• Submitted by: admin
• international
• Personalities
• 04 / 19 / 2010

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Former President Bill Clinton said Saturday he had no regrets over sending Elián González back to live with his father in Cuba, and would order a federal raid on Little Havana all over again.

``I did everything I could to try to have this resolved in a peaceful way,'' he said, even with the hindsight of a decade after the episode sparked an international crisis between Cuba and the United States.

It also stoked tensions in Miami and roiled many in the Cuban-American exile community, who saw the Clinton administration decision to reunite the 6-year-old boy with his father from Cárdenas, as tantamount to turning his future over Cuba.

But Clinton said both international and U.S. law made clear what he had to do about the boy who was found clinging to an inner tube off the Florida coast on Thanksgiving Day in 1999. His mother and some 10 other Cubans in his group perished while trying to reach the United States on a raft.

Clinton made his remarks in response to an Associated Press reporter's question at the University of Miami's Coral Gables campus, where his Clinton Global Initiative has convened college students to encourage volunteerism and engagement.

``We had American children who had been kidnapped. They were in Iran. They were in Germany. They were in country after country after country,'' Clinton recalled.

Had the United States refused to repatriate the boy, ``no other American president would have been able to say with a straight face, `You can't kidnap my child and keep him in Germany...''

Moreover, he noted, U.S. courts had decided the cross-Florida Straits custody issue in favor of the boy's father, who had said he wanted to raise the child in his native Cuba, and the White House could not ignore the law ``even if we don't like the result.''

Federal agents descended on the Little Havana home of young Elián's uncle Lázaro, cousin Marisleysis and other kin on April 22, 2000, and seized the boy before dawn to resolve the crisis.

The Miami family continued to appeal the decision through the courts, at one point seeking to get the child an independent asylum hearing. When all avenues failed, father and son flew to their homeland in late June 2000.

Clinton added that in his memoirs he noted that he had regretted some of the decisions of his presidency, ``several things I would do differently. But this isn't one of them.''

Elián is now 16 and was recently seen in photographs released in Cuba attending a Young Communist Union congress in Havana, holding a Cuban flag and wearing an olive-green military school uniform.

Source: Miami Herald