By E. J. Dionne Jr. The Washington Post. Tuesday, April 25, 2000; Page A23
Vivian Escobar-Stack understands why Cubans in Miami were willing to push aside the rights of Elian Gonzalez's father in the name of keeping Elian in a free country. Her parents did much the same thing with their own parental rights when it came to making choices on behalf of her brother, and
herself.
In 1962, when Escobar-Stack was 7 and her brother was 11, they were sent to the United States to live with friends even as their parents stayed behind in Cuba. "When we left, we didn't know if we'd ever see our parents again," she says. It took 3 1/2 years for her parents to get out of
Cuba and for the family to be reunited.
Escobar-Stack isn't sure she could ever make the same choice and separate herself from her own sons, who are 7 and 9. But she respects what her parents did, is grateful to be an American and suggests we try to understand the traumas so many Cuban American families have gone through because of
Fidel Castro's regime.
"The community," Escobar-Stack says, "allowed its passion to cloud its judgment in responding to the controversy." But what may seem to outsiders irrational behavior, she adds, is consistent with choices so many Cuban Americans felt they had to make because the political had
overwhelmed the personal in their country's history.
It was sobering to have Easter dinner in Rockville with Vivian, her husband, Bob, and their children in the wake of the INS raid that reunited Elian with his father Juan Miguel. Hearing Escobar-Stack describe the struggles of individual Cubans made the canned political responses to Attorney
General Janet Reno's actions seem inadequate to the human tragedy that has unfolded over these past several months and, for that matter, since the 1959 revolution that put Castro in power.
Reno couldn't win, no matter what she did. Before she called in the INS agents, she was bitterly criticized for indecisiveness and for allowing Elian's Miami relatives to string out negotiations endlessly. But then came that gruesome photograph of the automatic-weapon toting INS agent. Suddenly,
Reno was under assault for deploying excessive force and for not giving negotiators enough time.
It's easy to say now that she could have given negotiations another go. It's also easy to see that had she done so, the papers would be full of talk of her "weakness" and "vacillation."
Elian's Miami family helped bring about this result by badly overplaying its hand. Putting out that videotape in which a young boy said (or was encouraged to say) that he didn't want to go back to Cuba with his father seemed a form of exploitation several steps too far.
As Castro receded from public view and Juan Miguel Gonzalez began speaking for himself in public, sympathy inevitably shifted to the pleading father. Once a court guaranteed that father and son would have to remain in the United States until the conflicting claims in this case were adjudicated,
it became untenable to keep Juan Miguel and Elian apart.
We'll now proceed to political recriminations. Republicans will have yet another go at Janet Reno, a favorite sport in Washington. Progressives will denounce fanaticism in the Cuban American community. We'll argue about whether asylum and immigration laws give Cuban refugees an unfair break over
others.
All this contention is what makes us a free country. But now that Elian is with his dad, as he was going to be inevitably, perhaps we can shift the spotlight a bit. Let's ask Castro to answer for the circumstances that led Elian's mother to give her own life in bringing her son to these shores.
Yes, Cuban exile leaders misread American public opinion and underestimated the natural sympathy that flows to a father separated from his son. But the problem in this case lies not only in Miami but also in Havana. Castro can now have no argument with the American government, which enforced our
law on behalf of one of his own citizens. He no longer has a little boy to parade as a potent symbol against his Miami foes.
Resolving the case in favor of Juan Miguel, however painful that is for the Cuban exiles, can build pressure for democratization in Cuba. And the democratic freedoms that today give us all the right to beat up on Janet Reno will someday save Cubans from the tragic choices faced by
Escobar-Stack's parents, and Elian's.
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