Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors. The Weekly Standard / January 31, 2000
Last week, lawyers for 6-year-old Elián González filed a motion in federal court to prevent the boy from being sent back to Cuba. It1s an uphill battle.
On Thanksgiving Day, Elián, one of 14 people who had fled Cuba on a rickety raft, was found strapped to an inner-tube with a drowned 60-year-old woman bobbing alongside. Ten others had died in the attempted crossing, including Elián's mother and stepfather. Since the boy1s rescue,
hundreds of thousands have marched in Miami to demand that his dead mother's wishes be respected that he be allowed to live in America, with members of his extended family. Similar marches in Havana have demanded Elián's return to Cuba, where his father still lives. Cuban-Americans say we
must not condemn a boy to life in a totalitarian state. Cubans say we must not break apart a father and his son.
Almost every powerful institution in North America has lined up on the Cubans' side. The Immigration and Naturalization Service would have summarily returned the boy in December, but legal motions filed by Elián's relatives prompted Attorney General Janet Reno to wait for a federal court
decision. The president favors Elián's return. The Economist calls the Miami exile community "deaf to reason". Fifty-six percent of Americans tell pollsters they think Elián should be shipped back.
But they're wrong. The marching Miamians understand something the others do not. Castro's -CubanAmericans, for some reason, need be reminded- is the most repressive society in the Western hemisphere, and one of the most repressive on earth. According to Freedom House, Cuba's respect for
political and human rights ranks lower than that of Cambodia, Iran, both Congos, and Serbia and no better than Vietnam and the Sudan.
We are here talking not just of Castro's crimes against would-be emigrants, grisly though they sometimes are. (In September 1994, the Cuban coast guard fired water cannons at a refugee tugboat at 2 o'clock in the morning, washing dozens into the sea, where they drowned. Amnesty International
called it an "extrajudicial execution"). Nor is it merely a question of the "laws" Cuba applies to the unfortunates it manages to retain. (Cuban citizens may be jailed for "dangerousness", "disrespect", or even for owning a fax machine.)
Rather, it is the way Castroism treats families and children that renders ludicrous the notion that any Cuban father can speak freely about what is best for his son. Family members are Cuban hostages. It is a routine.
Orlando "El Duque" Hernández, now of the New York Yankees, was banned from Cuban baseball for life because his brother defected to the United States. Before El Duque himself boarded a raft for the Bahamas and freedom, he was earning nine dollars a month mopping floors in a
hospital and living in a cinderblock outhouse.
Earlier this month in Havana, opposition journalist Victor Rolando Arroyo got a six month jail term for cooperating with a Miami charity that sends toys to poor Cuban children for Christmas (celebration of which has been legal only since the pope's visit in 1998). Arroyo was convicted of "hoarding
toys".
Not even the daughter of Raúl Castro, Fidel's brother and designated successor, was allowed to accept a scholarship to study in Mexico, for fear she would defect.
We hear about these things only when they happen to famous people, but "family life" in Cuba is tens of thousands of such incidents, 365 days a year. Cuban children have a political dossier -the notorious Expediente cumulativo escolar- kept on them from the moment they enter school. It
determines whether they are politically reliable enough to go on to higher education or even to hold jobs. And when someone proves unreliable, it is often children who are required to take part in the Cuban state's Maoist response: an "act of repudiation". It has already happened in Elián's
case. Ten-year-olds are being trundled onto Cuban television to denounce the "bandits", worms", and "kidnappers" hosting the boy in Miami. It is to this the United States would return Elián.
Two things make it necessary that Elián have his day in court with his father in the United States. First, in Castro's Cuba, we simply cannot know the underlying facts. Elián's grandmother, Raquel Rodríguez, was asked in Cuba why she wanted the boy returnedÐagainst the
wishes of his late mother, Elisabet, Rodríguez's daughter. "What do they know about her?" Raquel Rodríguez replied. "Who are they to say what her will is?" Assuming Elisabet wasn't simply showing her son what sharks look like up close, we have a pretty clear idea of
what her wishes were, of course. Perhaps Mrs. Rodríguez has been rendered irrational by grief. But more likely she understands that her daughter was guilty of a counterrevolutionary, unpatriotic "illegal exit", and that she herself is consequently at risk in a state where "failure
to comply with the duty to denounce" is also a crime.
