By DeWayne Wickham. USA Today. July 5, 2000. Page 15A
For the most part, the media's postmortem of the Elian Gonzalez saga has amounted to little more than a stilted explanation of how Cuban exiles mishandled the shipwrecked boy, and advice to Fidel Castro not to make too much of the victory his enemies in Miami handed him.
Missing in both the coverage of Elian's seven-month sojourn in this country and his return a week ago to Cuba is any widespread journalistic analysis of the assumptions that have become the pillars of American foreign policy toward the communist nation sitting 90 miles off the Florida coast.
From almost the very moment Elian was found floating in an inner tube near Fort Lauderdale, Cuban exiles in south Florida treated what happened to him as tragic proof of how desperate Cuba's people are to escape Castro's rule. Most media organizations accepted their characterization of this sad
event as gospel, rather than as the well-worn political alchemy it is.
The image of Cubans, especially -- women and children -- taking to sea in small boats to flee communist Cuba for our shores is an effective tool for rallying support in Congress and elsewhere for the nearly 40-year-old economic embargo of Castro's regime.
It's also quite bogus. The truth, which few journalists have bothered to emphasize, is that the vast majority of people who leave Cuba for this country do so without undertaking such a harrowing trip.
More than one way to arrive
In 1998, the U.S. Border Patrol says, just 615 Cubans were arrested for entering this country illegally. Virtually all were allowed to remain here under a so-called ''wet-foot, dry-foot'' policy that requires U.S. government officials to return to Cuba exiles picked up at sea, but allows those
who make it to U.S. soil to remain.
That same year, 155 Cubans entered this country through a grant of political asylum after convincing officials here that they had a credible fear of being punished for their political views if returned to Cuba. These are the people exile leaders -- and many in the media -- focus their attention
on.
What exile leaders don't want you to know is that, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 17,375 Cubans entered this country in fiscal year 1998 by way of an agreement between the United States and Cuba that allows up to 20,000 people annually to leave the island for permanent
residence in this country. They take regularly scheduled flights, not life-threatening, leaky boats, to get here.
By not revealing how many Cubans legally leave for the United States each year, media organizations perpetuate the myth that to get here most Cubans must risk their lives at sea to escape Cuba -- a myth that is used to justify the continued imposition of the economic trade embargo the United
States unilaterally imposed on that communist nation 38 years ago.
Tightening up travel to Cuba
When House Republicans agreed last week to loosen the embargo by permitting the sale of U.S. food and medicine to Cuba, congressional supporters of the Cuban exiles added a travel restriction. It would codify the limits on travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens that had been imposed by presidential
decree -- and that recently were loosened.
The significance of their attempt to transform this ban into a rigid law has been lost on most of the journalists covering this story. House Republicans' willingness to relax the food-and-drug embargo results from pressures applied to them by farmers and corporate executives, many of whom have
visited Cuba in recent years. What they found on the island was a market hungry for their products and a communist regime that is far less rigid than Castro's detractors portray.
Exile leaders and their congressional allies brand Cuba a totalitarian state. But they champion a law that restricts the freedom of U.S. citizens to go there and take their own measure of Castro's regime -- an undemocratic restriction of personal freedom that cries out for analysis by this
nation's media.
DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY. |