Mari Paz Martinez Nieto. Published Friday, April 14, 2000, in the Miami Herald
The media worldwide are devoting most of their news coverage to Elian Gonzalez. Alarming news -- in Chechnya, Ethiopia, Colombia and South Africa -- are relegated to the background by news of the boy's turnover to his father.
In two decades of my worrying about Cuba and its lack of human rights, I've never seen anything like it. Not that this sudden worldwide attention toward Cuba seems improper to me. Yet no one has called for even a small investigation into the thousands of Cubans forced to risk their lives in the
Florida Straits, fleeing a tyrannical regime. Did you know that out of five Cubans who dare to cross the straits in search of freedom only two reach their destination?
How is it that news of this little rafter's plight turns the world's eyes toward that island forgotten by international public opinion? Is it the same public opinion that for 41 years has turned a deaf ear to the calls for freedom from Cuba's people?
Now even Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses, has written about Elian. I hope that Rushdie also writes articles about the 23 children who were killed in the tugboat 13 de Marzo, rammed by Cuban government patrol boats in 1994 as they fled to freedom. Their bodies still lie at the bottom of
the entrance to Havana harbor.
By what authority do the same people who turn their backs to the cruel dictator who has slaughtered with impunity the hopes of freedom of Cuban families for decades now ask the Miami exiles for tolerance and calm? How is it that people criticize Elian's exhibition on Miami television --
reprehensible, no doubt -- yet say little or nothing about the embarrassing exhibition in Havana by thousands of children who parade like soldiers and shout slogans demanding Elian's return day after day? Today the slogans deal with Elian, but tomorrow, they'll return to the usual: ``Fatherland or
death. We'll be like Che.''
Do those children have less rights than Elian to be protected from the political maneuvers programmed by Cuba's Absolute Dad in his despicable megalomania? And where are the feminist organizations, which have forgotten about Elian's mother, who disappeared at sea and had parental authority over
the boy?
CONCEALING REPRESSION
I just returned from Geneva, where many women demanded respect for individual freedoms and human rights in Cuba. Naturally, there at the United Nation's Human Rights Commission, the Elian affair also was at the top of the news. Naturally, because that's exactly what the Cuban government wanted:
a smoke screen to conceal the repression exerted over the people of Cuba, especially the dissidents.
Why is it that we human-rights activists are defenseless in the face of abuses by Cuban delegates to the Human Rights Commission in Gen- eva, where -- because we deliver irrefutable truths -- we are threatened with expulsion from the commission and are accused of being ``child kidnappers''? The
Cuban government, in addition to violating its own people's right of speech, wants to do likewise in the international forums -- and life goes on.
Yet we continue denouncing the cruel arrests and the degradation inflicted on prisoners of conscience. We remember the peaceful dissidents on hunger strikes and those imprisoned such as Maritza Lugo and Oscar Elias Biscet, among many others.
We denounce that in Cuba freedom of expression has been diminished alarmingly in the past year and that independent journalists are harassed, threatened and imprisoned for accomplishing the sacred duty of informing others.
We know that dozens of children are being detained in Cuba, kept as hostages because their parents have decided to remain in a free country, building a future that is denied to them in Cuba.
The Cuba we denounce is Elian's homeland. And what I have denounced is little compared to the many freedoms trampled by the government that so vehemently demands Elian's return to Cuba. If those who mold public opinion would turn eyes toward the real Cuba, hundreds of "Eliancitos'' would be
grateful.
Mari Paz Martinez Nieto is director of the Elena Mederos Foundation, based in Spain, which advocates for human rights in Cuba.
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