by William F. Jasper. The New American. May 22, 2000. Vol. 16, No. 11
Castro's oppressive regime has trapped every Cuban behind the iron bars of fear, bars that still imprison Elian's father here in America and through which he dare not speak his true desires.
Juxtaposed on the front pages of many newspapers Easter Sunday morning were two photographs of Elian Gonzalez. In the one, a terrified, screaming Elian is being grabbed by a shouting, heavily armed, SWAT-clad federal agent. In the other photo, reportedly taken a few hours later, a smiling, happy
Elian beams from the arms of his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. Elian looks happy, Juan Miguel looks happy, Elian's step-mother and baby step-brother look happy. Everybody's happy. The raid on Lazaro Gonzalez' home in Miami may have been a bit heavy-handed, but, hey, all's well that ends well, right?
The Elian happy-face photos are Exhibit A in Team Clinton's Elian "vindication" file. Obviously, this cute, cuddly family should be hurried back to Havana where loving "Papa Fidel" waits with hugs and kisses for all. However, we do not know positively whether or not Juan
Miguel would elect to stay in this country if given a real opportunity to do so. But what we do know is that he has not had that opportunity thus far, and will not get one unless a miracle overcomes the Clinton-Castro police-state controls that surround him. We also know that there is abundant
evidence from numerous credible witnesses that Juan Gonzalez knew in advance and approved of his ex-wife's plans to flee Cuba with Elian, and has wanted to escape to the United States for a long time himself:
• Spanish reporter Mauricio Vincent, of the socialist Madrid newspaper El Pais, says that Juan Miguel told him that he wanted Elian to go to the United States.
• Maria Isabel Martell, a first cousin to Juan Miguel Gonzalez, grew up with him in Cuba and arrived in the United States on June 23, 1999, five months before Elian was rescued from the sea. "I know for a fact that Juan Miguel wanted to come to the United States," Mrs. Martel has
stated in a sworn affidavit. "When my brother, Alfredo, and my husband left Cuba, Juan Miguel told me, in front of his mother and his relatives, that sometime in the future he would come, even if it had to be in a tub," she says.
• Yusledis Ortiz, the wife of Alfredo Martell, a cousin of Elian's father, has testified: "On several occasions, when I was living in Cuba, Juan Miguel stated, in my presence, that he wanted to come to the United States." According to the sworn affidavit of Mrs. Ortiz, after Juan
Miguel learned that her husband had made it to the United States, he told her and other relatives "that Alfredo should have let him know, so he could have come with him even if he had to row." He also told her that he desperately wanted to escape Cuba, but "what would hurt him the
most would be to leave his son [Elian] behind."
• On November 22, 1999, at 9:01 p.m., Georgina Cid, an aunt of Juan Miguel Gonzalez, received a call at her home in Miami, alerting her that Elian and his mother were on their way from Cuba. The call, she says, was from her brother, Juan Gonzalez (Juan Miguel's father), and originated from
the Gonzalez' home telephone number in Cardenas, Cuba, where both Juan Miguel Gonzalez and his father Juan Gonzalez live with their wives and Juan Miguel's infant son. The call from the Gonzalez phone in Cuba is confirmed by Mrs. Cid's phone records.
• According to Elian's great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, who was given custody of the boy in Miami, Juan Miguel had asked him in a telephone call from Cuba to protect Elian "by whatever means available." When Lazaro called Juan Miguel to tell his nephew that his son was okay, Juan
Miguel told him, "Take care of him for me until I get there."
• William Gonzalez attests that in 1998 he visited his cousin, Elian's father, in Cuba, and discussed with Juan Miguel his plans to come to Miami.
• The Miami Herald discovered that on November 26, 1999, the day after Elian was rescued, Juan Miguel Gonzalez had obtained certified copies of Elian's birth certificate and his marriage certificate to his deceased ex-wife, Elizabeth. These documents would be required for Juan Miguel to
obtain a non-immigrant visa. More proof he was hoping to leave — legally?
