CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

April 19, 2000



Democracy Is In the Streets?

Not if you’re a Cuban American, says the Left.

By Rich Lowry, NR Editor. National Review, April 14

As the crowds built in Miami yesterday, we heard more talk from the Elián-deporters of the "rule of law," a phrase that liberals scorned from the lips of Henry Hyde, but now is back in style. In the media’s account, the lawless fanatics in Miami are set against an administration doing its solemn duty to uphold the laws of this great land. This is the usual toxic mix of falsehood and hypocrisy that has characterized liberal attitudes in the Elián case from the beginning.

First, the hypocrisy: Since when are liberals so unsympathetic to civil disobedience? "No justice, no peace," apparently is a phrase appropriate only to race hustlers attacking the police in New York City. Let an anti-Communist, let alone a Cuban American anti-Communist, dare say it and suddenly it represents a threat to the American way of life. Are all the Elián-deporters now tossing out their dog-eared copies of Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail? Or are they just adding a section about how all the arguments in it apply only when convenient to Al Sharpton?

I’m obviously no fan of civil disobedience, or civil unrest – may there be no bricks thrown in Miami. But it is entirely appropriate for Cuban Americans to take to the streets to pray and to chant and to scream, in an effort to demonstrate the depth of their passion on the subject and try to sway Janet Reno. Because Reno is not simply enforcing the rules; she is responding to political pressure — from Castro and from her minders in the administration. And it is not the "rule of law" Cuban Americans are protesting, but an arbitrary decision masquerading as a legal imperative.

There is no law that says Elián must be returned to totalitarian Cuba. What the law says is that Reno can send him back, but it gives her tremendous discretion. She could just as easily order him to stay, or — for that matter — maintain the administration’s original position, which is that it is all a matter for a family court. Does anyone doubt that if the case involved a 14-year-old girl to be returned to her father in a country that practices genital mutilation, that Reno would have made an entirely different determination? Alas, Cuba only mutilates souls. Make no mistake — it isn’t the law that is an ass in this case, it’s Janet Reno.

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