John Kass. Chicago Tribune, January 6, 2000
Before there was Elian Gonzalez in Miami, there was Walter Polovchak in Chicago.
Many of us have opinions about what should happen to Elian, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who is being kept in Miami while the politicians and the lawyers talk about process and hearings.
Elian's mother is dead. And his father wants him home, in Cuba. There's been lots of talk and anger.
And in Washington on Wednesday, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said that Elian should be returned to his father in Cuba by the end of next week.
Today, Walter Polovchak is going to tell you what he thinks. He actually lived through a similar episode. We called him so he could tell you himself.
"I think it's a sad situation for Elian," Polovchak said. "He has this opportunity to stay in America. And I would worry that the lifestyle he would be in if he were sent back would be bad for him."
Twenty years ago, he was Little Walter, a child from Ukraine on a vacation in Chicago with his family. But instead of returning to the communist U.S.S.R., he ran away from an apartment near Fullerton and Central Avenues on the Northwest Side.
The 12-year-old demanded political asylum and put himself in the center of an international incident, in a high-stakes custody battle between the enemies in the great Cold War.
Nukes were aimed and ready. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were fighting proxy wars in South America, Africa and Asia. And Walter was symbolically in the middle.
So there were protests and shouting and finger waving and diplomatic outrage. The parents wanted their little boy to come home with them. But the lawyers dragged it out. Six years later, he was 18, old enough to make his own decisions (legally) and so he stayed.
Now he's a dad in the northwest suburbs and was staying home on Wednesday to take care of his little 6-year-old boy, Alec, who had the flu.
"I hope his father would be wise in this situation and give his son the opportunity to stay," Polovchak said.
"I was 12 years old, and he's 6 years old. But the situation's very similar. I understand he's made a comment that he wants to stay here. He should be given that opportunity to do so, but obviously his father is under pressure, and it's just tragic.
"I have a 6-year-old son myself. I want the best for him."
Polovchak is living what we call the American dream. A family, a 4-bedroom home and two cars in the garage, a vegetable garden out back. He's a member of the Des Plaines Jaycees.
"The father must try not to be selfish," he said. "He knows the type of lifestyle his son will have if he returns. A lot of selfishness is going on here.
"The boy has become a political bouncing ball. I think the father is under political pressure (from Castro) to say he wants the boy to go back to Cuba."
So do you think Elian's father is being forced to say things he might disagree with?
"Oh, absolutely," Polovchak said. "My father was under the same pressure, to argue for my return. But now, my father is there, and I'm here. So because I'm established here, I'm able to help my family back there.
"I think Elian would gladly one day help his father out, if he got the opportunity to stay here."
In Washington, Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the ruling to return Elian to his father requires the child to leave Miami by Jan. 14.
"We have determined that Elian should be reunited with his father," Meissner said.
And President Clinton had this to say:
"I told you when we started this that I would do my best to keep this decision out of politics. We have done that."
(In a column earlier this week, I harshly criticized the president, saying that he would put politics and polls above doing the right thing and returning the boy to his father. I was wrong. I owe our president an apology.)
For weeks, I've argued that Elian belongs with his daddy in Cuba even, though it's a decrepit communist dictatorship.
I feel that way because of what I know of the past. During the throat-cutting in Europe after World War II, the communists in the Balkans rounded up children and took them into Stalin's Russia, never to see their parents again.
Thousands and thousands of children were taken. In Greece. it was called the Pedomazoma--literally "the gathering of the children." It took place during the Greek civil war, when my family, including my father, fought the communists.
The idea of the Pedomazoma always frightened me.
So I figure that America shouldn't be in the business of taking anyone's child. And I'm glad the president is letting Elian go home to his father.
It's nice to finally agree with him, at least this once. |