Telegraph.co.uk. Thursday 6 April 2000
For the last two centuries the United States has attempted to separate Church and State. Ben Fenton reports on an increasingly uphill struggle
AT first sight, a high school football game in Texas and a torchlit vigil in Miami protesting plans for the forcible repatriation of Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old Cuban castaway, would appear to have little in common.
But they are linked and the connection between them goes to the centre of America's political soul.
Last week, as Miami's powerful Cuban-American community flexed its considerable muscle in the campaign to keep little Elian in the land of the free, the Supreme Court heard evidence that a pre-game public-address announcement at an American football game in Santa Fe, Texas, was "unconstitutional".
Because Marian Ward, the 18-year-old daughter of a Baptist minister, invoked God's blessing on the players, she breached the 1962 Supreme Court ruling that organised prayer in state schools violated the doctrine of separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution.
Two pupils, one Catholic, one Mormon, sued, saying that the address was symptomatic of the way in which Protestant worship was forced upon them at the school.
It is always a surprise for visitors to America, a country where so many people describe themselves as born-again Christians and churches are so full, that the highest court in the land has banned schools from saying prayers at assemblies or displaying copies of the Ten Commandments.
Yet as some of America's mostly highly-paid lawyers argued in Washington about the intentions of the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution of the United States in 1787, in another part of the country, religion and politics were mingling as thoroughly as the waters of the Atlantic
Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
In Little Havana, Miami, the organisers of a 15,000 strong rally aimed at further intimidating the Department of Justice from enforcing the law with regard to little Elian Gonzalez, showed no scruples in keeping the temporal and spiritual apart.
There is no doubt that the courts of America will rule against the boy's relatives in Miami and order him to be returned to his father in Communist Cuba.
And there is no doubt that those politicians and church leaders representing the 800,000 people who, having fled Castro's tyranny, now live in the sprawling Florida city, will do everything in their power to frustrate the law and keep Elian with them.
So far, the prospect of invoking the anger of this community has frightened Janet Reno, the Attorney General, and her political master, Bill Clinton, enough to prevaricate and postpone the day when they enforce the law and send the boy back to his father.
And at last Thursday's rally, the Cuban-American demonstrators showed that they thought that if the law was not on their side, then they had a more powerful ally.
"God grant us political freedom and economic freedom," an evangelical Catholic priest prayed before the huge crowd last Thursday as they lined up on each side of him at an intersection, forming the shape of a cross.
"Amen," the throng replied, waggling their torches in their air at the television helicopters overhead.
"Viva Elian! Viva El Nino Rey!," cried a speaker from the makeshift dais.
"Viva!" the faithful howled back at him.
"El Nino Rey" - the Little King - is the name given to Elian Gonzalez by what is an intensely religious community which has undergone a powerful spiritual rebirth in recent years.
It is also the name given to the infant Jesus.
The parallel between Elian and Jesus is made consciously, unapologetically and vehemently by those Cuban-American politicians who have identified the boy's fate with their own crusade for the overthrow of Fidel Casto and his hated communist dictatorship in Havana.
It is a parallel that is spreading in scope and in detail.
An image that appeared in the window of a bank 400 yards from Elian's temporary home in Little Havana is supposedly a likeness of the Virgin Mary, although to less committed eyes it looks like a smear caused by inadequate cleaning.
Some see the boy as Moses, cast on the water by his mother(who drowned when their makeshift refugee boat capsized on Nov 25), only to return to lead his people to freedom from oppression.
Some see his story as a miraculous revival of the miracle of the Virgin of Charity, the patron saint of Cuba, when she rescued a drowning fisherman from the same seas as Elian.
Others point out that he was plucked from the sea on Thanksgiving Day and arrived just in time for the Millennium and the Catholic Jubilee year of 2000.
Last week, a banner outside his great-uncle's small whitewashed house in Little Havana, where the boy is occasionally paraded for the faithful on the shoulders of his relatives, like a holy statue at a fiesta, read "Elian es Cristo. Castro es Satana".
Elian is Christ. Castro is Satan. Not a complex message.
But a closer examination of some of the messages on display in Little Havana does indeed show a subtler signal aimed at cementing support for the cause among the devout Cubans in Florida.
"Elian conocio a Cristo, otros lo niegan" reads the caption on a popular poster of the boy, wearing a crucifix around his neck and cradling a model of the manger in his arms, complete with ceramic Baby Jesus staring up at a beatific Elian.
It means: "Elian knows Christ. The others do not."
The others, as any Cuban would instantly know, are the followers of Santeria, the animist religion brought to Cuba by slaves from Nigeria and Benin, melded with Catholicism and still practised, according to some estimates, by a majority of islanders.
Current rumours in Little Havana centre on a belief that Castro, who it is claimed has long been under the thrall of a Santeria priestess, was told many years ago that he would be overthrown by a Cuban rescued from the sea by dolphins.
Although the story of Elian's rescue by dolphins seems to have its roots in the fact that the fishermen who found him after 48 hours adrift on an inflated inner tube were seeking mahi-mahi, or dolphin fish, the boy is said to fit the terms of the omen.
Castro, according to some of his arch-opponents in Florida, must have the child and will sacrifice him on a Santeria altar to make sure this prophecy is never fulfilled.
Apart from the fact that Santeria specifically abhors human sacrifice and Castro has actually spent much of the past 40 years persecuting its followers on his island, it would seem to be a compelling argument against returning Elian.
The extent to which religion and politics are interwoven in Cuban-American politics was evident to anyone who attended last week's rally in Little Havana, who listened to the outpourings of the three Hispanic talk-radio stations in Miami or who studied the rubric of support for Elian.
The manner in which the interests of the boy and adherence to a nation's law have been suborned to the wishes of the mob, however morally indignant it may be, should give cause for additional consideration to those nine Supreme Court justices when they mull over the reasons why the Founding
Fathers of America were so insistent 213 years ago on keeping religion and politics apart.
This article has been written exclusively for Electronic Telegraph
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