Elián González, who as a young boy sat at the center a controversial international custody battle between Cuba and the United States, remembered Fidel Castro as a father figure in an emotional interview that aired on Cuban state TV on Saturday.
Castro, whose death at 90 was announced late Friday, was still in power when a 5-year-old González was rescued off the coast of Florida on Thanksgiving Day 1999.He had survived a shipwreck that had killed his mother, her boyfriend and several others when he was found adrift at sea holding onto an inner tube.
But a castaway rescue turned into a heated custody battle when González’s father in Cuba demanded the United States return the boy to the island. His relatives in Miami, however, wanted to raise the child in Florida.