An editorial from The Wall Street Journal. Published Monday, January 10, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Juan Miguel Gonzalez loves his son Elian. More than six weeks and many headlines after the 6-year-old boy was fished out of an inner tube floating off the Florida coast, that's the conclusion of Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner. Accordingly, Meissner an- nounced
last Wednesday, the INS has determined that Gonzalez is the only one with the legal right, in the whole wide world, to speak on behalf of his son. And because Gonzalez has asked for the boy to be sent back home to Cuba, he's going just as soon as Meissner and her fellow INS officials can persuade
Fidel Castro to give them some fig leaf under which to do it. From the White House came word that Bill Clinton supports the INS's decision to deport the boy.
For Gonzalez is by no means the only one asking for Elian to come home. Almost since his little face was splashed across American newspapers following his dramatic Thanksgiving Day arrival on freedom's shores, Castro has been leading monster rallies in Cuba calling for the boy's return. The
point here is that the INS has, predictably, resolved what was never really an issue. No one who thinks the boy should stay assumes that Gonzalez doesn't like his son. What we all wonder is how free Gonzalez is to say what he really thinks back in Cuba.
Leave aside for a moment any mention of Elian's mother, who might have thought that her life was worth her little boy's freedom. Put yourself in Gonzalez's shoes. You live in a one-party communist state whose megalomaniacal ruler has let the whole world know that wresting your little boy from
his haven in America is the national priority. Moreover, since divorcing the boy's mom, you have remarried and have a new family, still in Cuba with you -- people who might not fare all that well if you were to declare for letting your son stay in America.
Maybe Gonzalez does want his boy to leave America -- though it is at least worth noting that he didn't really start insisting on it until after Fidel did. But this is something the INS cannot know, because it has allowed Fidel to compromise the investigatory process. Had Fidel allowed Gonzalez
and his new family to come to America and answer these questions without a gun effectively pointed to his head, the INS might have some claim to know what he really wants for his son.
Of course that's something Fidel would never permit, because it would run the risk of having them all defect. Recall that this is the same man whose goons only five years ago rammed a tugboat filled with desperate escapees until it broke up and sank. One survivor would later tell The Washington
Post that Cuban officials continued to spray them with water cannon and watch them go under even as mothers desperately tried to keep their children's heads above the water. Does anyone think a man who considers escape a criminal act has Elian's welfare at heart? Indeed, though there has been a
great deal of breast-beating about how Cuban Americans have ``politicized'' Elian's case, in fact it has been the other way 'round.
Who suggested on national television that the boy should be sent back? Bill Clinton. Which group made a high-profile visit to Cuba, where it endorsed the Fidel line? The National Council of Churches. And which governmental body brought us to where we are today by saying that its original
decision leaving Elian eligible for parole was a ``mistake''?
In sharp contrast, all Elian's Miami relatives had asked for was that his fate be resolved by a Florida state family court, which is set up precisely to sort out these kind of competing claims regarding a child's best interests.
Then again, maybe there is a perverse logic here that does explain why 16 Puerto Rican terrorists get freedom and a 6-year-old boy who miraculously survived almost two days at sea alone gets sent back to Fidel.
Poor Elian. If only Hillary were running in Florida, he might have had a real chance.
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