Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Cuban government censors filter details of the Elián González case broadcast on the island. But when Leoncio Veguilla visited Miami in March, he couldn't escape the news. Veguilla, president of Cuba's Western Baptist denomination, thought he had heard it all: That Elián's volatile father had abused Elián's mother, who drowned off Miami's coast before fishermen plucked the child from shark-infested waters. That Elián's grandmothers wanted to defect to the United States. That Elián's father really wants him to stay in America.Now, back in Havana, Veguilla is shocked at the news that federal agents removed Elián at gunpoint from the home of his Miami relatives and reunited him with his father."I was flabbergasted," Veguilla says. "Everything has been so fast, so unexpected. We didn't expect things to turn out as they did."Yet Veguilla says it is good that Elián is now with his father."The boy should come back to Cuba," he says with conviction.Veguilla's opinion contrasts with polls showing that most of Miami's Cuban Americans believe the boy should stay in America. Across the Florida Strait, however, interviews with Havana pastors and national church leaders reveal that many evangelicals agree with Veguilla.What surprised Veguilla most during his visit to Miami was the Cuban-American reaction to Elián. "I believed I was going to find [Miami] opinion as I did in Cuba, but it's very different," he says.Veguilla is no Castro cheerleader. Starting in 1965, he served five-and-a-half years in prison on false charges of associating with American spies. Secret police arrested his son, Eliezer, on the same false charges in 1994, demanding that the son confess to espionage or face a live bear visible from his cell (CT, Jan. 12, 1998, p. 18). Later, he faced a firing squad for a mock execution. In 1995, Cuba deported Eliezer Veguilla, who now is an ordained Southern Baptist minister in Miami.Leoncio Veguilla's denomination is not a member of the Cuban Council of Churches, the progovernment counterpart to the U.S.-based National Council of Churches (NCC), which has lobbied for Elián's return to his kin in Cuba; nor are the denominations of other evangelicals who spoke with Christianity Today.What about the NCC's role in reuniting Elián with his father? While Leoncio Veguilla describes the NCC as left-leaning and supportive of liberation theology, in contrast to Veguilla's conservative Western Baptists, "It appears to me that [the NCC's] intentions aren't bad, that it's a good thing," he says.Since the NCC sponsored the journey of Elián's grandmothers to the United States in January, it has continued advocacy for the boy's return to Cuba. The council helped introduce the Cuban relatives to attorney Gregory Craig, who now represents them. The United Methodist Church, one of the largest NCC member denominations, has established the Humanitarian Advocacy Fund fund to pay for Craig's expenses. The church hopes to attract $100,000 in tax-deductible donations."The church has been the only bridge between Cuba and the United States," Cuban Council of Churches General Secretary Reinerio Arce told Ecumenical News International.NCC General Secretary Robert W. Edgar denies that the organization's involvement in this case means it supports Castro's regime. "We have not, as a council, been pro-Castro or pro-authoritarian government," he says, adding that the NCC has backed political asylum for Cubans who want it. "You don't have to support Cuba to recognize that the role of family in culture is important."

next page... |  1 of 3

May 22 2000, Vol. 44, No. 6