By Charles Lane. The New Republic. January 23, 2000
MIAMI - As leader of Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based group of small-aircraft pilots who assist Cuban refugees making the hazardous journey across the Strait of Florida, Jose Basulto has seen his share of tragedies. At first, he didn't see much difference between Elián González's
case and all the others. He thought the boy should probably go back to his father in Cuba.
But then Fidel Castro began loudly demanding Elián's return, which immediately caused Basulto, who has been fighting Castro almost as long as Castro has been in power, to rethink his position: if Fidel wanted something, it couldn't be good. Returning the boy to his father would mean, in a
way, returning him to el tirano.
And there was something else. As he heard more about Elián's survival at sea--about how the five-year-old clung to an inner tube for dear life as the adults from the capsized boat, his mother included, gradually lost their strength and slipped under the waves--Basulto began to sense that
God himself had intervened to save Elián. "This was a clear case of a miracle," he told me, adding matter-of-factly that "when they found [Elián] he was surrounded by dolphins." As the story goes, the Lord sent the sea mammals to protect the boy, as if he were one
of heaven's own angels, until two fishermen happened upon Elián and pulled him to safety on Thanksgiving Day. Now Basulto, in his capacity as adviser to and spokesman for Elián's Miami relatives, is leading the campaign to keep Elián in the United States. He advocates mass
resistance to any attempt by the Clinton administration to send the child back to Cuba.
It would be easy to dismiss this tale of deliverance by dolphins as the propaganda of an interested party. The story's origins are obscure: neither the fisherman who actually saved Elián, Donato Dalrymple, nor the Coast Guard officer who arrived to help out saw any porpoises at the scene.
Dalrymple told me he has heard Elián (who was barely conscious much of the time in the water) say that he saw dolphins. But Basulto struck me as completely sincere. And he is far from the only Miami Cuban who believes the story. Time and again, Cuban-Americans here recounted Elián's
rescue by the dolphins as evidence that a power much higher than the Immigration and Naturalization Service has decreed that the boy, who recently turned six, must stay with his great-uncle and great-aunt in Miami instead of returning to his father and grandparents in Cuba. "Maybe the dolphins
pushed him toward the shore," Vicente Quintana, 63, told The Miami Herald. "And then he was found by the fishermen. Any Cuban would know this is a story straight out of the Bible." And any Cuban would know that you don't send angels back down to hell.
Much has been written about how the Miami Cubans are callously using Elián for political gain--parading him before the cameras as living proof of both the perfidy of Fidel Castro's regime and their own electoral muscle. Yet, as the widespread belief in the dolphin miracle suggests, the
campaign to save Elián is not very calculating or even very political, if by politics you mean an activity guided at least partly by a strategy. Yes, politicians--from the local congressional representatives to the major presidential candidates--have duly come forward to express sympathy for
the crusade to keep Elián here, in deference to Cuban voting power. But that's just the usual pandering. In many ways, the fight for Elián is actually a desperate one, a battle being waged despite clear indications that it may be counterproductive--a battle that reflects the
Cuban-American community's fears and weaknesses rather than its hopes and strengths.
The hard fact is that, under U.S. law, the case for denying Elián's father custody is weak. By demanding "a day in court" despite INS Commissioner Doris Meissner's ruling that the boy should be returned to Cuba by January 14, and by blocking traffic and threatening to "paralyze"
Miami to make their point, the usually law-abiding members of the Cuban-American community have suddenly given their neighbors in South Florida the impression that they consider themselves to be above the law. Polls show that, at a time when the Miami Cubans need all the allies they can get, the
protests are isolating them politically; they enjoy practically no support from non-Cuban whites or blacks and relatively little from other Latinos. It is not likely that a Dade County judge's decision to call a hearing, to be held March 6, on the boy's Miami relatives' bid to be named Elián's
legal guardians will stand. But, even if it does, it may only reinforce the already widely held view in Miami that the system gives the Cubans all the breaks--especially since it has come out that the elected judge once paid a hefty political consulting fee to Armando Gutierrez, another spokesman
for Elián's Miami relatives.
