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He was wrong.

The González family lived on 2nd Street, in the heart of Little Havana—ground zero
for a Cuban American population that had reached some 800,000 by the end of the 1990s.
It was a community that virtually controlled Miami politics, and that control was
driven by a fierce, unrelenting opposition to the regime of Fidel Castro. Its Spanish-speaking
radio stations, its newspaper, its politicians of both parties were implacable foes
of any policy that even hinted at accommodation with Cuba, and the most powerful force
in that world—the Cuban American National Foundation—was known to exact political,
financial, even physical retribution against any dissidents in the ranks.

So when Elián González was released into the temporary custody of Lázaro, the idea
of sending him home to his father was swiftly replaced by another:
Elián must not be sent back to that Communist hell on earth
.

The González family was intensely political, even by the standards of the hothouse
that was Miami’s Cuban-exile community. Elián’s great-uncle Delfin had been a Castro
dissident in the early 1960s. His cousin Marisleysis, despite her youth, was well
connected to other young, politically engaged Cubans. For them, and for the hardcore
anti-Castro exiles in their families, Elián had been divinely delivered to freedom
out of the prison that was Cuba. (Hadn’t dolphins surrounded the little boy, protecting
him from sharks and from drowning?) Within hours, prominent political figures like
Miami’s Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen were posing for photos with the boy, and
radio talk-show hosts were demanding that Elián stay.

Then, on November 28, Elisabet Broton—Elisa, as she was known—regained full consciousness.
A series of phone calls from her hospital to and from Cárdenas informed her that Elián
was alive and well in Miami. Three hours later, Elisa was at the González home on
2nd Street. At first, she was welcomed as another symbol of freedom. And then she
asked the visitors, the photographer, the reporters, and the politicians to leave.
And she spoke to the family of her ex-husband.

“I am not going to stay here,” she said. “Our plan—Rafa’s and mine—was to live with
his aunt outside the city. Now Rafa is gone, drowned, and I do not know what I will
do. But you must know I am not going to stay in the home of the family of the ex-husband
who betrayed me with so many women in Cárdenas. Maybe I will stay in Florida; maybe
I will return to Cuba. But I did not come here for politics. I came to be with the
man I love, and now he is gone, and I need time to decide.”

The González family pleaded, begged, even threatened. “Elián is the symbol of a free
Cuba,” they told her. “He is a little boy,” she responded, “who almost drowned, almost
lost his mother.”

In the end, there was nothing they could do. A day later, she and Elián were out of
the house, out of Little Havana, out of the media spotlight. Three months after that,
Elisa and Elián quietly returned to Cuba. One of the more bitter relatives said later,
“It would have been better if Elisa had drowned; then Elián would have been a symbol
to the world.”

But she hadn’t. And he wasn’t.

And that made all the difference a little less than a year later, on November 7, 2000.

It was 6:45 p.m. Central Standard Time, Tuesday, November 7. George W. Bush was in
a private room at the Shoreline Grill, on San Jacinto Boulevard in Austin, Texas.
He had just finished the Parmesan-crusted chicken and stuffed shrimp and was reaching
for the ice cream when his brother called.

“Just got a heads-up from John,” Florida governor Jeb Bush said. John Ellis, a cousin,
was working the decision desk at Fox News.

“They’re calling Florida for Gore,” Jeb said. Seconds later, the news was flashing
on the TV set that had been wheeled into the dining room earlier that day.

It was as close to a death sentence as the Bush campaign could imagine. Everyone had
known it for months: that the election could well come down to Florida and its twenty-five
electoral votes. It was the biggest of the swing states—New York and California were
in Gore’s pocket, Texas was clearly Bush country—and Florida had, in the Clinton years,
turned from reliably Republican to competitive. As candidate and president, Bill Clinton
had relentlessly pursued the Cuban American vote, backing stringent restrictions on
trade and travel with Cuba. That had brought him within two points of carrying Florida
in 1992, and—after he’d signed the Helms–Burton Act, which punished foreign-based
companies that traded with the Castro regime—he won the state with a six-point margin
over Bob Dole in 1996. Gore had no intention of challenging that policy.

