The Economist, April 2000
APRIL has never been a gentle month for Janet Reno, America’s attorney-general. On April 19th 1993, when she was brand-new to her job, four federal agents were killed and 87 people incinerated in the siege of the Branch Davidians’ headquarters outside Waco, in Texas. Two years later,
to the very day, a bomb planted in revenge for Waco in Oklahoma City killed 169 people. Now, perilously near those anniversaries, crowds are massing in Miami to prevent the seizure by federal agents of Elian Gonzalez, a six-year-old Cuban refugee who must, under American law, be returned to his
father and to Cuba. For all her uncompromising talk, Ms Reno clearly does not know which way to turn.
The parallels with Waco are disquieting. In that case, Ms Reno justified her intervention because children were said to be being abused inside the Branch Davidian compound. In Elian’s case, too, the charges and counter-charges are now about child abuse: whether his Miami relatives, who took
him in last November, are turning the boy against his father, or whether his father would treat him more cruelly by taking him back to Cardenas. But most important, Ms Reno now faces—as at Waco—a crowd of believers, convinced that Elian has been saved by a miracle for a life in the United
States and determined to die martyrs’ deaths to keep him there.
It need not have come to this. When Elian was first rescued from the sea, one of three survivors of a raft-load of Cubans, it seemed that matters would be sorted out swiftly. Both national and international law are clear on the issue: a child belongs with his surviving parent, unless that parent
is unfit. Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian’s father, had nothing that could be held against him—except that he lived in Cuba. But that was enough. As the relatives became increasingly attached to Elian, their attitudes hardened, and one can understand why. Since Elian’s mother had risked
everything on that hazardous journey across the Florida Straits, it was surely her wish that her son should become an American. To send him back would mark another "betrayal" by the government, a betrayal as callous as when it abandoned the band of paramilitaries who were sent by the CIA,
in 1961, to try to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. That anniversary, too, fell this week.
Elian thus became, and remains, a captive of the poisonous relationship between Cuba and the United States. Since 1960, the two countries have neither traded nor had diplomatic relations with each other. They lie a mere 90 miles apart, the citadel of free enterprise and the western world’s
last sad, failed remnant of communist central planning. Cuba longs for the dollars on which it subsists; much of Miami yearns to be reunited with struggling Cuban relations. But both sides are far too proud to admit to any complications in their public loathing of each other.
This long hatred is now summed up in one bitterly divided family. Neither side trusts, or will even speak to, the other. Elian’s father, dispirited, waits in Maryland, while the Miami relatives try to engineer yet more legal delays. They have defied a court order to turn Elian over; his
father, they say, is simply a tool of Cuba’s dictatorial leader, Fidel Castro. Politicians are not helping: the two local mayors, both facing tough election fights, have said they will not lend support to any federal agents who are sent to seize the child. At national level, both George W. Bush
and Al Gore are scrambling for Floridian votes by saying that Elian should stay.
The rule of law
He should not stay. Despite the best efforts of his relatives to lure him with toys, clothes and video games, his place is with his father. But it is hard to see how matters can be resolved without violence. Miami’s Cuban exiles, though their power has been waning in recent years, are
utterly immovable on one point: they will not deal with Cuba while Fidel Castro is in power. He is the devil, and Elian their saint. His case has become the pivot on which all their arguments, and all their hopes, turn. They are determined not to lose it. This small boy encapsulates their message
that Cuba is evil, America is good, and that the two sides must not do business with each other until the regime has changed. If they have to defy their own government to make this point, so be it.
How misguided they are. The Economist yields to nobody when it comes to contempt for Mr Castro. But to use Elian for propaganda purposes, as the exiles now are, is exactly the tactic Mr Castro would choose. He is getting huge mileage out of this case. It shows, even better than the trade embargo
can, how vindictive and inhumane the United States can be. Elian’s Miami relatives believe they are doing the best thing for him, literally saving his life. But actually they are playing into the devil’s hands; and, in the process, they are also restricting Elian’s choices as surely
as Mr Castro would.
There is also a more fundamental point. These exiles came to America after the Cuban revolution not just because they believed in capitalism, but because, presumably, they believed in the rule of law. They are now treating the rule of law as contemptuously as Mr Castro himself does. They will
abide by it merely if it suits them. This defiance does not show Mr Castro, and Cuba, that America is a morally superior place. On the contrary, it displays a country where even an administration with law on its side may be bullied out of doing the right thing because it is election year.
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