CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

April 20, 2000



What a Boy Needs in His Life

By Marc Fisher. Thursday, April 20, 2000; Page B01

The crises in a 6-year-old boy's life are supposed to be like these: Whose turn is it? Who won the game? Why is Mommy angry?

And here's what the adults in a 6-year-old boy's life ought to be doing: Teaching right and wrong. Showing how people work together. Instilling a love for life's joys--reading, exploring, singing.

Now, if you can stand it, look south, to Miami, to a 6-year-old boy being destroyed before our eyes. We watch him every night, sometimes playing in the yard, sometimes being trotted out like a circus act to perform his part in this endlessly cruel spectacle.

Who cares about this boy?

The U.S. government? This administration, which so piously invokes the interests of children to advance policies on everything from poverty to pollution, acts befuddled and blinded. They set deadlines, then run away from them. They talk tough, then do nothing.

This president, who admits he's not the greatest family man but says he sure loves kiddies, could have sent the boy home on Day One. If it had been the father who died in the Atlantic, the boy would have been on a plane to Mama faster than President Clinton can spell "focus group."

The Cubans in Miami? Far from caring about the boy, they have set up a system of torture that would break most adults: round-the-clock chants and shouts, a mass of gawkers and rabble-rousers who prevent the boy from attending school or finding even momentary relief from his terrible trauma.

The Cubans in Cuba? Castro and friends have used the boy as cynically as have their brethren in South Florida--forcing schoolchildren to dwell on the boy's horrific loss, pasting the poor kid's face on billboards, TV screens, classroom posters.

The Miami relatives? Displaying a young child on television, parading him about as a political tool, shielding him from his real family, lining up book and movie deals--this is abuse, not care.

The news hounds? Start with the pathetic faux-caring of Diane Sawyer and legions of TV folks who would do anything to pump the boy's suffering onto the home screen. Move on to the CBS miniseries, now on the fast track to air during the November sweeps.

Or drive by the Kenwood section of Bethesda, where, in the name of serving the public, the news-entertainment complex has set up what increasingly looks like a permanent encampment, with canopies over carpeted platforms that block streets, satellite trucks that groan without end, and port-a-potties installed smack in front of $800,000 houses.

How about the psychiatrists? Surely they understand the need to permit the boy some sliver of privacy? No--they scamper to get themselves on TV, to mouth off at every opportunity about how damaged the child is.

I talked to Jerry Wiener, the George Washington University psychiatrist who is one of three mental health experts the U.S. government asked to meet with more cooperative members of the boy's family. He immediately agreed that "it'd be just as well for the boy if none of this were discussed publicly," but he argued that it's important to respond to the Miami relatives' accusations that the father is unfit and that the boy does not want to go home.

Wiener says it's the intense, raw hatred that Miami Cubans have for Castro that has driven them to exploit the boy. But what's driving all the other exploitation--by news people, presidential candidates, the government, psychiatrists? "That is simply what the media does," Wiener offers.

Which always sounds good, except that news folks, as craven as we are, do not operate in a vacuum. Somebody goes on the air to sell out the boy. Somebody watches.

Those examples of what should be happening in a 6-year-old's life come from "Your Child at Play," a new book by psychologist Marilyn Segal. She says any boy this size is learning how to be funny, to show empathy, to question his world.

Let's hope this boy learns well on his own. Because not a soul is helping him, and the only one left who can is being barred from his duty by a Shakespearean cast of villains. Let Daddy get his boy.

E-mail: marcfisher@washpost.com

© 2000 The Washington Post Company

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© 2000 Mobile Register. Used with permission.

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