When he was six, his terrified face – photographed during a raid by armed immigration officers on his family’s Miami home – became one of the most memorable images of cold war tensions between the US and Cuba.
Now 29, and more than two decades after he was forcibly deported from Florida to his homeland at the direction of the US supreme court, Elián González is poised to become one of Cuba’s most senior lawmakers.
His nomination for a seat in the 470-member national assembly, announced in the Caribbean island’s government newspaper Granma on Tuesday, is seen as a high honor at a young age for González, who has long been critical of US policy towards Cuba.
Hailed by the outlet as “representing the most worthy of the Cuban youth”, González will join the members who meet several times a year to discuss and set laws for the island’s communist regime.
The months-long custody battle over González began in 1999, when he survived the sinking of a ship bringing Cuban refugees to Florida. His mother died, and the child was looked after by relatives, including his great-uncle Lazaro, at their house in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood.
The tug-of-war between the boy’s father – still in Cuba – and his relatives in Florida for custody soon evolved into a full-scale diplomatic face-off, with the communist dictator Fidel Castro bombastically threatening to dispatch guerrilla squads to snatch Elián back.
The tense situation created a headache for the Bill Clinton White House. Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, became a pariah among Miami’s influential Cuban expat community for siding with the father and ordering the early morning seizure of the boy at gunpoint. His angry relatives said Reno had tricked them by ordering the military-style raid while they believed they were negotiating a voluntary handover.
González was treated like a hero on his return to Havana, and he was used frequently as a prop by the Castro regime as it sought to capitalize on the episode.
Castro himself attended González’s seventh birthday party. And for years his family in Cuba was surrounded by government bodyguards.
As he grew older, González made it clear that he welcomed Castro’s embrace, joining the Young Communist Union of Cuba and entering military service at 15. He rejected claims by his Miami relatives that he had been brainwashed.
In a 2017 interview with CNN, the year after he graduated from a military academy with an industrial engineering degree, González said that if he had been made to stay in Miami he would have been “used” by the expat population there.
“I think I would have become the poster boy for that group of Cubans in Miami that tries to destroy the revolution, that try to make Cuba look bad,” he said.
“Fidel put many things in my hands. Fidel told me if I wanted to be an athlete, he supported that; if I wanted to be a swimmer, he supported that. If I wanted to be an artist, he supported that – and he did.”
In Miami, the house from which González was seized became something of a shrine, remaining as it was on the day of the raid there in April 2000 and operated as a museum for several years by another of his great-uncles, Delfin González, who died in 2016.