Refugee Says Elian Should Be With Father

The words spoken by her father on the day life changed are still as clear as the crystal waters off Havana.

“Don’t worry,” he said, confident the social turmoil would soon blow over, “You’ll be home in three months.”

With that, 16-year-old Maria Hernandez-Peck boarded an airplane and left her beloved Cuba to live with relatives in Miami.

It was Oct. 18, 1960.

Things, to say the least, didn’t exactly turn out the way her father planned.

“All I took with me was my German typewriter and my English riding boots,” says Hernandez-Peck, 56, adding that none of her Cuban friends back then dreamed for a moment that a giant like America would allow Fidel Castro’s revolution to succeed.

On a recent morning, Hernandez-Peck sipped a latte with me in a Spokane espresso shop. She shared her take on Cuba and the Elian Gonzalez fiasco. Hernandez-Peck teaches at Eastern Washington University’s school of social work and directs its center for aging.

Castro’s takeover spelled economic doom for Hernandez-Peck’s family. Her dad, Carlos, was a politically connected attorney who had millions in real estate and stock and bonds.

He lost it all to the Communist regime.

The lone sliver of good luck was that Hernandez-Peck’s parents were able to join her in Miami a few weeks after her arrival.

But Carlos, she says, was never again able to practice law. American justice was too different from the Cuban legal system prior to Castro. He died a few years ago, hopeful to the end that things would change enough so that he could go back home.

In light of such hardship, one would expect Hernandez-Peck to echo the impassioned “Keep Elian” sentiments expressed by anti-Castro Cubans in Miami.

She doesn’t. Siding with the majority of Americans, as indicated by polls, Hernandez-Peck believes the shipwrecked lad belongs with his father, Juan Gonzalez.

Even if that means a return to Cuba for the boy.

“Maybe it wasn’t the best way to do it,” she says of the recent late-night raid that plucked Elian from his uncle’s home. “But it was over in three minutes and, looking at it from a distance, I’m not sure (Attorney General) Janet Reno had any other alternatives.”

Hernandez-Peck has managed to come to terms with all that happened to her 40 years ago. What happened in Cuba, she steadfastly believes, made her a better person.

With her parents’ wealth, Hernandez-Peck was destined for a life of luxury. She had it all: security, education at the best private American schools and the good life in a beautiful land.

Then came the revolution. Hernandez-Peck had only the riches of her character to rely on. Originally a French major, she found a burning desire to help others.

She got her bachelor’s degree at Miami’s Barry University, a master’s in social work at the University of Louisville and a doctorate from the University of Denver.

“I don’t think I could be anything else but a social worker,” she says. “I always work to try make the world better.”

Social work gave this exiled Cuban perspective. She even lived for a time in a miner’s cabin in Alaska. “I was the only Cuban in Juneau.”

Being away from Miami, she says, helped her rise above the bad feelings. “If you stay in bitterness, she says, “you never are able to make a contribution.”

Two years ago, Hernandez-Peck got the opportunity her father never had. She went back to Cuba, not to live, but to attend a professional conference.

She arrived on Oct. 18, 1998 - 38 years to the day after she left.

She visited old friends and walked the streets of her childhood. Under Castro, Hernandez-Peck concedes, Cuba is a tattered remnant of what her proud country once was.

“But there are people who live there and this is their home regardless of the hardships. They have a real commitment to the country.”

She offers some straightforward advice to the Miami expatriates: “You can’t live in the past,” says the social worker. “This is Cuba now. It’s time for life to go on.”