Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Elian Gonzalez joins Twitter
Elian Gonzalez, best known as the Cuban boy whose mother drowned at sea and whose Miami relatives fought to raise him in Little Havana, is now on Twitter.
Gonzalez marked his 25th birthday on Thursday with a Tweet thanking Cuban president Miguel DiazCanel for his birthday wish.
Gonzalez shared in Spanish “it is no coincidence that I join Twitter on my 25th birthday, I do so to thank the congratulations of my President Miguel Díaz-Canel and from here to follow and support him.”
By Friday morning, Gonzalez had 700 followers and he was following 29. On his Twitter account @BrotonsElian, he used the last name of his late mother, Elizabeth Brotons.
She drowned while fleeing Cuba with Gonzalez who was 5-years-old at the time. He was
found floating in an inner tube by two men three miles off Fort Lauderdale Thanksgiving Day 1999. The boy stayed with his great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez and relatives in their Little Havana bungalow which became the epicenter of a global custody dispute.
Federal agents seized the boy from that house in the early morning hours of April 22, 2000 to reunite him with his dad, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who had traveled from Cuba to pick him up and take him back to the island nation.
Gonzalez was featured in last year’s CNN Films documentary “Elian” which showed the engineer as a member of the Young Communists Union.
Gonzalez’s Twitter account comes just as Cubans on the island were allowed to sign up for Internet access to their mobile phones with the purchase of 3G service packages, according to The Miami Herald.