Even worse, the Miami Cubans are playing into Castro's hands. To be sure, Castro himself has demagogued the tragedy, giving the United States a 72-hour ultimatum for Elián's return and ranting against the "mafia" in Miami. But, by responding in kind, the Miami Cubans have
allowed Castro once again to pose as the stalwart foe of reactionary exiles--and even as the defender of family reunification. Castro's pose is, of course, preposterous, especially given the number of Cuban families his dictatorship has shattered. Moreover, Elián's father is surely not as
free to express his true wishes for the boy as the INS determined. And perhaps in some other context an uncompromising posture from Miami would have been appropriate.
But, for all that, the case for returning the boy to his sole surviving biological parent still strikes many people as commonsensical; quite simply, Castro has a leg to stand on. Thus, he has had no trouble creating a colossal distraction from the real story in Cuba--which is economic decay
accompanied by increasingly harsh repression of a small but slowly strengthening internal dissident movement. Those brave activists for democracy scored a major victory last November 14 when, despite Castro's efforts, they met with visiting Latin American and Iberian leaders during the Iberoamerican
Summit in Havana. Soon thereafter, a group of three dozen or so pro-democracy activists pulled off a rare protest march in the streets of the capital. But nobody's talking about any of that now.
In short, when this is all over, the verdict on the Miami activists might well be that they exploited Elián for political loss. Why, then, do they persist? The answers lie deep in the cultural and psychological interior of the community, in the dynamics of what Damian Fernandez of Florida
International University has called "the politics of passion."
To outsiders, the exiles seem a successful, even privileged, immigrant group. Through hard work and business acumen, the Miami Cubans have achieved, individually and collectively, a permanent place in the great American middle- and upper-middle classes. In a real sense, they have built modern
Miami. Through unified voting and the astute deployment of campaign cash, they have secured a kind of veto power over U.S. policy toward Cuba, along with such immigration benefits as the Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants Cubans, and only Cubans, the right to legal residence upon their arrival in
U.S. territory.
But the Miami Cubans do not see themselves in such secure terms. Their own narrative is tinged with betrayal and defeat. It is no accident that they call themselves exiles rather than immigrants. No matter how much they achieve economically, their community's reason for being was, and is,
political. Cubans came to Miami--and still come--not because their first choice in life was to become Americans but because they felt that communism had driven them from home. They still define themselves largely as victims--each with a story of personal suffering and dispossession and each acutely
mindful of the continuing hardship endured by family members back on the island.
Theirs is an ambivalent view of the United States, a country whose generosity and liberty they appreciate but whose government they have long blamed for failing to liberate their island--beginning with the great sellout at the Bay of Pigs. Another watershed event was the shootdown of two of
Basulto's Brothers to the Rescue aircraft by Cuban MiGs in international airspace on February 24, 1996. Four Miami Cubans, three of whom were U.S. citizens, were killed in the attack, which was Castro's way of dealing with previous Brothers flights that had dropped anti-Communist leaflets on Havana.
Yet there was no military response from the United States.
Basulto, a veteran of both the U.S. Army and his own quixotic Florida-based raid on Cuba in the 1960s, believes the Clinton administration knew that Castro planned the attack on Brothers and gave him the green light to remove a nuisance to both governments. He believes that his men were
sacrificed on the altar of U.S.-Cuban rapprochement. Now, he believes, the two governments are at it again: "The Cuban government and the Clinton administration are trying to harmonize relations with each other at the expense of Elián," he told me. This feeds both Basulto's outrage
at the prospect of Elián's return and his willingness to promote civil disobedience in order to stop it.
Indeed, on Miami's 50,000-watt AM station, Radio Mambe, there was an almost anti-American tone to the rhetoric employed by Basulto and other exile commentators. The street demonstrations that so annoyed Miami commuters were depicted as a "glorious day" in a "battle" between
the "Cuban people" and "the North American government." Listeners were regaled with stories of the purported brutality with which the Miami police arrested Cuban protesters. No one pointed out that such wildly exaggerated claims (in fact, the police remained mostly passive, even
when crowds blocked critical intersections for hours) were not exactly consistent with the exiles' central contention that Elián must stay because, unlike Cuba, this is a land where the authorities respect people's rights.
Furthermore, many Miami Cubans regard theirs as a uniquely cruel victimization, one so profound and personal that other Americans couldn't comprehend it even if they wanted to. "If you are Cuban, you know what I mean," 31-year-old Henry Cuik, one of those who took to the streets in
protest, told the Herald. "If Cuban blood does not flow in your veins, you have no idea of what it is like to be us--all of our memories of what it is like under Castro and what it means to be separated from your homeland." I half expected some witty entrepreneur to print t-shirts
declaring: "It's a Cuban thing--you wouldn't understand."
