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Cuban former castaway Elian calls Castro friend

Posted on: Thursday, 29 September 2005, 16:06 CDT

MIAMI (Reuters) - Cuban shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez considers President Fidel Castro a friend and father but would like to see his Miami relatives again, he told an interviewer for a U.S. television network.

Gonzalez, now 11, told CBS journalist Bob Simon that Castro attended his elementary school graduation and declared he was proud to have Gonzalez as his friend.

"I also believe I am his friend," Gonzalez told Simon in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday on the network's "60 Minutes" show. "Not only (do I think of Castro) as a friend, but also as a father."

Gonzalez turned 6 shortly after he was found floating on an inner tube off the Florida coast in November 1999. He had survived a shipwreck that killed his mother and other Cubans who had left the communist-ruled island for the United States.

Cuban exiles in Miami lost a passionate legal battle to let him stay with his great-uncle's family in Miami, who refused to give him up. Immigration agents finally seized Gonzalez from their home at gunpoint and reunited him with his father, who took him back to Cuba.

Gonzalez, who is considered a hero in Cuba, was interviewed in Spanish with his father at a museum in his hometown of Cardenas, CBS said. The network provided an English translation of his comments and said no Cuban officials or monitors were present at the interview.

Gonzalez said in the interview that his Miami relatives tried to persuade him to stay but that he missed his father and friends back in Cuba.

"They were telling me bad things about (my father)," he said. "They were also telling me to tell (my father) that I did not want to go back to Cuba and I always told them that I wanted to."

He said the worst parts of his Miami stay were the nights.

"I would have nightmares and my uncles would talk to me about my mother ... it was better not to remind me of that because that tormented me," he said. "I was very little."

Nonetheless, he said he would like to see his Miami relatives again.

"Despite everything they did, the way they did it, ... they are my family," he said.

Cuban exiles in Miami, including one of Gonzalez's uncles interviewed for the show, said the boy was happy in Miami and is being brainwashed in Cuba.

Source: REUTERS

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