The Gazette, Montreal. Friday 21 January 2000
As the political and legal battle drags on over the future of Elian Gonzalez, it should be clear by now that the real issue in this case is the Berlin Wall that still separates Cuba from the United States. If nothing else, little Elian has helped to point out the absurdity of Cuban-American
relations in the 21st century.
Six-year-old Elian has been in the care of Miami relatives since late November, when he was found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Florida. The boat that Elian, his mother and 11 other Cubans were using to escape the Castro regime had capsized in a storm. The boy watched his mother and
nine others drown.
Since then, he has become the object of an intense political and legal battle between those who believe he should stay in the United States with his Cuban relatives and those who argue that his proper place is back home with his father, Juan, a security guard at the Varadero beach resort who had
divorced Elian's mother and remarried.
All the fuss the Cuban exile community has kicked up over the case has been more than matched by the Castro propaganda machine, which is demanding the boy's return and serving Cubans a steady diet of all-Elian, all-the-time.
The legal arguments for Elian's return to to his father's custody seem clear. Under international and U.S. law, family unification takes precedence. That was the gist of the Clinton administration's original decision to send him back home. (A lawsuit filed this week by the boy's Miami relatives
will further delay his departure, but legal experts have said the suit has little merit.)
Most people would agree that the best interests of the child would be served if he were reunited with his father.
The question is: where?
Elian's mother died in her pursuit of freedom. Clearly, she chose freedom, and a life in the United States, for her son. Those wishes should not be forgotten.
Of course, the wishes of the father also matter. Juan Gonzalez, by all accounts a loving father, has said he wants his son to come back to Cuba. But does Mr. Gonzalez really speak for himself?
He has a good job by Cuban standards, rare in a country that is suffering miserably. It is doubtful that Mr. Gonzalez could hold on to that job if he said anything else.
The United States has offered to allow Mr. Gonzalez and his family to come to Florida to pick up his son. Presumably, he could then decide whether to remain in the United States or return. But that should be his choice.
Those who argue that it is wrong to keep a child away from his only parent are right, of course. But it is just as wrong for any nation to lock up its citizens and deny them them the freedom to seek a better life elsewhere.
Much has been said about the need to end the outdated U.S. embargo against Cuba, about how the free circulation of American travelers, money and ideas would undermine the repressive Castro regime and bring it down.
Indeed, the embargo should go. But bilateral relations between states are based on reciprocity. If American tourists, for example, are to be free to travel to Cuba, then Cubans, too, must be free to travel the other way.
There are few Berlin Walls left in the world. Letting Juan Gonzalez travel to Miami to pick up his son would be a first, and important, breach in the wall around Cuba. |