Alan Diaz, photographer behind Elian Gonzalez image, dies at 71

MIAMI — Retired Associated Press photojournalist Alan Diaz, whose photo of a terrified 6-year-old Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez earned him the Pulitzer Prize, has died. He was 71.

Diaz’s daughter, Aillette Rodriguez-Diaz, confirmed that he died Tuesday. The cause of death wasn’t immediately known.

“He was the king of the family,” Rodriguez-Diaz said. “He cared about all of his friends and colleagues. His life was photography and my mother.”

Diaz’s wife, Martha, died nearly two years ago.

Diaz’s iconic image shows an armed U.S. immigration agent confronting the boy in the Little Havana home where he lived with relatives after being found floating off the Florida coast.

“Alan Diaz captured, in his iconic photographs, some of the most important moments of our generation — the bitter, violent struggle over the fate of a small Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez, the magnified eye of a Florida election official trying to make sense of hanging chads and disputed ballots in the 2000 presidential election,” AP executive editor Sally Buzbee said.

“He was gravelly-voiced and kindhearted, generous with his expertise. And like all great photographers, he was patient. He was able to wait for the moment.”

Diaz reminisced about getting the award-winning photo when he retired in December. He was freelancing for AP when a boater found a 5-year-old Cuban boy floating in an inner tube in the waters off Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving Day 1999.

He would be the only photojournalist to capture the moment five months later when U.S. immigration agents ended an international custody battle with a pre-dawn Good Friday raid, pulling a terrified Elian Gonzalez from his uncle’s Little Havana home so he could be returned to his father in Cuba.

Diaz said he was just in the right place at the right time.

He had spent months chatting with Gonzalez’s relatives and neighbors over cafecito and cigarettes, earning their trust by respecting an order from the boy’s uncle to not speak to the child.

When he heard a radio call that the raid had begun, Diaz jumped a fence and was ushered into the house by a friend of Gonzalez’s relatives. Huddled with relatives in a bedroom, the terrified boy asked Diaz, “What’s happening? What’s happening?” Aiming his camera at the bedroom door, Diaz tried to soothe the child, saying, “Nothing’s happening, it’s going to be all right.”

ALAN DIAZ / ASSOCIATED PRESS 2000 On April 22, 2000, photojournalist Alan Diaz took this picture of Elian Gonzalez being held in a closet by Donato Dalrymple, who had helped rescue the boy from the ocean, as government officials searched the home of Lazaro Gonzalez in Miami.