Indeed, there's a rough analogy between the CubanAmerican reaction to Elián's plight and the African American reaction to O.J. Simpson's trial (though, of course, there's no analogy between the innocent child and O.J. himself). Miami's Cubans insist that Elián must stay, no matter
what the stubborn legal realities may be and no matter what the rest of society may think--just as many blacks stuck to their belief that racist cops framed O.J. For these blacks, believing O.J. was innocent became a near-mandatory element of group identity--an article of faith that helped define
what it meant to be black rather than white. The belief that Elián must stay serves a similar function among Miami Cubans. The fact that so few nonmembers of the group agree only fortifies the Cubans' sense that they must be right.
And there's another element to the analogy: the reactions of both groups, though emotional, have a rational basis. Thanks largely to the O.J. case and subsequent scandals in police departments around the country, it has emerged that cops do plant evidence and rough up minority suspects more
frequently than most whites had believed. Similarly, life in Communist Cuba is much harsher and more humiliating than most American newspaper readers, fed a steady diet of stories about the free health care and education on the island, generally appreciate. Cuba is a country penetrated by government
spies, where you can go to jail without due process for such offenses as peligrosidad--"being dangerous." Fixated on the evils, real and exaggerated, of American policy toward Cuba, and Latin America in general, Western journalists, academics, and human rights activists have never
championed freedom in Cuba with anything approaching the energy they devoted to denouncing dictatorships in Guatemala or Chile. And that, too, fuels Cuban Miami's sense of isolation and grievance.
``I'm fighting the desire to go park my car in the streets in protest," Raúl Hernandez, who works resettling newly arrived Cuban refugees, told me after the INS decision. A doctor in Cuba, he came to Miami in the 1980 Mariel boatlift because of the persecution he and his colleagues
suffered. He'll never forget watching a government mob pelt a colleague with garbage for expressing a desire to leave the country. "How can they be so ignorant?" he says. "How can they not see?... There's a sense of horrible frustration that no one pays attention to Castro's
violations of human rights." Whether or not the Cuban exiles are in touch with contemporary political reality, they are more in touch with Cuba's historical reality than many of their critics.
Yet translating these feelings into a positive political agenda has grown increasingly difficult since the 1997 death of Jorge Mas Canosa, the founder and president of the largest exile organization, the Cuban American National Foundation. Immensely controversial because of the way he threw his
weight around in both business and politics, Mas Canosa nevertheless enjoyed the grudging respect of even many liberal Cubans for his charisma and his ability to get things done in Washington. With Mas Canosa gone and Castro still in power, influential business organizations and even Republican
senators such as John Warner feel freer to openly call for lifting the trade embargo against Cuba and adopting a new policy of "engagement." And the Clinton administration has moved in that direction as well, encouraging cultural and academic exchanges, bargaining with Castro to control
the flow of refugees, and floating such ideas as U.S.-Cuban cooperation against drug trafficking.
Unable to do much more than play defense against the growing pro-engagement mood in the foreign policy establishment, many politically active Miami Cubans believe the U.S. government is preparing to write them off, along with their home island. This fear takes its most hyperbolic form in the
political commentaries broadcast daily on Spanish-language radio, where the INS decision in Elián's case is likened to the Bay of Pigs--and where many predict that the Clinton administration will grant Castro's demand for the abolition of the Cuban Adjustment Act.
And it's not just the militants. You hear the same incipient despair in calmer quarters, too. In one of the trendy bars that dot upscale Coral Gables, an old friend of mine, a thirtysomething Cuban-American attorney who steers clear of exile politics, ruefully conceded that lately he's been
trying to reconcile himself to the possibility that Cuba might still be Communist when he's 60. "There's a feeling, especially since the death of Mas Canosa, that the whole thing's slipping away," he told me. "Not only the hope of overthrowing Castro, but even the ability to influence
U.S. policy and to make people understand the cause. The entire exile idea is threatened. Then what are you about?... It starts to go to the identity of the people who live here."