By Election Day the race in Florida had become a coin flip, despite Governor Jeb Bush’s
close political and financial ties to the Cuban American community. The African American
community, incensed by Governor Bush’s attacks on affirmative action programs, was
mobilizing. Older voters were dubious about Bush’s intentions toward Social Security.
And Gore’s selection of Joe Lieberman as the first Jewish running mate had excited
the significant Jewish community in South Florida.

And now, early on Election Night, the candidate’s brother—the governor of Florida,
no less—was delivering the news that the state was being called for Al Gore.

“Karl says it’s an outrage—well, to be exact,” Jeb added, “he said it was a ‘fucking
outrage.’ The polls are still open up in the Panhandle—that’s your turf, George. And
God knows what this is gonna do to our folks all over the rest of the country. Not
only that—John says the computer models are all wrong; we’ve got thousands and thousands
more absentees voting. Only thing … ” He paused.

“Yes?”

“Only thing is … we don’t seem to be doing quite as well in Little Havana as we had
hoped. You’re winning, of course, but it doesn’t look like the kind of numbers that
we—”

“That we need to win the state—is that what you’re saying?”

There was a short, painful silence. “Yeah.”

“Well,” George said, “I’ve got myself to blame. That story of my DUI arrest wasn’t
exactly the right way to close out a campaign. Karl says it might be costing us a
couple of million votes from the evangelicals, which is enough to cost us the popular
vote. And, well, we were banking on winning that.”

Indeed, heading into Election Night, a primal fear of the Bush campaign was that they
would win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College—the only vote that really
mattered. So concerned were they that the campaign had armed its surrogates—the men
and women who would appear on the various networks throughout the evening—with arguments
challenging the legitimacy of such an outcome, raising the possibility that a few
“rogue electors” or state legislatures or the (likely) new Republican Congress would
deliver the presidency to Bush.

“It was part of the talking points,” said Ken Duberstein, a former White House Chief
of Staff and one of the best-connected Republicans in Washington. “Even if it wasn’t
something they thought they could win, they could certainly make an issue out of moral
authority.”

Now, the last-minute revelation that young George W. Bush had been busted for drunk
driving, combined with a massive Gore ground game fueled by the labor unions, had
given the Democrats that symbolically significant national popular-vote plurality.

At Gore’s command post in Nashville, the network projections were the cause of more
than celebrations—they triggered a profound sense of relief. All day, calls had been
coming in from Palm Beach, Florida, about massive ballot confusion in the heavily
Democratic, heavily Jewish districts, with people fearing that the confusing “butterfly
ballot” design had misled them into voting for right-wing independent candidate Pat
Buchanan.

“We were getting calls at eight in the morning on Election Day from people worried
they had miscast their vote,” said Randy Schultz, editor of the Palm Beach Post’s
editorial page, “and it just built from there.”

But now it didn’t matter. Al Gore was winning Florida anyway; and the mishaps in Palm
Beach would be a footnote, fodder for some poli-sci dissertation or late-night liquor-fueled
recollections on a future campaign trail. And shortly after 11 p.m. in the East, Governor
George W. Bush called Vice President Al Gore to offer his congratulations.

“You gave us a real fight,” Gore said.

“Well, your guys on the ground did a heck of a job, Al,” Bush replied.

But even as Bush was putting down the phone, his campaign command was furiously pushing
back against the “Gore has won” narrative. Karl Rove and Bill Bennett were on CNN,
ABC, and Fox, demanding to know why the Gore states were being called early while
states likely to go for Bush were being described as “too close to call.” Mary Matalin
was telling CNN that the Florida numbers were “unreliable.”

And as the night wore on, even with Gore’s Florida margin holding steady at 30,000
votes, there was still a path for Bush to make it to 270 electoral votes. He had won
Ohio, another intensely contested swing state, as well as Arkansas and Tennessee,
the home states of Clinton and Gore. Ralph Nader’s 22,000 votes in New Hampshire had
put that state into Bush’s column (by 7,000 votes). By midnight, three states still
hung in the balance: Iowa, Wisconsin, and New Mexico. If Bush could win all three,
those twenty-three electoral votes would give him 270 in all—precisely the minimum
number needed for the Presidency.

