By Frank Calzon. Published Thursday, July 6, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Marquis de Lafayette was not the only foreigner who fought for American freedom.
Washington -- Anyone who feels tempted to join the current mood of immigrant-bashing could do worse than to take a stroll around Lafayette Park, directly across from the White House.
The beautifully landscaped park honors the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the earliest immigrants to the United States. The Thirteen Colonies, of course, were populated by settlers -- immigrants by any other name -- but Lafayette, a French nobleman of decidedly republican sympathies, was one of
the first foreigners to come to the United States, as it had been formally (and democratically) constituted. An aide-de-camp to George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, Lafayette made a signal contribution in the fight for American independence.
If you walk around the park, you are reminded that Lafayette was not the only foreigner who fought for American freedom. There is a statue of Baron Frederick William Augustus von Steuben, erected by Congress in grateful recognition of his service to the American people in their struggle for
liberty. He, according to the inscription, after serving under Frederick the Great of Prussia, ``offered his sword to the American colonies'' and ``gave military training and discipline to the citizen soldiers who achieved the independence of the United States.'' He died in New York in 1794, at just
about the time Lafayette, who returned to France to participate in his country's democratic revolution, was risking his head by defying the extremists who believed -- with a logic Cubans are painfully familiar with -- that you could make a revolution by means of terror and tyranny.
Walk beyond Steuben, and you come to a statue of Thaddeus Kosciusko, the military engineer who fortified Saratoga and West Point. And not far from this son of Poland we come to Count de Rochambeau, yet another Frenchman, whom Washington described as a ``fellow labourer in the cause of liberty.''
Washington had good reason to appreciate Rochambeau. He knew an army ultimately required supplies as well as great generals and elan. In 1781, things were grim. With a campaign shaping up near Yorktown, the British commander Gen. Charles Cornwallis, expected to crush the Americans.
According to historian Stephen Bonsal, Rochambeau wrote at the time:``The Continental troops [are] almost without clothes. The greater number [are] without socks or shoes. These people are at the very end of their resources.''
Historian Charles Lee Lewis's book, Admiral De Grasse and the American Independence, said Rochambeau sent the young admiral to seek funds in the West Indies: ``I must not conceal from you, monsieur, that the Americans are at the end of their resources,'' Rochambeau wrote him.
But according to Jean-Jacques Antier in Admiral de Grasse: Hero of L'Independence Americaine, when Francois De Grasse got to Havana the warships had just left, taking the treasury's funds to Spain. The colonial government could not help, but public opinion in Havana was pro-American. Private
contributions flowed in. "Ladies even offering their diamonds. The sum of 1,200,000 livres was delivered on board.'' De Grasse sailed back toward Philadelphia with enough money to fund the coming campaign.
The usually reserved Washington fell into De Grasse's arms when he saw him. The campaign in the fall of 1781 -- and the war -- ended with Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown. As Bonsal noted, "The million that was supplied by the ladies of Havana may be regarded as the 'bottom dollars' upon
which the edifice of American independence was erected.''
The contribution Cuban Americans make today to the preservation of American freedom is perhaps less spectacular. They pay taxes day by day, serve in the army, obey the law -- the actions of people in a free society who appreciate freedom. Cuban Americans, too, are keenly aware that America is a
nation made overwhelmingly of people, or the children of people, who chose to be Americans who chose freedom and choose to pay for its defense daily with their lives and fortunes and, as the men of Washington's day used to say, their sacred honor.
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