He braved 12ft swells to rescue five-year-old lost at sea – and sparked America’s fiercest ever custody battle
A Florida fisherman who rescued Cuban refugee Elián González Brotons after his mother fled with him to the US has reflected on the harrowing encounter 25 years later.
On Thanksgiving Day 1999, Donato Dalrymple came across five-year-old Elián floating alone in the ocean, in what would prove to be a fateful moment in American-Cuban history.
Elián’s mother and her partner died during the perilous journey through the Straits of Florida, as did almost all the other refugees aboard their makeshift aluminum boat.
The subsequent international custody battle between Elián’s father in Cuba and his distant relatives in Miami became a symbol of tensions between the socialist island and America in the years that followed.
Elián, now thirty, is a government politician in Cuba, but his fame still precedes him. Fisherman Dalrymple has told the full story of the pivotal Thanksgiving day that started it all.
Pictured: A U.S. agent transports Elian Gonzalez as federal agents stormed the Cuban shipwreck survivor’s home in Miami on April 22, 2000, tearing him away from his relatives in Miami who moved in the early morning hours to end a bitter international battle over the end detention
Pictured: Elian Gonzalez, 6, is held in a closet by Donato Dalrymple, right, as government officials search for the boy at his relative’s home in Miami on April 22, 2000
“That the sea was very rough that morning,” Dalrymple told Cuban journalist Peniley Ramírez in her podcast Chess pieceas he remembered braving the waves with his cousin Sam.
“(There were) 8- to 10-foot waves, and the sky I remember was black on one side and the daylight was coming up, and beyond that it was like a rainbow.
“We walked on an inner tube and that’s where it started for me.”
Dalrymple said he saw what he thought was a body in the tube and warned his cousin of what they would encounter.
“But then I looked again and I saw a hand moving,” Dalrymple said. The fisherman rushed to the survivor.
“Before I could blink my cousin was in the water, he said, ‘It’s a baby, it’s a baby,'” Dalrymple recalled.
‘What he said was a baby, it was a five year old boy. When I took him in my arms, I asked him, are you okay, and he didn’t answer.
‘So I said: tu hablas espanol? and he said: si.
“We found a little boy floating about three miles off the coast of Fort Lauderdale.
“He looked like an angel, I mean, he looked so fresh.”
Pictured: Elian Gonzalez, six, receives a toy football as a Christmas gift from Donato Dalrymple of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the home of Elian’s relatives in Miami, December 24, 1999. Dalrymple is the fisherman who helped rescue Gonzalez from the Straits of Florida months earlier
Pictured: Gonzalez on June 30, 2010, on the 10th anniversary of his return to Miami
Pictured: Cuban President Fidel Castro caresses Elian Gonzalez’s head during a graduation ceremony in Cardenas, July 21, 2005
At that point, Elián had been floating alone through the tumultuous ocean for at least a day.
The fishermen gave him orange juice and a sweatshirt before taking him to dry land, where an ambulance and media were already waiting.
“He made a sour face like he wanted to cry, but he never cried,” Dalrymple said.
‘I just looked up at the sky. I didn’t realize at the time that this would become another mission for me.’
The boy’s mother, Elizabeth Brotons, died on the raft along with ten other refugees.
Along with Elián, a young couple – Nivaldo Fernández Ferrán and Arianne Horta-Alfonso – were the only survivors.
According to Fernández Ferrán, Elizabeth “protected her son to the end.”
He told media at the time that the boat’s engine had failed and the vessel had begun to fill with water.
As it went down, the refugees clung to the inner tubes as 10-foot waves crashed into them.
Elián said his mother’s partner put him in one of the tubes, and he fell in and out of sleep as he was rocked by the ocean.
When he woke up on the way to Florida, his mother was gone. Her body was never found.
Pictured: Then-President Bill Clinton held a press conference in the East Room of the White House, where he discussed topics including the 1999 custody battle for Elian Gonzalez
Pictured: Six-year-old Cuban castaway Elian Gonzalez (C) is carried by his grandfather Juan Gonzalez (R) next to his great-grandmother Ramona (L) upon Elian’s arrival from the United States on June 28, 2000 at Havana’s Jose Marti Airport
Pictured: Photos of Elian Gonzalez when he was seven or eight years old and teaching his younger brother Yanni to dance in Cuba
The boy was taken to relatives in Miami, but his father, Juan Miguel, who had been separated from his mother and remained on the island, demanded that the Elián be returned.
The dispute spiraled into a headline-grabbing international custody battle that weighed heavily on the 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Fidel Castro threw pressure from the Cuban government behind the case and mobilized seven months of mass demonstrations calling for Elián’s repatriation.
While the two sides fought the high-profile case in court, U.S. immigration officials decided to place Elián in the care of his father, who had come to the United States to advocate for his return.
His relatives in Miami refused to go, so armed federal agents raided Elián’s uncle’s home and captured the boy.
It was one of the few moments since 1959 when the Cold War rivals agreed on something: the American legal system ruled that Gonzalez should be returned to his father.
Pictured: Elian Gonzalez talks to the press at Revolution Square in Havana, where people pay their respects to Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on November 29, 2016
A member of Mothers Against Repression holds a photo of a federal agent with an automatic rifle confronting fisherman Donato Dalrymple holding Elian Gonzalez in a closet during a demonstration outside the White House April 26, 2000 Washington, D.C.
Elian and his father Juan Miguel Gonzalez had been transferred to the plantation, while the Miami relatives continued their attempts to visit Elian at the time of the aforementioned protest.
A state celebration was held on the 10th anniversary of his return to Cuba.
Fast forward to April 2023, when Elián was elected to the National Assembly of People’s Power, representing Cardenas, Cuba.
“From Cuba we can do a lot so that we have a stronger country, and I owe that to the Cubans,” he said at the time during an exclusive interview with AP.
“That’s what I’m going to try to do from my position, from this place in Congress – to contribute to making Cuba a better country.”
“It’s been hard not having my mother, it’s been a burden, but it hasn’t been an obstacle when I’ve had a father who stood up for me and was by my side,” he added.
Elián is now also the father of a two-year-old daughter.
He also worked for a state-owned company that facilitates tourism to the island his mother left, underscoring the alternative path his life has taken since returning home.