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Posted on 02/11/2002 11:49:23 AM PST by Luis Gonzalez
HAVANA (AP) - The U.S. group Freedom Forum presented shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez with its Free Spirit Award Friday in a ceremony attended by the boy's family and a few Cuban officials.
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Elian, 8, looked a bit awed as he receive the metal sculpture — a stylized globe with what appears to be a flame rising out of the top, representing a free spirit.
"Besides being able to survive at sea, our Free Spirit Award committee said that through his ordeal Elian was able to come back and laugh no matter how many grown-ups were tugging at him," said Neuharth.
"This is from the United States to you and to the people of Cuba," Neuharth told the boy. "Everybody in the United States loves you."
Elian was just 5 when he was found lashed to an inner tube as he floated at sea off the Florida coast around Thanksgiving 1999. He was one of three people who survived when their boat capsized as it traveled from Cuba to the United States. Elian's mother and 10 others perished in the waves.
The child was temporarily placed with his relatives in Miami, setting off a seven-month international child custody battle between family members on both sides of the Florida Straits. After a battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) and an armed raid to seize the child from his Florida family, Elian and his father returned to Cuba in late June 2000.
"His dad told me he is doing extremely well and that Elian sometimes talks about being a doctor, sometimes talks about being a teacher, but mostly talks about being an astronaut," Neuharth said. "Among his interests have been baseball and now, karate. He has a purple belt."
The Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to free press and free speech, presents the award annually along with $1 million. In Elian's case, the money could not be awarded because of the 40-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. Instead, it will go to help help needy refugee children living in the United States, Neuharth said.
Elian's award, announced in 2000, could not be presented until now because of delays by the U.S. government in granting a license to Neuharth and other Freedom Forum for the trip to Cuba. "The Cuban government immediately said we could come, but our own government fooled around for another year and a half," Neuharth said.
Previous Free Spirit Award recipients include Terry Anderson, the former chief Middle East correspondent for The Associated Press who was held hostage in Lebanon for nearly seven years, and former Supreme Court Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall.
Giving a freedom award to a little boy re-enslaved after his mommy, whom he lived with, having conceived him after a divorce from his father, FLED oppression (and maybe the brutality of Juan, himself, according to one of Elian's grandparents), DIED trying to get him TO FREEDOM???
This award is nice, sure, but kinda of meaningless. I mean, giving a FREEDOM award to someone who lives as a slave to his state? Not everyone in America loved ELAIN. Obviously.
But some people in America really love Elian. SO much that they recognized his mother's dream for this child as the abiding, most wonderful form of love.
Others, loved Castro more. Elian knows this. Gregg Criag knows this. Billy and hilly clinton know this. Reno knows this....in fact these people know it so much they were willing to RE-ENSLAVE little Elian at the point of machine gun.
So the man IS a liar, when he says everybody in America loves Elian. Some love Castro, ADM and Reynolds tobacco much, much more than this little child.
I see they still bring him out for special Left Wing visitors.......
The hurt just doesn't go away does it..
Someday Elian you will live in freedom!
I'm just speechless about this.
Who are these people who gave this bogus award? Outrageous....indeed!
Astronaut? If that is Elian's dream...it seems he's not forgotten his time of living free....I don't think he'll find any astronaut opportunities in Castro's Cuba!
A dream of being launched off Castro's prison.
Any of it at all...
Congreeeman Billybob
"His dad told me he is doing extremely well and that Elian sometimes talks about being a doctor, sometimes talks about being a teacher, but mostly talks about being an astronaut,"
In Cuber? Fat chance.
Private libraries turn page in Cuba: Book lenders offer variety, draw scorn of Castro regime--[Excerpt] The government, while dismissing the collections as "neither libraries nor independent," has for the most part left them alone, though some of their directors have faced persistent harassment.
The founders of the independent library movement, Berta Mexidor Vazquez and her husband, Ramon Humberto Colas, immigrated to Miami in December after losing their jobs and their home, and seeing their daughter removed from her school.
Other independent library heads say they have been jailed briefly or had security agents search their collections…..
…That's not to say that at least some of the same things aren't available at Cuba's expansive network of state libraries. The National Library in Havana has 4 million titles, and while most are dated--one of the "International Who's Who" copies is from 1995--the big wooden card catalog is full of authors considered controversial in Cuba, from Mario Vargas Llosa to George Orwell.
Critics point out that such books are not available to all patrons, whose type of library card depends on their jobs or other affiliations, and that most Cubans would hesitate to go on record asking for controversial titles.
Most of the library's books are in closed stacks. Patrons must ask for them by filling out a form with their own name and the title, which is then handed over to librarians. [End Excerpt]
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