Ileana Fuentes. The New Republic. February 4, 2000
I am "a woman named Ileana Fuentes" quoted in Margaret Talbot's Homesick (TNR From Washington 1-31-00). One expects great sophistication and a high degree of excellence in writing and reporting from TNR, and not simplistic articles the likes of Ms.Talbot's.
First and foremost, she quotes me out of context in her piece. It is true that in the referenced book (Yvonne Conde's Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children. Routledge, 1999) I state that the imminent separation from my eleven-year old daughter in 1992 at Newark Airport
(as she boarded a plane to visit cousins in Tampa) threw me into a painful time warp back to October 20,1961 at Havana's airport when I separated from my own parents to come to the U.S.
However, Ms.Talbot failed to include the most important part of that account: "Suddenly, I was at the other side of the pecera (the fish-bowl, as the glass-encased waiting room was called). Suddenly, I was in the place of my mother and father.... I would never separate from my daughter..."
The separation of Cuban children from their parents characteristic of the Pedro Pan Operation was traumatic, indeed. So would have been the alternative. Welcome, Ms. Talbot - Welcome, America! - to the reality of being Cuban in the second half of the 20th century! Trauma is our middle name, as
it is for Soviet Jews, Muslim Serbs, Armenians, Aphgan women under the Taliban, Palestinian refugees, Salvadorians, Tibetans, East Timorians, Kurds and a plethora of other ethnic and national groups who have lived part, or all, of their lives in the midst of political turmoil and ethnic, religious
or ideological cleansing.
I belong to that 70% of Pedro Pan children whose experience was positive. I am a free, independent thinker, an author and a feminist because I was able to develop in an environment of civil rights and freedom. That it happened to be here in the US instead of Venezuela or Spain does not affect
the outcome. The operant word is free access, free flow of ideas.... simply stated: freedom.
I also belong to the 33% who feel that they could not send their children abroad and separate from them indefinitely under similar circumstances. Being on the other side of the glass partition about to separate from my daughter incarnated in my soul the pain of my parents, as well as my own.
But Ms. Talbot is insensitive and mistaken when she uses the term "send away", as if our elders considered us refuse. In our parents' eyes, they were delivering us to a safe and familiar haven - the U.S. - in the care of an equally familiar institution - the Catholic Church - to spare us
many other traumas that they, as adults, were already witnessing first hand: communist indoctrination: compulsory, government-sponsored study-abroad programs - abroad being Soviet bloc countries; compulsory military service; militarization of civil society and education; harassment of believers of
all denominations; summary trials and executions by the thousands; mass arrests; cancellation of constitutional rights and habeas corpus; suspension of Cuba's legal equivalent to the U.S. Bill of Rights; elimination of the middle class and family-owned businesses; general intimidation and the
formation of informant networks on every street block in the country - much like in Stalinist Russia and in Nazi Germany - to enforce compliance with the one-Party, one-ideology system..... I need not go on about the alternative traumas.
Her comparison of wartime England, 1942, with peacetime United States, 1961 ("....8,000 children who remained in London were killed by enemy bombs"), is ludicrous, although, as revealed in Nikita Kruschev;s memoirs, Castro's would have nuclear-attacked the southern United States in
1962, killing millions of Americans - and 200,000 Cuban exiles - in order to prove a political point. One can understand any effort to get children out of harms way when "harm" is a madman.
One final point. That children sent into safety by their parents - thus separated from them - in times of conflict, would themselves find it difficult or impossible to do the same with their children, in no way undermines the benefits reaped, albeit the traumas. Ms. Talbot has missed the mark
completely by utilizing the European and the Pedro Pan experiences as a referential framework to argue that, in the absence of a mother, little Elian González should be returned to his father in Cuba: "...[this experience] should give serious pause to anyone who wants to keep Elian here."
Ms. Talbot obviously does not feel that Elian faces "grave physical or psychological jeopardy" which justifies a decision "to override a child's right to remain with his parents" and viceversa.
Fifteen different rights as stated in the pertinent Articles in both the U.N.'s Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Status and Treament of Refugees would be completely violated in the case of Elian Gonzalez if he were to be deported - not returned, not repatriated:
deported - back to Cuba. Elian is no longer a child or a person in Cuba. Fidel Castro has stated it himself: Elian is a national symbol of Cuba's sovereignty, and a hero to Cuba's children. (I refer your readers to my article "Elian González's Human Rights, The Miami Herald, Sunday,
December 19, 1999).
Heretofore, Elian's life in Cuba will include compulsory ideological allegiance and militance to communism - the Consitution of 1976 so requires it -; a denial of his mother's decision to leave Cuba, for she is a desertor and traitor in the official Cuban context, a woman who could have been
tried and sentenced to 6 years in prison for leaving Cuba illegally had she been intercepted and returned to the island courtesy of Janet Reno and the U.S. Coast Guard. Elian will not be raised in a humane and compassionate environment as is every child's right, but in one permeated by hostility,
hatred, resentment, and plain lies about the side of the family that has cared for him with total dedication and love since he was rescued in November.
Elian will have to join the Young Pioneers in a year or two, march around with the symbolic red scarf around his neck like a miniature soldier, and repeat every day that he wants to be like the cold-blooded murderer who had thousands of Cubans executed (over 17,000, by his own admission!) in a
two year period: Ernesto Che Guevara. How can any American fail to understand that all-of-the-above constitutes "grave physical or psychological jeopardy", when in this country, even exposing children to residual smoke is considered a form of child abuse?
Elizabeth Brotons, Elian's dead mother, did not send Elian abroad by himself: she took the journey with him, apparently - as recent evidence reveals - with the encouragement of the boy's father -her ex-husband- who promised to join them in Miami soon. (If this is proven in court, Elian's father
in Cuba could lose custody of his other little boy, as well as face a prison term for being an accessory to criminal activity).
Elian's mother fled Cuba with her son, and died in the process of reaching what so many Cubans feel is the promised land. I would leave Cuba with my child as Elizabeth Brotons did with hers, if it meant survival for both of us. And I would come back from the dead to haunt mercilessly any
son-of-a-bitch -man or woman- who sent my child back to Hell after I gave up my life to the sharks in order to deliver him from it.
Ileana Fuentes.
Author, guest columnist (NY's El Diario La Prensa), feminist. Miami, Florida
tel: 305-441-0207
fax: 305-441-0230
e-mail: IFAConsult@AOL.com |