NewsMax.com. January 13, 2000
The following is taken from a recent publication by the Center for Security Policy, a non-profit, non-partisan organization devoted to enriching debate on foreign policy and defense issues, on the Internet at http://www.security-policy.org.
Rarely has the plight of a single human being – let alone a six-year old boy – so powerfully illuminated the moral underpinnings of and critical choices confronting American security policy.
The Clinton administration's decision to deport Elian Gonzales is such a case, however, reflecting not only the odious lengths to which it is prepared to go to appease Fidel Castro.
It also lays bare the larger purpose of such appeasement:
A desperate bid to normalize relations with Cuba's totalitarian ruler before President Clinton's tenure ends and the opportunity is lost, possibly forever, to throw Fidel the political and economic lifeline his regime so desperately requires.
Three articles that appeared in leading papers Jan. 10, 2000, make clear the stakes not only for Elian, but for a nation that would abandon him to Castro's totalitarianism:
* * *
What Clinton Is Sending Elian Back To
By Michael Gonzalez
When I was seven or eight years old, not much older than Elian Gonzalez is today, the principal at my school in Cuba forced me to wear a Young Pioneer scarf. He simply announced, in front of the whole class, that he'd had it with my refusal to join, and that I couldn't say no any longer. The
Pioneers are the communist version of the Hitler Youth. All those kids you see on television, wearing blue-and-white scarves around their neck and taking part in government-staged demonstrations for Elian's return, are Pioneers.
I had again and again, for two years, told my teachers and the principal that I would not join the Pioneers. I was the lone holdout in a classroom that included the children of political prisoners and others from known anticommunist families. My conscientious objection cost the class a 100%
participation rate and therefore perks such as field trips. I wasn't the most popular kid in school.
But my new status as a Pioneer also did not make me very popular with my father, as I had feared. Dad had his ear glued to his (highly illegal) shortwave radio when I arrived home for lunch.
I can still picture him, sitting in his rocking chair. He was home because he was very ill; he had two to three years left at most and he (and all of us) knew it. Just after the revolution he had walked away from a post as a professor of law at the University of Havana, an institution he loved,
because – the words still ring in my ears – "you can't teach law in a country not ruled by it." He died soon after because lack of a proper diet aggravated his diabetes.
It didn't take too long for me to explain to my father why I was wearing the Pioneer scarf, or for him to renounce me for my weakness. He also decided that if they were going to take his family away, there was nothing left, so he would have to go to the school and kill the principal. Since this
was the agent of government who had transgressed his family's freedom, he was the obvious choice. Killing the principal's boss would have made no sense, and killing Fidel Castro was impossible. I don't fault my father's logic in the slightest.
Castro had forced Cubans to hand over all their private weapons very early in his rule, but Dad had kept his father's gun, thinking the ability it gave him to take one last stand for his family against tyranny was a thread of freedom to cling on to. Again, I admire him for thinking this way.
My grandmother had other ideas. She promptly locked her son up in his room as he was getting the gun, and announced to him that he would have to go through her on his way out. Mother soon was fetched from her office, and she informed my father that he would have to do away with two women in his
family.
While he remained pathetically locked in his room, my mother walked me back to school, still empty of schoolchildren at lunchtime, and had a quick word with the principal as she handed back the Pioneer neckwear. The essence of it was that her husband was very upset and that the principal had
better not try this sort of thing again. Until I left Cuba three or four years later, I was not bothered on this score again.
My father and I made up that evening, of course, and he explained to me that once I was living in freedom, I'd be able to make up my own mind, and that if I then turned into a communist, that was my business. I didn't – far from it – and I'm glad my father decided to try to get us out,
though he did not live to see the day.
Even if you think my father may have been right about wanting to shoot the principal, you might wonder if he was not a bit too severe with me. I was, after all, just a kid, and the principal had forced the thing on me. In fact, Dad understood all too well that I had had it with resistance, for
otherwise the principal really couldn't have forced anything on me. Dad knew that after putting up a good fight for some time, I too had had enough, and that I was more than happy to join in, not to stand out, not to have to fight after school or suffer the taunts of others, including teachers.
That's why he acted the way he did, and why I remain so grateful to him.
In totalitarian systems it takes desperate measures to remain an individual, to have any degree of autonomy even within the most narrowly defined private sphere. Our natural instinct for survival militates against fighting the system; we have to overcome human nature just to resist.
This is the kind of world that produced Elian Gonzalez's father, the man who, after Castro organized anti-American rallies, said he wanted his son back – even though he knows that his ex-wife, Elian's mother, died taking the boy out, and that Elian would have a better life in America, and
not just materially. This is the world that produced the people at the rallies, very many of whom would escape Cuba if given the chance.
And much, much worse, this is the kind of world President Clinton is sending Elian Gonzalez back to. If he's strong, he will survive, but I somehow think his father is very different from mine.
