Hours earlier, rescuers had found two more survivors, but Elian's mother, Elizabeth Broton Rodriguez, 28, a hotel worker, and her boyfriend Lazaro Munero Garcia, 28, who had captained the craft, were missing and presumed drowned. Elian's plight captured the rapt attention of two countries, and he became instantly entangled in America's thorny relationship with Fidel Castro's Cuba. The boy's father, hotel doorman Juan Miguel Gonzalez, has accused the couple of kidnapping Elian and wants the child returned to Cuba. Yet Elian's relatives in Miami, with whom the boy is staying, have the support of Florida's powerful Cuban-American community in the quest to keep him in the U.S.
"If I have to go and look for him, I will," Gonzalez, 31, a Communist party member, said in a TV interview from his home in the city of Cardenas. "Here, he has his health care and education free. He does not lack for anything."
Back in Miami, according to relatives, Elian is doing just fine, considering all he has been through. "He seems very happy where he is right now, playing with his 4-year-old cousin Lazarito," says family spokeswoman Marisleysis Gonzalez, 21. Not too long ago, the boys had played together in Cardenas, a port east of Havana on the island's north coast and a frequent jumping-off point for Cubans who hope to evade their country's strict emigration laws by making the dangerous 90-mile voyage to Florida on boats and rafts.
Elian Gonzalez's journey began early on Nov. 22, when his mother and Munero Garcia joined 11 others aboard the boat. On the second day out, their outboard engines failed just south of the Florida Keys, and at about 10 p.m. that night the boat foundered. According to survivor Arianne Horta Alfonso, 22, the passengers clung to two inner tubes, but one by one grew exhausted and slipped away. Horta Alfonso and her boyfriend Nivaldo Fernandez-Ferra, 33, were rescued near a marina on Florida's Key Biscayne just after dawn on Thanksgiving Day.
Two hours later and 50 miles to the north, first cousins Ciancio and Dalrymple pushed off from Lighthouse Point. "We'd been out a good hour," says Dalrymple, who owns a housecleaning business. "We passed this inner tube about 50 yards off to our left, and as I looked I said to my cousin, 'There's somebody in that.' " Ciancio, who owns a roofing company, at first mistook Gonzalez for a doll tied to an inner tube—somebody's idea of a joke. But as the fishermen steered closer, Dalrymple saw Elian's hand moving. "The minute I said that, my cousin just pulled his pants off and dived into the water," he says. Once Elian was in the boat, Ciancio called his wife by mobile phone, and she alerted the Coast Guard.
How much the child can recall of his ordeal is unclear. "He has a clue of what's going on, but I really don't want to ask him and put him on the spot," says Marisleysis. For the moment, he is being given time to recover, unaware that the battle over his future is set to begin.
Patrick Rogers
Don Sider in Miami
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