Rod Dreher. The New York Post, May 2, 2000
THE most frustrating and unjust aspect of the Elian Gonzalez affair is the refusal of the news media and the American people to seriously consider the kind of life the child would have under communism.
The prison camps, the interrogations, the brutal silencing of dissent, the ruined lives, the torture, the secret police, the closed borders - these are not unpleasant memories of the Cold War.
That's Cuba today. It is no more free than any Iron Curtain country was prior to 1989.
Yet the Elian issue is framed for the public in ways that make it easy to dismiss the claim that sending Elian back to Fidel Castro would be tantamount to child abuse. Communism is not evil, just "different;" Cuban exiles in Miami aren't to be trusted because they're right-wing
crazies.
This is an old, depressing story to Bela and Gabriella Bollobas, long-time friends of mine whom I met for coffee on their visit to the city last week.
As exiles from Hungarian communism, which they daringly fled in 1969 for England, they have suffered the willful ignorance of Westerners who would prefer not to hear what people who have had to live under the communist jackboot have to say about it.
Poor Lazaro Gonzalez has been slandered as a lazy drunk in the media as a way of discrediting him. You cannot say anything remotely similar about the Bollobases. Gabriella is an accomplished sculptor and artist. Bela is one of the world's leading mathematicians.
They passionately believe Elian should stay with his American relatives - for the soundness of his own mind and the integrity of his soul.
"When our son was a little boy, we told him that if anything happened to us, he was not to go back to live with his relatives in Hungary," Bela said. "We made other arrangements for him. It was unthinkable."
Yes, but the Bollobases were by then enemies of the state. What about Elian, whose father is a party member, and who will grow up with all the privileges Castro can offer?
Consider, replied Bela, that if a German mother died getting her son out of Nazi Germany, we would never send such a child back to his Nazi father. We would not subject the child to that kind of perverse evil.
"It's not all right to live in Nazi Germany, period," said Bela. "It kills any decent feeling within you."
So it is with communist Cuba.
"It's a horrible thing to grow up under a tyranny where everybody is lying, because you have to lie," the professor continued. "People don't realize how much everybody has to lie. We even lied to ourselves and told ourselves we were wrong because we were not conforming enough."
"We would be standing there in the crowd," Gabriella recalls, "cheering for our wonderful leader, and I would think, âWhat a pity that I don't really have this feeling that everybody else does.' I later realized that we all felt the same way. We wanted to belong."
Generations of exiles from communism have tried to tell us this. Few, particularly in the academic and media elite, have been willing to listen.
When the Bollobases warned their influential friends at Cambridge that they had it all wrong about communism, these people called the couple - surprise! - hotheaded Hungarians.
Now that everything they testified to then has been proven true about communism, "You can't find a single one of those people who will admit they were wrong."
The story of little Elian's escape, with his mother losing her life to get her boy to freedom, and his providentially being plucked from his little float in the big sea, pierces the Bollobases' hearts. Their own flight from communist oppression was extremely risky and involved events they
believe were miraculous.
In the late 1960s, the regime finally allowed young Bela, the finest Hungarian mathematician of his generation, to accept a scholarship to study in England. The authorities fully expected him to return.
Getting Gabriella out was the problem.
He and Gabriella secretly hatched an escape plan. When Bela received a signal in England, he sped across Europe to communist Yugoslavia, and snatched Gabriella off a train.
"When I arrived in the darkness there, Bela was running by the side of the train. I got off," Gabriella recalls. "And then we had our miracle, which is why I became a serious Catholic."
A mysterious Hungarian Jesuit they happened to meet took pity on the two, who could be arrested and returned to Hungary at any moment. He married them and arranged for exit papers to Italy.
As they set out for the border in Bela's rattletrap English car, the priest fished in his pockets for a wedding gift - a wad of bills.
Then as the Italian border drew closer, the Yugoslav police stopped them for speeding and demanded a bribe.
"We didn't have any money," said Gabriella. "Then we remembered, The priest gave us some.' We asked, How much do you want?' The police said, 400 dinars.' I took out the money, and it was 400 dinars exactly."
They wept all the way to the border, drove their sputtering little car to freedom, and never looked back.
Theirs is just one astonishing story among tens of thousands of desperate men and women who have fled communist tyranny. And now, this country is trying to send a child, whose mother died to make him free, back to a communist prison called Cuba - and nobody cares to listen to those who know
communism and say, "Wait a minute! Think about what we're doing to this boy's life!"
Bela Bollobas, whose brilliant mind can plumb the depths of the most complex mathematical equations known to man, cannot figure this one out. He's not the only one.
E-mail: dreher@nypost.com |