Elian Gonzalez's return to Cuba from the United States last night brings a remarkable human and political story to a satisfactory close. The six-year-old child, with his father with whom he was reunited earlier this year, was flown home after the US Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch appeal by his Miami relatives to keep him in the US and to give him political asylum. The court thereby confirmed an honourable position taken by the US administration over the course of the affair, in which it consistently supported the principle of parental custody over the political case made by the Miami-based Cuban exile community that state repression in Cuba rendered it inapplicable.
Elian's extraordinary adventure, in which he was rescued from a shipwreck in which his mother drowned, caught the imagination of the media and general public and lent itself to an endless dramatisation of the personal and the political. The 800,000-strong Cuban exile community in Miami believed it had found the perfect means of winning support for its hard-line positions in an election year. But opinion polls showed that a solid majority of US citizens always believed the child should be returned to his father in Cuba. And that conviction has contributed to a sea-change in attitudes towards Cuba among the US political class.
The Cuban exiles have been able to determine much of US policy towards Cuba because of their strategic position in Florida's electoral politics. It is a "swing state", based on the fact that all the votes in its electoral college are allocated to the popular winner. That power was seen this year in Mr Al Gore's decision as Democratic candidate to dissociate himself from the Clinton administration's support for the principle of parental custody. His Republican opponent, Mr George W. Bush, is a brother of Florida's governor, Mr Jeb Bush, both of whom have supported the exile community's hard-line position. But after the many miscalculations made by that community's leaders in the Elian affair it will be much more difficult for them to maintain such a hold on US policy.
In one of the many ironies of the affair Dr Castro has been able to turn it greatly to his advantage in terms of propaganda. By taking the line it has the Clinton administration has opened up a possibility of relaxing the boycott, which has damaged Cuba's people rather than its regime, and of developing greater dialogue and engagement with Cuba. That would help in the longer term to develop a policy capable of dealing more effectively with the inevitable transition in Cuba's affairs when Dr Castro passes from the scene.