.

All roads leading to the capitol were clogged with satellite trucks. Available hotel rooms were scarce, most of them occupied by the vast media horde that had descended on Tallahassee. Another new member jokingly asked me, “Does the first day always get this much attention?”

As it turned out, the resolution of the election crisis would prove anticlimactic in the house. The U.S. Supreme Court effectively declared the winner on December 12, before the legislature had to take definitive action. Nevertheless, it was a very unusual start to a new legislative session.

The session was memorable for other reasons as well. The incoming majority leader, Mike Fasano, appointed me to his former job, majority whip. After only nine months in the house, I had vaulted into the leadership. It was a major coup, and I was thrilled. The news wasn’t received enthusiastically by Gaston Cantens’s allies, however, whose suspicions about my ambitions only deepened.