By Charles Lane. The Washington Post. Sunday, January 30, 2000; Page B07
The Cuban government firmly and sincerely supports the humanitarian value of family reunification. Or so it would seem, judging by the energy and resources Havana has devoted to its international campaign for the return of 6-year-old castaway Elian Gonzalez from his relatives in Miami to his
father in Cuba.
But consider the Fidel Castro regime's behavior toward Luis Grave de Peralta Morrell and his family.
In 1989, Grave de Peralta, a physicist, returned home to Cuba from an academic exchange in Italy. Having been able to read Western news accounts of the changes in Eastern Europe and the uprising in China, he was disgusted to find Cuba's official press attacking perestroika and justifying the
massacre at Tiananmen Square. So he resigned from the Cuban Communist Party.
Fired from his university, Grave de Peralta spent the next half-year researching and writing a 200-page manuscript in which he documented self-contradictions and lies in Fidel Castro's speeches and writings. State security agents arrested Grave de Peralta and charged him with "rebellion
through peaceful means"--that's a crime in Cuba--and, in 1992, sentenced him to 13 years in prison.
Declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences, Grave de Peralta was released in January 1996 after then-Rep. Bill Richardson personally intervened with Castro. As a condition of his release, Grave de Peralta was
required to emigrate, but he was told his family could follow.
Indeed, his two sons, Gabriel, 13, and Cesar, 8, have been granted U.S. visas and Cuban exit permits. But the Cuban government continues to deny an exit permit to the boys' mother, Maria Bouza Fortes. (She and Grave de Peralta were divorced during the four years they have been obliged to live in
different countries.) Grave de Peralta, now 42 and studying for a doctorate in engineering at Texas Tech, showed me some of the letters the family has sent to Cuban officials from Castro on down, only to be ignored or brushed off with vague alusions to "orders from above."
This, then, is the choice imposed by the Cuban government on this politically incorrect family. The children can go to America to live in freedom with their father--abandoning their mother in a totalitarian society where she lost her job as an English teacher because of her former husband's
dissent. Or they can remain with her, and, in all likelihood, forfeit any hope of seeing their father as long as Fidel Castro remains in power.
A Miami-based Cuban exile organization, Cuba-New Generation, says it has documented nine cases similar to that of Grave de Peralta, among them the story of Manuel Amigo Trejo, who was jailed for dissident activities and released to Sweden in 1994. His wife and two daughters have Swedish visas,
but the Cuban government won't give them exit permits.
Castro's government has always manipulated family relationships to exert control over potentially troublesome subjects. When musicians, athletes and scientists travel abroad, they are often obliged to leave their spouses and children in Cuba, to discourage them from defecting. Paquito D'Rivera,
the great jazz musician, bolted anyway in 1978; it took a nine-year campaign to persuade Castro to let his son join him abroad.
Then there's the agony of family members separated from loved ones who are jailed without due process for such offenses as "dangerousness" or "contempt." Amnesty International has just documented the case of Victor Arroyo, a dissident journalist, who was caught distributing
some 140 toys, purchased with donations from Miami, to poor children in Pinar del Rio province. He has been sentenced to six months in prison for "hoarding." His mother, Marta Carmona, waited for him during a previous 21-month sentence on political charges; now she's waiting for him again.
Everywhere it has existed, Communism has generated refugees; Cuba is no exception. Often the price of escape is some years of separation from family. One of the three survivors of Elian's ill-fated boat, Arianne Horta, decided at the last minute to leave her 5-year-old daughter in Cuba rather
than take her on the desperate journey that cost Elian's mother her life. This little girl and her mother will now live apart indefinitely.
Castro may be reaping a public relations windfall from the tragedy that has befallen the Gonzalez family. He may even have the law on his side in this case. But none of that should obscure the fact that the whole episode probably would never have occurred if the Cuban dictator had long ago
instituted the economic and political reforms Cuba's people so plainly need. Fidel Castro, unifier of the Cuban family? The pose is pure hypocrisy.
The writer is a former editor of the New Republic.
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