By Myriam Marquez. Arizona Daily Star. Monday, 10 July 2000
He was our divine child - the one dolphins encircled to keep sharks away in the Florida Strait.
Our own little Moses, whose mother died getting him to freedom. The one who was plucked from an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day.
How could we not want to hug the little Cuban boy who turned 6 in America?
A week ago, Elián Gonzalez became the property of Fidel Castro's communist regime, back in a country where paternal rights don't exist, where the constitution makes children wards of the state. The boy will live like a king.
Unlike during Easter weekend, when machine-gun-toting federal agents grabbed Elián from his Miami relatives' Little Havana home, I shed no tears for Elián last week.
I watched Elián and his dad, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, on television smile and wave goodbye as they boarded the plane. It was the only day during my vacation that it rained from dawn to night at the Maryland seashore.
Another divine sign. A cleansing. Goodbye, boy. Good luck.
Oh, most Americans will prefer to believe that Elián is where he should be. He was reunited with his father, and everyone will live happily ever after in Cuba because, as Castro apologists like to say, there are good families in poor countries. Love, as they say, transcends politics.
I would like to think so. But love cannot transcend totalitarian control in a communist dictatorship. So be it.
Elián is a special child. He taught me a lot about myself and about the values that many Americans - those lucky never to have faced a tyrannical government - hold dear.
The power of the green, man: money. That's what most Americans hold dear.
In the final analysis, that's what Elián's plight brought: one more push to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
But even as Republicans from the farm states in the Midwest joined liberal Democrats in Congress to chip away at the embargo last week, Castro never will soften to American business interests.
Already, Cuba's dictator has promised to keep daily TV roundtables and weekly mass rallies going throughout the year. The topic last Monday, according to Cuba's Communist-Party newspaper, Granma, was an analysis of racial discrimination, poverty and "other social evils" in the United
States.
No sense spending any time explaining to Cubans why Castro's regime maintains a racist and sexist system.
In a country in which more than half the population is either black or mixed race, virtually all of Castro's ministers and power brokers are white men. Women in power?
Sure, if power is the art of prostituting yourself on the streets.
The Congressional Black Caucus, Castro's staunchest American defenders, might want to ask its Cuban pal why the island's jails are disproportionately jam-packed with Afro-Cubans and the halls of power are filled with white guys.
Talk about racial discrimination, poverty and other social ills in Cuba.
Elián is gone, but he left behind something special.
He was the boy who brought three generations of Cuban-Americans - from Miami to Union City, N.J., to Los Angeles - together to speak up against Castro's communist dictatorship.
Many of us had begun to doubt the effectiveness of the U.S. embargo against Cuba. We had begun to think another strategy might be better to end Cuba's 41-year-old communist dictatorship. But Elián forced us to put morals and ethics above pragmatic politics.
After seven months and three days, he left us all the wiser. We shed no tears.
Myriam Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel. |