Lazaro Gonzalez pulled a brown paper towel from his pocket and wiped his eyes as the closing credits rolled during a preview of The Elian Gonzalez Story. Lazaro had laughed, shaken his head and bitten his lip while watching the nearly two-hour-long TV movie, which depicts the events that thrust his family into the international spotlight. He wept when the movie showed federal agents raiding his home to seize his nephew, 6-year-old Elian.
And now he was angry.
"Nothing is reality in that story," Gonzalez said.
According to FOX news online, the family's attorneys and advisers all said the movie, which airs on the Fox Family Channel at 8 p.m. EDT Sunday, does not reflect accurately what happened during the five months that Elian lived in Miami's Little Havana with his great-uncle Lazaro. The boy, who had survived a boat trip from Cuba that killed his mother, was returned to his father in April after a months-long custody battle.
"I didn't want to watch it because I thought it would hurt so much," attorney Kendall Coffey said. But he said it actually was more like fiction, so for him the pain vanished.
"Detail after detail was wrong, they couldn't even get the chronology right," said Coffey, who is not depicted in the film.
Events shown in the movie as occurring simultaneously, such as Elian's December birthday party and the government's January decision to return him to Cuba, actually occurred weeks apart. The order of other events is flip-flopped.
Meanwhile, Lance Robbins, the film's executive producer, admits to some inaccuracies for dramatic reasons, and said some events were compressed because of time constraints.
The film, which is the first to depict the Elian saga, is based on real events but is not a documentary, he said.
It depicts "the ultimate custody battle, a battle between nations," he said.
According to FOX news, Robbins said many witnesses and participants were interviewed, including Lazaro, and writer Dennis Turner then recreated the dialogue.
Overall, he said, the movie is accurate in substance and tenor.
"Nobody was a fly on the wall, but we believe the movie is extremely fair," he said. "We wanted people to understand why everybody fought so hard for that boy."
Gonzalez, family adviser Armando Gutierrez, and attorneys Spencer Eig and Jose Garcia-Pedrosa settled into seats at a Miami conference room this week to watch the tape. Coffey arrived minutes later.
All, including Lazaro, denied being interviewed by the movie's makers. Gutierrez, depicted in the film as a political opportunist who forces himself upon the Gonzalez family, said the producers offered to make him a paid consultant but he declined.
The movie opens with Elian, played by Alec Roberts, playing soccer with friends under the watchful eye of his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Esai Morales. A playful Elian drops pebbles from a balcony onto his father's car as Juan Miguel works under the hood.
In the movie, Brotons is torn between wanting Elian to grow up free of Cuban communism and fearing for his safety on the boat to Florida.
Much of the group's ill-fated voyage is dealt with in flashbacks, including a scene where Elian's mother lashes him to an inner tube after the boat capsizes. She calls goodbye, then sinks beneath the waves.
Eig said that he thought that the mother scene was the most accurate part of the movie. "It matches much of what I know about what happened out there," he said.
The more controversial scenes start after the boy's rescue, last Thanksgiving Day.
Lazaro, Miguel Sandoval, is depicted as devoted to Elian but blinded by his attachment to the boy, by his unwillingness to anger Miami's Cuban-American community by returning him to his father, and by bad advice from Gutierrez and others.
Lazaro's 21-year-old daughter, Marisleysis, former Miss USA Laura Elena Harring, is shown as a caring young woman who comes to view herself as the boy's mother.
Coffey said the Miami family had one motivation: to fulfill the final wish of Elian's mother that he grow up in freedom.
But Robbins said his movie portrays the Miami family much as the national media did. "It is how they were viewed by the rest of the country," he said.
The Miami viewers erupted in laughter during a scene in which Cuban dictator Fidel Castro summons Juan Miguel to his palace and asks whether he would like Elian returned.
"We will absolutely respect your decision," Castro says. Juan Miguel answers that he wants the boy brought home.
"It is outrageous that anyone would believe that," Gutierrez said.
Robbins said the conversation happened, and that the Miami viewers missed the subtext: Castro knew Juan Miguel could only answer one way.
Two other scenes drew hard anger.
One shows Elian's first phone conversation with his father back in Cuba; Elian asks when he is going home.
That didn't happen, Lazaro said. The boy would not answer when his father asked if he wanted to return to Cuba.
The other scene is the pre-dawn raid on April 22 in which agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service snatched Elian from the Miami home.
On film, the raid is slower and less chaotic than in reality. The agents use less force, for example, the film's agents do not fire pepper gas at the crowd outside the home, as real agents did.
"They should have talked to us," Lazaro Gonzalez said. "We could have told them what really happened" – Albawaba.com.
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