I am an American today, and I love America as only someone with my kind of background can. It's going to take a lot more than a wrong decision by a discredited administration for me even to begin to feel disappointed in this vast, generous country. But, knowing as I do what kind of place Elian
is being sent back to, I can't help but wince at the thought of what we're about to do.
Michael Gonzalez is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe's editorial page.
* * *
National Council of Castro's Friends
By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley
The National Council of Churches wants to send refugee Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba. This should come as no surprise since the NCC does not represent American Protestants and has long served as a lobby for the Marxist dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
The NCC was founded in 1950 as a repackaging of the old Federal Council of Churches, a body dedicated to ecumenism and the social gospel. Though the New York-based NCC gives the impression that it represents American Christians, its member bodies amount to only about half of American Protestants
and a fourth of American Christians overall. Major NCC groups such as the Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians have been losing members in recent decades. An examination of NCC policy statements and resolutions confirms that the NCC leadership is far to the left of the rank and file of its
own denominations.
The Council took no official notice of Castro's rise to power in 1959 and remained silent while Castro aligned his regime with the Soviet Union, quashed human rights and brutally repressed dissent – exiling, imprisoning or executing nearly two-thirds of his original revolutionary Cabinet.
By 1968, when the NCC finally broke silence, nearly a million Cubans had fled the island. The first NCC statement urged the United States to recognize the Castro regime.
Church World Service, the NCC's relief arm, set up the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center in Miami but when exiles began speaking out in local churches and to the press about Cuban human rights, NCC officials said the program "abetted our government's effort to discredit Cuba" and "encouraged
humanitarian sentiment that generated hostile attitudes toward Cuba among U.S. congregations."
The NCC fired James McCracken, head of the refugee center, and replaced him with the Rev. Paul McCleary, who helped set up an "advocacy" office for Cuban affairs in Washington, and who later testified in favor of Vietnamese "re-education camps."
In 1977, a year before his election as NCC president, Methodist bishop James Armstrong led a delegation of American church officials to Cuba, where they supported the regime's repressions. Said their report: "There is a significant difference between situations where people are imprisoned
for opposing regimes designed to perpetuate inequities, as in Chile and Brazil, for example, and situations were people are imprisoned for opposing regimes designed to remove inequities, as in Cuba."
On its return from Cuba in 1977, the first official NCC delegation said they were "challenged and inspired" by Cuba and flatly denied that the Cuban regime persecuted Christians. The NCC stood in sharp contrast to Amnesty International, which asked to see those the group described as "the
longest term political prisoners to be found anywhere in the world."
In other reports, Amnesty International mentioned imprisoned poet Armando Valladares, who noted that Cuban officials used pro-Castro statements of American clergy to torment prisoners. "That was worse for the Christian political prisoners than the beatings or the hunger," Valladares
wrote. "Incomprehensibly to us, while we waited for the embrace of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our tormentors."
In 1980, the NCC published a book claiming that "Cubans are the only Latin Americans who have broken with dependent capitalism and its accompanying dehumanization of the common people." Further, the efforts of the Cuban government "affirm that the gospel's command to feed the
hungry and preach good news to the poor is being fulfilled."
That is the ethos of the current NCC leadership, which also supports lifting the U.S. embargo. Family reunification has nothing to do with it. The NCC leadership believes that Elian Gonzalez will be better-off under socialism in Cuba, better-off without the right to free speech, free
association, and freedom of movement – the bourgeois capitalist vices that the NCC believes dehumanize people.
Cuba confirms that nations that are barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. But the NCC believes Elian will be better off under a regime of shared scarcity. The Council's stand can only be described as loathsome, the direct opposite of the most Christ-like figure in this episode,
Elian's mother. She died that her son might be free.
That heroic sacrifice should be respected and Elian Gonzalez should stay here. Meanwhile, the National Council of Churches should drop its religious affiliation and register as an agent of the Cuban government.
Writing the above in the Washington Times, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of "From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches."
* * *
Father Knows Best
From the Wall Street Journal, an analogy for the folks who want to send Elian Gonzalez back, excerpted from a posting on Licianne.com:
James, the father of Elian, a six-year old Negro boy, has petitioned the Superior Court for the return of his son. James, age 30, is a Negro slave living in Hanover County, Virginia, and has joined in a petition by his master, Robert Wortham, for Elian's return to Hanover County. In his court
petition Wortham asserts that six-year old Elian had been taken from the Wortham farm in Hanover County by his mother, Charlotte, a Negro woman also belonging to Wortham.
Charlotte, a runaway slave under the law, then made her way north with the boy until she arrived in Maryland where she unfortunately died of exposure and exhaustion.
James asserts that he wants to raise his son as a father should, that he misses his son's company and laughter. James and Wortham both accuse the boy's Philadelphia relatives of maliciously and illegally detaining Elian. Wortham asserts that if Elian is returned to his home, Elian will be well
cared for on the Wortham farm.
So do you send the boy back?
All Rights Reserved © NewsMax.com |