When the votes were counted, however, all three states, by the closest of margins,
had gone for Gore: Wisconsin by 5,200 votes, Iowa by about 4,000; and New Mexico by
just 367 votes. That gave Gore 291 electoral votes—and triggered one of the Republican
Party’s favorite Election Day talking points.

“It’s voter fraud, pure and simple!” Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg told NBC’s Tim
Russert. “We have documented proof that students in Wisconsin and Iowa, with residence
in New York and Illinois and Minnesota, voted illegally.”

“A classic case of sore-loser-itis,” James Carville cracked on CNN. “Last time I checked,
the governor of Wisconsin was a Republican. Does anyone think Tommy Thompson was trying
to rig the election for Al Gore?”

The razor-thin margins were enough for George W. Bush to place a highly unusual phone
call to Vice President Gore shortly after midnight Central time, when the networks
projected California and the other two West Coast states as Gore’s—enough to give
him the White House.

“Mr. Vice President,” he said, “I just want you to know that I’m seeing the same numbers
you are—and there are just too many close states for me to offer you a concession
after all. If Iowa or Wisconsin or New Mexico really end up on your plate, I’ll be
happy to call back with a handshake.”

“Let me understand this,” Gore said in disbelief. “You’re calling me to tell me you’re
not conceding?”

“Well, you might want to get that burr out of your saddle,” Bush said. “We just want
to make sure all the votes—the
legitimate votes
—are all counted.”

It looked like an unprecedented post-election fight might delay the outcome. But by
midafternoon the next day, the high command of the Bush campaign—including the candidate
himself—had come to a reluctant, inescapable conclusion: A post-election fight simply
could not be won.

“In Florida, there was just too big a margin for a recount to matter,” one Bush insider
admitted. “We thought we had a chance when we saw what was happening in Palm Beach
and up in Jacksonville; those screwed-up ballots were costing Gore a whole bunch of
votes. But we just didn’t get what we needed out of Little Havana,” he said.

And the next morning, over a breakfast empanada at Miami’s Versailles restaurant,
one veteran of political wars pointed to a factor that had been consigned to utter
obscurity over the past ten months.

“Imagine,” said prominent Democratic pollster Sergio Bendixen, “where we’d be if Elián
González’s mom hadn’t survived and he’d been sent back to his father in Cuba. Imagine
the protests, the rallies, the fury on Spanish talk radio. The whole community would
have been up in arms, and it wouldn’t have mattered how much Gore tried to distance
himself from his own administration. A six-year-old boy forced back to Fidel Castro’s
Cuba? I shudder to think.”

But it hadn’t happened.

Because Elián and his mother were now living in obscurity in Cárdenas, Cuba, Al Gore
did not have to contend with an outraged Cuban community. And, while virtually no
one realized it at the time, the survival of the boy’s mother almost a year before
Election Day was the reason Al Gore won the state of Florida—and with it the presidency
of the United States.

With the 2000 election finally resolved, both victor and vanquished spoke gracious
words of harmony.

Governor Bush, appearing before a joint session of the Texas legislature, acknowledged
that “Vice President Gore and I put our hearts and hopes into the campaign; we both
gave it all we had. But now the campaign is over; now we must put politics behind
us and work together to make the promise of America available for every one of our
citizens. … I hope and believe that President Gore and a Republican Congress, guided
by a spirit of common sense, common courtesy, and common goals, can unite and inspire
the American people.”

“Great speech, Governor,” whispered Texas house speaker Pete Laney, a Democrat. Others
were less charitable. “If that asshole Rove hadn’t tried to cover up that drunk-driving
bust,” said Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry, “I’d be heading into the governor’s mansion
right about now.”

A few moments later, from his Carthage, Tennessee, farm, Al Gore thanked Bush for
his kind words and said, “What remains of partisan rancor must be put aside. Now is
the time to recognize that what unites us is greater than that which divides us.”