AMERICAN THEATRE | Revisiting the Elián Drama at Miami New Drama

Nearly 1 / 4 of a century in the past, on Nov. 25, 1999, whereas many Americans have been watching a Thanksgiving Day parade and soccer, two fishermen rescued a 5-year-old Cuban boy, Elián González, as he clung to an interior tube three miles off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. He was among the many few survivors of an try by a gaggle of Cuban nationals to cross to the U.S. in a defective boat; his mom and 10 others had drowned within the effort.

His rescue sparked a world custody battle that performed out every day on the information. Almost 23 years later, it’s the topic of Rogelio Martinez’s new play Elián, which runs Oct. 27-Nov. 20 at Miami New Drama in Florida, within the metropolis the place the drama unfolded. It’s the place the place, the day after his rescue, Elián went to dwell together with his uncle and different family members. The Cuban authorities, and Elián’s father, needed him again in Cuba, whereas the U.S. and his stateside household claimed him. The battle stoked lingering Cold War resentments between communist Cuba and the U.S.

“It’s very dramatic stuff,” mentioned Michel Hausmann, Miami New Drama’s creative director, who can also be directing Elián, in a telephone interview throughout a break from rehearsals. And, consistent with the theatre’s mission to make work in dialog with its metropolis’s distinctive multicultural and multilingual neighborhood, which has led them to supply Billy Corben and Aurin Squire’s Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy and Carmen Pelaez’s The Cuban Vote, amongst different performs, Hausmann mentioned he has lengthy needed to deliver Elián’s story to Miami New Drama. Every time he mentions Elián among the many metropolis’s Cuban neighborhood, Hausmann mentioned, “It feels like it’s an unhealed wound it’s hard for people to want to return to. We felt a huge responsibility to bring the story of these events and the story of the community in a way that honors the truth that the community feels was robbed from them.” In specific he needed a play that will get past the “media circus” that performed out in 1999 and 2000 to reckon with each the emotional and political sides of Elián’s story.

He discovered the right collaborator in Martinez, he mentioned. The two have been launched a number of years in the past by a mutual good friend, who thought Miami New Drama was residence for a play of Martinez’s referred to as Come As You Are. Miami New Drama produced a workshop of it, after which in December 2020 included Martinez among the many playwrights of 7 Deadly Sins, seven commissioned brief performs, every targeted on one lethal sin, in vacant storefronts alongside Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road (the place the theatre can also be situated). It was among the many most formidable in-person skilled theatre productions at that stage of COVID-19 pandemic.

What made Martinez the best playwright to inform Elián’s story, although, was his personal background. Like Elián, Martinez got here together with his mom to the U.S. from Cuba; he turned 9 a number of days earlier than he bought on the boat to Miami in the course of the Mariel boatlift in 1980. He was supposed to return together with his father and grandmother as effectively, however on the final minute army police got here and instructed his father he was not allowed to depart the nation as a result of he had a level from the University of Havana. His dad and mom then needed to decide: Would they keep as a household or go away his father in Cuba? His father determined to allow them to go. Years later, the wedding resulted in divorce. Martinez solely noticed his father twice after leaving Cuba.

“He could have put his foot down at that moment,” Martinez mirrored in a telephone interview. “He could have said no. That’s a difficult thing to wrestle with as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult, and now as a father. It wasn’t until I became a father that I could see the world from my father’s point of view. I could see how painful it must have been to let go. I didn’t understand that. Decisions that change lives forever are what drama’s about.”

This expertise led Martinez to focus lots of his performs on the decades-long battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Born in East Berlin took its inspiration from Bruce Springsteen’s legendary live performance in East Germany in 1988, a 12 months earlier than the Wall got here down, and was first carried out on the Stasi Museum in Berlin in 2019 earlier than premiering on the San Francisco Playhouse in 2020. In Blind Date, which premiered at the Goodman Theatre in 2018, Martinez portrayed a summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev assembly to halt the arms race. And When Tang Met Laika, which premiered on the Denver Center Theatre in 2010, follows a gaggle of former Cold War adversaries as they work collectively on the International Space Station.

