Essay / By William Safire. The New York Times. April 10, 2000
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Assume the deal goes through: custody of Elián González goes to his Cuban Communist father after he agrees that he will not take the boy out of the U.S. until court appeals end. The 6-year-old's Cuban-American relatives agree to turn him over after the
Justice Department guarantees that the father will stick around for the decision.
Here is what this four-month immersion in a media bath teaches us:
1. Flight from tyranny still has a powerful moral and emotional appeal. When the mother died in her attempt to choose freedom for herself and her son, the initial U.S. public reaction was to grant him asylum. His relatives here were right to claim and protect him; Communist charges that the
fleeing mother kidnapped her boy were ludicrous.
2. The father's claim pitted parental control in a tyranny against care by relatives in a free country. In such a clash of values, thoughtful people can disagree. But anti-Communists saw only a Castro ploy to whip up anti-U.S. sentiment in Cuba. And liberal anti-anti-Communists here (who might
have resisted returning a motherless child to a Nazi father and Hitler Youth) found an opportunity to vent their distaste at the political strength of those opposed to extending an economic lifeline to Castro.
3. When Republican presidential candidates put the dead mother's desire for her child's freedom ahead of the live father's claim of custody, the Democratic-leaning states of Florida and New Jersey -- with sizable Cuban-American voting blocs -- were put in play. That forced Al Gore to break with
the Clinton decision to return the boy to Cuba.
4. When the Democratic candidate takes a stand that aligns him with conservatives, he is castigated by liberals as a shameless panderer. This causes some embarrassment now and generates much media derision, but costs him little in the long run; Gore's most virulent leftist critics today will
come home to him in November. Practical Democrats understand and are silently pleased at the prospect of making inroads into a Republican stronghold.
5. Firebrands in Miami's Cuban-American community overplayed their hand. Angry televised demonstrations; human chains and talk of civil disobedience; the Miami-Dade County mayor's foolish threat to withhold local police protection to U.S. marshals -- all this, exploited by background briefings
from Bill Clinton's media-savvy impeachment lawyer, helped Castro make a martyr out of the father. Refugees traditionally take pains to uphold their welcoming country's rule of law; by the time cooler Hispanic heads prevailed, the majority of U.S. public opinion had turned.
6. Human interest now easily beats political interest and sometimes even national interest. We have seen how television footage warped U.S. policy that had been to destroy Iraq's republican guard; other pictures of suffering created our protection of an exodus of endangered Kurds. Pictures of
the arrival of Juan González, tenderly cradling an infant in his arms and accompanied by his new wife, bolstered the image of a caring father and eroded the hopes of the drowned mother. That helped undermine legitimate concerns that Elián would be brainwashed in a Communist school and
made into a poster child of anti-U.S. propaganda.
7. The concern for the unity of a nuclear family divided conservatives. A Communist real father may be better than a democratic substitute father; a natural family unit in a tyranny may be better for a child than a split family anywhere. That virtue of family cohesion, added to the newly equal
parental rights of fathers, made it hard for conservative hawks on human rights to adopt the certitude taken with such ease by the crowd of immigration bureaucrats, Justice politicians, Castro appeasers and their unconflicted editorial supporters.
8. It's working out for the best. The U.S. shows again that individual rights come first, and only the courts decide them. Anti-Castroites in Congress will pass a law granting Elián and family permanent residence here if and when they are free to so choose. Cuban-Americans now know their
political strength and its limits.
As for the celebrated kid, pawn he may be, but Elián is off to a fast political start. By 2030, in a democratic hemisphere, he could face a choice of running for president of Cuba or mayor of Miami.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company |