by Norberto Santana Jr. norberto.santana@uniontrib.com. Intellectual Capital. Thursday, April 06, 2000
Since the firestorm of controversy over the fate of six-year old Elian Gonzalez erupted last year, the emotions of Cuban exiles have been on display like never before.
Public opinion in the United States consistently has favored the return of Elian to his father in Cuba, with most Americans seeing the issue as a simple one of parenthood taking precedence over politics. Some also argue that if Elian were a Mexican or a Haitian child, he would have been returned
to his father immediately. For them, the special treatment accorded to Cuban émigrés by national, state and local elected leaders is hypocritical and misguided.
Yet thousands of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans or Haitians do not hit the streets to protest such an issue or regime. That is because the life they have left behind, albeit poor, does not have the revolutionary baggage that many Cubans carry for a lifetime.
Breathing the fresh air of freedom
Many of the million Cuban expatriates living in South Florida regularly protest against the regime of Fidel Castro. For them, the protests vent 40 years of celebrating Christmas, Easter, birthdays and deaths in their families apart from their relatives and their homeland. Their sin is the love
of individual freedom -- an unwillingness to submit to a regime that demands total compliance.
Understanding the Kafkaesque life of Cubans is difficult, if not impossible, for anyone who has not lived in their shoes. Cubans leave their island nation not because of poverty -- one does not abandon all future contact with family just for some Nike sneakers -- but for the chance to enjoy the
breath of fresh air that freedom brings. Freedom to raise your child as you see fit. Freedom to move from one town to another without permission. Freedom to just live how they -- not the state -- sees fit.
While rallies for Elian in Cuba are government organized, the ones in Miami are spontaneous. Their lack of organization is readily apparent in the uncoordinated chants and extreme comments of some protesters.
There is much more behind what seem like frantic and fanatic protests. For better or worse, Elian has become a symbol for many Cuban exiles and Cuban Americans. He represents victory in the quest for freedom – a quest that cost Elian's mother her life. Returning him to the island after such
a sacrifice represents the agony and hopelessness that envelops the daily lives of Cubans after four decades of living under Castro's rule.
Some commentators believe the Miami protests are dominated by older Cubans who mourn for an island that long ago disappeared into the pages of history. But there are also younger faces outside the Gonzalez family home. Many are recent émigrés from the island.
Ironically, despite being repeatedly told by the Cuban government that an extremist, right-wing mafia runs Miami, Cubans still go there more than any other place when they flee the island. And when they get there, they protest. They long to say what they could never say while they lived in Cuba.
When asked whether Cuba is a free society, Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY) said he did not know because he had never been there. But for dissidents inside the island desperately seeking domestic reform, there is no mystery to such a question.
A life of repression
In June 1991, a group of intellectuals wrote to the government to request an open dialogue on the country's future. Most were jailed. Their leader, the poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela was brutally beaten in public and, after two years, forced to seek exile.
In August 1994, frustrated Cubans took to the streets to protest the brutal murder of women and children who had been attacked by Cuban Coast Guard ships with water cannons in July of that year. Their crime was trying to leave the island in a tugboat. "Rapid-response brigades" beat and
jailed anyone who was on Havana's seafront that day.
In 1997, another group of opposition leaders declared in a letter that "our fatherland belongs to all." Despite appeals from Pope John Paul II and virtually every single Western government, the four leaders remain jailed today.
There is little doubt that average Cubans enjoy and believe in many of the Castro revolution's tenets: Free health care, free education, housing for all. But do they also need the police presence and countless restrictions on daily life?
These leading dissidents, who are committed socialists, have advocated peaceful reform. Yet even these moderate voices of change are silenced, repressed and ultimately either jailed or exiled. There are no options for Cubans, other than those dictated by Fidel and the communist elite.
On the island, the only true Cuban is a revolutionary. No one else is entitled to anything, not even fundamental human rights. More than two million Cubans have been forced to decide between freedom and their families. And within a tight-knit family culture, the decision to live free or among
family is an agonizing one.
Cubans who remain on the island are forced to live two lives. They become professional liars. In public, they live the life of good revolutionaries -- where working for no money is all right, where everything, including their children, is for the good of the revolution and never for themselves.
As young children, Cubans are taken to "circulos infantiles," where they chant slogans like "Fidel is our father." In grammar school, the chant becomes "Pioneers for communism, we shall be like Che [Guevara]." Beginning in the seventh grade, children are forced to
spend one month each year away from their parents in agricultural work camps. Anyone who wants to study at the university must begin attending special schools in the countryside by the 10th grade. Students live apart from their family, reinforcing the tenet that the revolution comes first.
Socialism is death
What Cubans living in exile know is that if Elian returns to Cuba, he heads back not his father or family but to Fidel and the revolution. Having close-up knowledge of how badly people seek a way out of that hellish existence, they cannot tolerate sending him back.
In a recent conversation with an independent Cuban journalist who sought exile this year, I asked about the life of a child in Cuba. From the outside, most observers say children seem well taken of. Along the streets of Havana, you can see swing sets and child care-centers. Most everyone agrees
children are well fed.
"It's just like looking at a little piglet in their pen," he told me. "You may look at them and say to yourself, 'They look happy and well fed. But the whole time, they're just being fattened up for the kill."
Many parents have to take the risk of confronting and correcting the values their children are being taught by the state. They have to fill in the blanks from the official texts -- to explain how stealing from the state is acceptable because sticking to your legal allotment under ration cards
means starving. Virtually every Cuban has to exist by breaking the law.
When the Cuban government initiated the so-called "special period" in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro coined a new term to end his speeches. "Socialism or death," he cried. Cubans, with their penchant for humor, wryly ask themselves: "What's the
difference?"
Cuban expatriates protesting in Miami know there is none.
Norberto Santana is a metro staff writer with the San Diego Union Tribune and an occasional commentator for IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is |