Florida Cubans open a museum devoted to Elian

Associated Press

MIAMI — The house where Elian Gonzalez lived with relatives for five months during a widely publicized, international custody dispute has been transformed into a museum honoring the boy.

Beginning today, an assortment of Elian’s belongings and tributes from Cuban Americans will be on display in the small house in Little Havana. It is the same house where Elian was filmed by countless news organizations as he played in the yard with his cousin and where he was seized by federal agents before being returned to his father in Cuba.

Elian’s Miami relatives, who no longer live in the house, waged a seven-month custody battle in U.S. courts to keep the boy in the United States.

"We just want to preserve his memory," said Delfin Gonzalez, one of the boy’s great-uncles in Florida.

Plans for the museum — known as Unidos en Casa Elian, or United in Elian House — have been in the works for months.

"With all this terrorist stuff going on, we thought this would be a good time to open and give people a distraction, a relief, comfort," Delfin Gonzalez said.

Elian arrived was floating off the coast of Florida on Thanksgiving 1999. A boat he and his mother had been on had capsized and she had drowned.

For several months following Elian’s arrival, the home became a focus of Miami’s Cuban community.

Elian’s Miami relatives were granted temporary custody of the boy after the death of his mother, one of 11 people who perished when the boat sank during the illegal attempt to immigrate to the United States.

The relatives fought to keep him in the United States, arguing that his mother died to bring him there. Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, demanded that the child be returned to him in their native Cuba.

After a legal battle that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. authorities allowed Juan Miguel Gonzalez to take his son back to Cuba last year.

The Miami home, now emptied of furniture, is lined with cases displaying Elian’s toys, poems dedicated to him and hundreds of photograph collages of the boy.

A motorized red and yellow car Elian rode in the yard is there, as is the Batman costume he wore for Halloween. Preserved in Elian’s former bedroom are the race-car bed where he slept, a book bag, a camouflage jacket and a karate uniform.

The house where Elian’s belongings are on display isn’t the only museum created to honor the boy. In July, Elian, his family and Cuban leader Fidel Castro inaugurated a museum dedicated to the fight for the boy’s return to Cuba.