“The Cold War changed the course of my life forever,” Martinez mentioned. “One day I was living in Cuba with my family—father, mother, grandmothers—and the next I was living in the United States, fleeing political repression and retribution. Until I first started to deal with the politics of the period on paper, I was wrestling with trauma that had not been dealt with properly.”

Elián continues this exploration, each politically and personally. As Hausmann identified, whereas the Cold War ostensibly ended with the autumn of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, “For Cuban Americans in Miami and for Cubans in Havana, the Cold War was alive and kicking” in 1999.

When Martinez arrived within the United States, he lived briefly in Miami with family members, then with different family members in Michigan, till the household lastly settled in Union City, N.J., which had the biggest focus of Cuban Americans of any U.S. metropolis outdoors of Miami. Referred to as “Little Havana on the Hudson,” Union City had a Cuban American inhabitants of roughly 15,000 by 1994. His return to Miami for Elián is a kind of homecoming for him, although there’s a fair deeper return occurring.

“When I hear Spanish in my play, I become emotional,” Martinez mentioned. “I realize just how much I’ve missed hearing it. My previous four plays had no Spanish, while all my early work had Spanish.”

Hausmann and Martinez have been engaged on Elián because the begin of the pandemic in March of 2020. In that point Miami New Drama despatched Martinez to satisfy members of the neighborhood and neighborhood leaders, together with Manny Diaz, the lawyer for the González household; Pepe Hernandez, the president of the Cuban American National Foundation; Alex Penelas, the mayor of Miami-Dade County on the time; Marty Baron, the editor of the Miami Herald on the time; and Carlos de la Cruz, a neighborhood chief requested by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to assist in the negotiation.

Martinez’s background as a journalist proved useful on this analysis. What he realized in these conversations was that there was a extra advanced story than the one which was instructed within the media on the time.

“We did a deep dive and immersed ourselves investigating the events we are telling,” Hausmann mentioned. “We feel it’s a scoop. It’s a perspective that has never been told before.”

Some of the inaccuracies they present in previous TV information footage and newspapers, each from the U.S. and Cuba, centered on Elián’s relationship to his U.S. household within the United States. The media portrayed Elián as coming into a home of strangers in Miami, however he almost certainly knew his family members and had hung out together with his nice uncle in Cuba earlier than he got here to the U.S. 

The play has a big solid of characters from politics, the media, and the González household. Martinez mentioned his propensity for big casts is impressed by his love of Robert Altman’s movies, notably Nashville, wherein a number of storylines all result in one large convergent second. But one main character by no means seems onstage: Elián himself. This absence could also be meant to make audiences mirror on the best way he was used as a logo by many individuals and political actors on the time. “We’re making a theatrical choice,” Martinez conceded. “If we were doing this for television it would be a different choice, and probably the child would be there.”

For his half, Hausmann likened Elián to Sophocles’s Antigone, wherein a central character, Polyneices, is offstage and the main focus is on the wrangling over what to do together with his physique.

“What makes Antigone such a good play?” Hausmann mused. “The answer to that I think is that you have someone like Creon who created a law, the law says you can’t bury a traitor. He’s right, it’s the law, it makes sense. But you have somebody like Antigone who says, ‘Well, this is my brother. You have to bury him, even if it’s against the law, it’s the right thing to do—the law is wrong.’ So you can argue both sides. With Elián you have something similar in the community, where you have somebody who says a child belongs to his father, and the other argument is that, yes, the mother gave her life so that her child could be in a free society. I think that the exploration of both is what makes great theatre.”

Elián’s saga lasted about six months, from late November of 1999 till April of 2000, when, throughout a pre-dawn raid, armed U.S. federal brokers seized Elián from his family members’ residence and reunited him together with his father, who took him again to Cuba two months later. During these two months, there have been court docket proceedings and demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in Miami that have been lined as a part of the 24-hour information cycle. Now, 23 years later, González works for a state-run firm in Cuba and has began a household of his personal there. It would appear that he’s finished his share of reckoning with the occasions of his childhood. Now Elián presents an opportunity for Miami to do its personal reckoning together with his temporary time there.

Shoshana Greenberg (she/her) is a author based mostly in New York City.

Related