Enter Elián. for the exiles, the shipwrecked little boy is the perfect totem because he embodies so much of what they believe about themselves: that they are innocent victims. The boy's arrival has given the exiles an opportunity both to reconsecrate the foundations of collective identity
and to revalidate their own decisions to leave home. In this sense, the crisis is as much about shoring up the community's eroding sense of purpose as it is about scoring points against Castro. "People are arguing that Elián should stay because they believe they are on the right
side--the right side morally, and the right side of the Strait of Florida, because Cuba is an evil place," says Lisandro Perez of Florida International University. In their custody petition to the county court, lawyers for Elián's Miami relatives argue that the father should lose custody
because he wants Elián to live in Cuba and that this request makes him, ipso facto, an unfit parent. By that logic, anyone who chooses to have children in Cuba would be an unfit parent.
But behind such arguments lies the defeatism wrapped deep within the exiles' thinking about both Elián and their larger predicament. Clearly, no one should take lightly Elián's return to a society where he will learn to worship Che Guevara--and perhaps be instructed that his own
mother was a "deserter"--even if his father and grandparents are there to tuck him in at night. On the other hand, he is only six. Communism in Cuba can't possibly last his whole lifetime. Indeed, if you're concerned about a better future for Elián and for all the other children in
Cuba, doesn't it make more sense to focus on hastening the end of communism than to facilitate and celebrate the escape of its victims, one by one, to America?
It's far from clear how this situation is going to resolve itself. It appears to be headed for federal court. Republicans in Congress may try to grant Elián citizenship. Meissner's ruling that Elián should go back to Cuba did not include any enforcement mechanism, merely a
suggestion that the two sides of the family work something out together, perhaps with the aid of a charitable third party. That idea, never terribly plausible to begin with, is looking more and more like a nonstarter--even a bit irresponsible, given that Meissner's job isn't just to state the law
but to make sure it's carried out. But the INS has said there will be no spectacle of federal marshals fighting their way through a human chain of elderly Cuban exiles to collar a six-year-old boy and ship him out of the country.
My guess is that we have only begun to appreciate how truly explosive the case of Elián González is. The politics of passion is a two-way street. Fidel Castro is, after all, a product of the same political culture as his Miami nemeses, and this is a man whose passions have had a
decidedly apocalyptic edge in recent years. He has staked too much on Elián's return to let the exiles thwart him through legal maneuvering. Furthermore, he can't keep herding his people into the streets forever; the campaign has begun to affect Cuba's already anemic economy, and there are
signs that it's starting to backfire politically, as quotes from Cubans mocking their commander-in-chief begin to creep into the Western press. "Elián, amigo, llevame contigo"--"Elián, my friend, take me with you"--goes one popular satire of an official slogan.
If he doesn't get Elián soon, Castro might retaliate by declaring that the United States is acting in violation of a 1995 accord that regulates migration from Cuba to the United States, and that Cuba is therefore unilaterally withdrawing from the accord. The deal is intended to prevent
another chaotic exodus like the one in August 1994 that brought more than 30,000 people on flimsy rafts to the U.S. base at Guantanamo, while hundreds of others drowned. It requires both countries to prevent people from attempting to cross illegally, while expanding the number of legal immigrant
visas offered through the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Thus, if Castro pulled out of the accord, it would be a cue to Cubans to take to their boats once again--creating a massive refugee crisis in the middle of a U.S. election campaign. In fact, the fear of just such a scenario probably
accounts for much of the Clinton administration's eagerness to wrap up the affair quickly, on Castro's terms if necessary.
If the nightmare scenario occurs, many Cubans will die at sea. Many more Cuban families will be divided. The primary responsibility will be Castro's. To be sure, such a mass exodus could slip out of control and undermine his rule. But, in the likelier event that it doesn't, the Miami Cubans,
who, in this crisis, have felt compelled to meet Castro's every action with an equal and opposite reaction, will have much to answer for, as well. It isn't too late for them to reconsider their position, to think strategically instead of symbolically, to substitute real politics for the politics of
passion. Cold-hearted as it may sound, they should not let the fate of a single child outweigh any and all other considerations. Among those other considerations is the struggle for democracy on their home island, a cause that ought to be theirs but from which they are diverting vital energy and
attention. Right now, the Miami Cubans are on course for what would be at best a Pyrrhic victory, one in which they somehow manage to keep Elián but leave Castro with an even tighter grip on the real prize: Cuba itself.
(Copyright 2000, The New Republic) |