By Charles Lane, Los Angeles Times. Sunday, January 23, 2000
MIAMI, FLA.--Extraordinary as the case of 6-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez is, something like it could easily happen again. On Jan. 4, 15 people arrived on the beach just south of Miami, aboard a small boat from Cardenas, Cuba, Elian's hometown and the point of departure for the boy's
ill-fated trip. Among the refugees were two children, ages 3 and 8, according to Border Patrol and refugee resettlement officials in Miami.
Elian wound up in an international custody battle by surviving the shipwreck of just such a boat, a tragedy that proved fatal to his mother and 10 others; it's sheer luck that neither of these most recent child arrivals met a similar fate. Plainly, neither the dangers of the voyage nor the
government-orchestrated campaign in Cuba to demand Elian back--and, by extension, to condemn those who try to escape--deter everyone.
Indeed, the broader context of the Gonzalez case is the extraordinary desperation with which more and more Cubans are seeking to flee Fidel Castro's island. Long after Elian's fate is settled, we will still have to determine why this surge in escape attempts is happening and how to deal
with it.
Migration from Cuba to the United States is currently regulated by an accord negotiated after the rafter crisis of August 1994. Faced with rising discontent, Castro suddenly let thousands of people pile into homemade floating contraptions bound for Florida. The Clinton administration
intercepted some 37,000 rafters and transported them to the U.S. base at Guantanamo. Uncounted hundreds of others were presumably lost at sea.
To prevent a repetition, the U.S.-Cuban agreement calls on Washington to offer at least 20,000 immigrant visas to Cubans per year, while sending back escapees intercepted at sea to Cuba--rather than escort them to Florida as it had previously. For its part, Havana promised both to prevent
people from fleeing and not to punish those sent back.
For about two years, it worked. But in 1997, the numbers of people attempting the crossing began to creep up again, and in 1999, the total number of Cubans who were either intercepted at sea or reached U.S. shores exceeded 3,000. To evade the Coast Guard, more and more people are embarking
in boats operated by professional smugglers--trips often organized in South Florida, paid for by U.S. relatives of escapees and facilitated by bribes to Cuban maritime officials. Refugee workers in Miami say they are preparing for between 3,500 and 4,000 arrivals in 2000.
One effect of recent U.S. measures intended to improve life for Cubans on the island--such as better phone connections to the U.S. and looser regulation of money transfers from relatives in the U.S. to families in Cuba--has been to make it easier to organize escape attempts.
Coast Guard officials have also noted alarming changes in the conduct of Cuban escapees. Willing to do almost anything to reach land, and obtain automatic legal residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, Cubans have, in some cases, tried to drive off Coast Guard personnel with machetes or
nail-studded oars. In other cases, they have threatened to set fire to their own boats. Last summer, a Cuban actually took a razor blade and cut a 12-inch gash in his own abdomen, apparently trying to get to a hospital on shore.
But the continued magnetic pull of the Cuban Adjustment Act isn't the only explanation for this dramatic situation. The more important factor is the worsening of life in Cuba. Castro has announced a crackdown on even the most minimal expressions of dissent. What little economic growth that
has occurred since the collapse of Cuba's Soviet sponsor in 1991 has not trickled down. When Cubans reach U.S. shores, they almost invariably explain their decision to leave by referring to a lack of hope for a better, freer future.
Though the 20,000 visas that the U.S. guarantees Cuba annually are far more than it offers to any other country, they are nowhere near enough to meet the demand. Some 500,000 Cubans are currently signed up for a biannual U.S. visa lottery. That probably understates how many Cubans want out,
since winning applicants may take close family members with them. Reportedly, some Cuban doctors have left in boats even though they have U.S. visas, because Castro has decreed that medical personnel must spend years working in the countryside before he will give them permission to leave.
In short, U.S. policy currently creates a situation in which Washington dangles a powerful inducement to leave--near-instant legal residence--while simultaneously acting as Castro's partner in attempting to herd people back to the island.
This contradictory arrangement enables U.S. politicians to stave off another sudden refugee crisis without alienating Cuban American voters who are fervently attached to the Cuban Adjustment Act. Yet, the main beneficiary is Castro, for whom the 20,000 visas act as a safety valve for
discontent and for whom U.S. assistance in routinely returning people to Cuba bolsters his claim that there is no political or moral difference between Cuba and other troubled Caribbean societies.
Eliminating the Cuban Adjustment Act, even if politically feasible, might only drive the flow of human desperation into more costly and dangerous clandestine channels. The important missing factor is fundamental political and economic reform in Cuba. Without that, U.S. policy will forever
be hostage to Castro's implicit threat to unleash another boat lift, a threat that may help explain why the Clinton administration has acceded to Castro's demand that Elian go back to his father in Cuba.
Ultimately, such change must come from Cubans themselves. I recently interviewed a group of four young Cuban men who had built their own boat and successfully piloted it on a nine-day journey through the Bahamas to Florida, arriving just as the fireworks from Miami's millennium celebration
lit up the sky. All had left wives and children behind, whom they hope to support by working here and sending money back. Listening to them describe how they secretly gathered money and materials, worked nights building the tiny craft and then braved the sea, I couldn't help but wonder why they
couldn't have devoted the same efforts to organizing political opposition. They laughed at the question.
"I don't want to be a hero," said the expedition's leader, a 31-year-old construction worker, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals against his family back home. "If I did that, Fidel would crush me like a cockroach."
Americans and their government must do whatever is possible to change that calculus, to instill hope and embolden the incipient Cuban opposition, whether through more trade and contact with the people of the island, more diplomatic and economic pressure on the Castro government or some
combination of the two. Only political and economic freedom in Cuba can guarantee there will be no more Elians, no more divided families, no more lonely deaths at the sea.
Current policy, built around the two governments' short-term mutual interest in controlling migration, ironically makes Castro the latest in a long line of Latin American dictators that the United States has done business with in the name of "stability."
Charles Lane Is Editor at Large of the New Republic
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times |