Mrs. Rodríguez has been portrayed sympathetically by a disgracefully incurious North American press, which has tended to adopt the rest of Castro1s line, as well: Elián's drowned stepfather, Lazaro Munero, is a bandit and a "smuggler". It has been up to Elián's
lawyers to root out that Munero was a dissident who was jailed, beaten, isolated, and deprived of food. Elián's mother, Elisabet, meanwhile, is portrayed as a flighty tart trailing after her boyfriend. It is never mentioned that she, too, was interrogated on several occasions for political
deviation. Meanwhile, the boy's father, Juan Miguel González, is depicted as a saint. And maybe he is.
But lost in the discussion is the fact that it is González's Miami relatives, not Elisabet's, who want to keep Elián; that González never publicly demanded Elián's return until after Castro did; and that there is evidence González may originally have approved
of his ex-wife's flight. Who called the boy's Miami relatives to alert them he was on his way? His father.
The second reason this case must be carefully adjudicated is that it deeply implicates American law. The behavior of the Clinton administration and the INS has been highly irregular. Every alien resident on American soil is protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, and has a right to
apply for asylum. But the Clinton administration has tried to short-circuit that procedure. In early December, an hour after Fidel complained that he hadn't been informed of American immigration rules, the U.S. interests section in Havana made contact with Cuba1s Ministry of Foreign Relations to
explain:
All the father would have to do is provide proof of paternity, and state that he was willing to care for his son and wanted him back. An INS source told Spain's El País that the required interview could take place wherever the father wants, not necessarily inside the U.S. diplomatic
mission.
After conducting such an interview with Juan Miguel González in Havana, the INS withdrew Elián's application on his behalf. All of which flew in the face of American precedent. The INS has guidelines for cases in which a child applies for asylum and his "interests are adverse
with those of the parent" According to these guidelines, "the parent shall be given notice of the juvenile's application for relief, and shall be afforded an opportunity to present his or her views and assert his or her interest to the district director or immigration judge before a
determination is made as to the merits of the request". Parents do not have the right to withdraw their children's applications for asylum. In other words, Elián's fatherÐwhose wishes are filtered through the raison d'état of a totalitarian regimeÐis enjoying greater
rights than he would if he were on American soil.
Particularly noxious is the rationale INS commissioner Doris Meissner is using to justify Elián's possible return. "Family reunification", Meissner says, "has long been a cornerstone of both American immigration law and INS practice". Well, yes. But unifying families
has generally meant bringing them together in free societies, not repressive ones. No one ever suggested in the 1970s that we return refusenik relatives to Brezhnev's Russia, or in the 1980s that Sandinista opponents in Miami be forcibly reunited with their persecuted families in Nicaragua.
In an asylum case, the country of origin is always on trial, and the country of origin knows it. Fidel Castro understands that if Elián can be sent back without a court hearing, the whole of U.S. Cuba policy -the trade embargo, Helms-Burton, isolation through the OAS- will collapse into
incoherence.
After all, if this is a regime to which a defenseless 6-year-old dissident-by association can be entrusted, by what logic do we block grown men from trading microchips for cigars? Elián González is a means by which Castro can undermine the trade embargo for freeÐno human rights
concessions required.
It has been clear since 1994, when the Clinton administration agreed to repatriate Cubans found in international waters, that thawed relations with Castro are what the president wishes, too. Miami's Cubans are alleged to be politicizing this case while Washington hews to principle. But the
reverse is true. At its crudest, the case sets up Al Gore -who has been admirably forthright in his insistence that Elián's family be brought to the United States- as a hero to Florida's swing voters. More broadly, the president is getting the rapprochement with Castro he wants, but dares not
admit.
Last week, the State Department announced that both Elián's grandmothers had been given U.S. visas. They are welcome here, but not material to the case. We need the father, Juan Miguel González -along with his wife, Elián's newborn stepsister, and anyone else Castro might
later employ as a hostage- before we even consider sending Elián back to Cuba.
That does not, however, mean that Elián's return should be automatic, even if his father continues to insist on it. There is a direct legal precedent here. The 1971 case In re B.G., Vlasta Z. v. San Bernardino County concerned a Czech dissident and his 5- and 6-year-old children, who had
fled Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion -against the mother's will. The father died of cancer weeks after arriving, leaving a testament expressing his wish that the children stay. Two years later, the mother arrived in California to demand her children's return. She was a "fit parent",
the court found. But it also ruled on the inhumanity of the Czechoslovak regime, and ordered that the children remain.
If Juan Miguel González won't take a 90-mile trip to retrieve his child, then he's hardly the father he says he is. If, as is more likely, he is forbidden to take a 90-mile trip to retrieve his child, then Cuba is self-evidently not a free enough country to send anyone back to without due
process -least of all a 6-year-old kid. |