It is a very long way from Japan to Miami, both physically and psychologically. For that reason, the brouhaha over little Elian Gonzalez that engulfed the United States this week has been a bit mystifying to people here. And yet perhaps distance lends a useful perspective.

Six-year-old Elian was one of just three survivors when a boatload of Cuban refugees was shipwrecked off the Florida coast last November. His mother drowned. Elian was rescued by fishermen and delivered by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to relatives, also refugees, who lived in Miami -- a sensible temporary arrangement. Then his father, who had been divorced from Elian's mother, was contacted in Cuba and said he wanted his son to come home. The INS determined that Mr. Juan Miguel Gonzalez had been an exemplary parent and agreed that Elian belonged with him. Who would argue?

Many people, as it happens. This was not just any little boy, or any father. They and their Miami relatives were also players in a political drama -- more of a tattered sideshow, really -- that had begun before most of them were born and that effectively transformed them all from human beings into types and symbols of the Cold War. No matter how eloquently Cuban President Fidel Castro and U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke of keeping politics out of it, this was politics and had been from day one. If it wasn't, why were political leaders talking about it? Politics was what drove Elian's mother to flee Cuba, still tottering along under a communist dictatorship after 41 years, in search of a better, freer life in the U.S. for herself and her son. Politics is the reason the Gonzalez family had relatives in Miami in the first place.