• On January 31st of this year, Reverend Kilari Anan Paul, an evangelist from India, went to Cuba to see if he could meet with Juan Miguel Gonzalez in person. Juan Miguel was under house arrest and Cuban officials refused to allow Rev. Paul to meet with him alone, without their
interference. But Rev. Paul did talk to at least three sources there — a friend of Gonzalez, a relative, and a church leader — who claim Elian's father truly wants his son to stay in America, and wants to come himself, with his family.
However, once Fidel Castro had made the return of Elian to Cuba his regime's top priority, it was a foregone conclusion that Juan Miguel would "change" his mind. Juan Miguel and his family were taken into Castro's tender custody. You know they were given a proposition they couldn't
refuse: special privileges and pleasures if they helped bring Elian back; special pain if they did not. Only those completely ignorant of the ways of Cuba's police-state methods or those sympathetic to its totalitarian ways could fail to see the obvious signs that Juan Miguel Gonzalez is not a free
man. Consider:
• Before Juan Miguel came to the U.S., his parents were moved to a special compound where they would be under the close supervision of Castro's secret police. This is a standard Communist practice: increase your leverage on those traveling abroad with the threat that harm will befall their
relatives if they don't come back or perform satisfactorily.
• When he was given U.S. visas for himself and five others, he balked and parroted Castro's demand that he must have 22 additional visas for a whole retinue of Fidel's psychiatrists, psychologists, and other control agents.
• On his arrival in the U.S., Juan Miguel read a defiant statement larded with Castroite verbiage. His attorney, Greg Craig, later admitted it was written by the Cuban government.
• He spurned all invitations to meet with relatives and to see his son unless it was under circumstances controlled by Castro's agents.
• Some of the Cuban thugs who serve as Juan Miguel's (and now Elian's) guards were involved in the violent, criminal attack on peaceful Cuban-American demonstrators outside the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. on April 14th.
"Most Americans cannot imagine what it is like to live in a total terror state," says Ninoska Perez, hostess of a popular Miami radio talk show and a spokesperson for the Cuban American National Foundation. "They can't conceive what it's like to be spied on every hour of every day
of your life, to have all entertainment, education, information completely controlled and censored by Communist officials."
Mrs. Perez, who has been involved in helping a number of Cubans defect, told THE NEW AMERICAN of the episode of four Cuban basketball players who wanted to defect. Mrs. Perez and her associates secretly arranged to help the athletes escape after their game. When the time came, however, only one
of the young men actually went through with it. "The other three wanted to defect also," she related, "but they were so terrified about what might happen — to themselves, if they got caught, to their families — that they couldn't do it. Even the one who did defect almost had
a heart attack from fright. And these were big, strong young men, athletes. But their entire lives they've been taught that Fidel is all-powerful and his secret police are everywhere. It's very effective."
Agustin Blazquez, a journalist and independent filmmaker, was 21 years old when he escaped Cuba in 1965. "I lived in fear 24 hours a day," he told THE NEW AMERICAN. "That's life under Castro. But that's so foreign to the experience of most Americans, and the U.S. media has been so
bad about romanticizing Castro and covering up the reality of his tyranny that Americans are clueless about the true state of things in Cuba." Americans have no idea, he says, that every Cuban athlete, musician, or diplomat who goes abroad is accompanied by a State Security "handler."
Blazquez related the story of Cuban pianist Abdiel Montes de Oca, a recent defector to Switzerland. "Abdiel told me that his SS agent never left him for a moment; he even had to sleep with him in the same hotel room."
"When I went to the Cuban Interests Section, I knew there was no way Juan Gonzalez would ever escape," said Blazquez. "Besides all of Castro's agents, there were huge numbers of U.S. agents and their boss is Bill Clinton. I think they know that Clinton is as determined as Castro
to have Juan Miguel and Elian back in Cuba. And I'm sure Juan Miguel knows that."
"Anyone who has experienced life in Cuba knows that Juan Miguel can't freely speak his mind as long as he is under the control of Cuba's police," Alex Diaz told THE NEW AMERICAN. Mr. Diaz, now a Miami jeweler, escaped Cuba by raft six years ago. "Many people claim that Castro is
mellowing, that things are much better now than in past decades," says Diaz. "But we who lived there and who still have family being brutally oppressed by him know that's not true. What is so frustrating and frightening to me and other Cubans who love this country is that we see America
under Clinton becoming more like Castro's Communist regime."
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