The Elian Mail
By Jim Hoagland. Sunday, May 14, 2000; Page B07. The Washington Post
Angry mail from readers is to a columnist as interest rates are to Alan Greenspan or a smile and a shoeshine were to Willy Loman: part of the business. Tell the Arabs and Israelis how to make peace or the IRA to disarm, and you will soon hear another view.
But the amount and intensity of mail drawn by a recent column on the Elian Gonzalez case were extraordinary in my experience. Readers were upset by different aspects of the Cuban boy's plight or by other points argued in the column. But they were nearly all united by a boiling rage that spilled
across pages of lined notebook paper, engraved stationery or e-mail.
Most took as their targets Elian's U.S. relatives or the Cuban American community in Miami. "They got what they deserved," was the general tone, and I was castigated for complaining about excessive force being used to grab Elian away from them. A minority fired instead on President
Clinton for consigning the boy to the eternal communist hells of Havana.
That a custody case triggers such intensely personal reactions is not surprising. Our feelings about our own children, or our own childhoods, color our formulations of supposedly abstract social goals and responsibilities far more than we admit. Bill Clinton, Jesse Helms or Lazaro Gonzalez
become convenient dartboards for columnists and their correspondents.
But three points did surprise me as I immersed myself in the mail on Elian: First was the depth of the openly expressed hostility from readers toward Cuban Americans at large.
Some of this came from other Spanish-speaking or Caribbean immigrants resentful of the attention, political power and affluence Cuban Americans have gained in the American system. But more prevalent was anger over the Miami community's perceived rejection of that system itself, through its
defiance of federal control and U.S. laws.
Lazaro Gonzalez and his defenders challenged nothing less than the driving force of Americanization: the doctrine and practice of assimilation. America was created by overcoming the diversity characteristic of Europe and other continents. For one group to hold itself apart as "a separate
nation," as some Cuban Americans did in the struggle over Elian, offended many of my correspondents.
The victim status gained by Cuban Americans through Fidel Castro's tyranny and the Bay of Pigs debacle does not seem to mitigate this backlash. Systematic attempts by some of the community's politicians to guilt trip mainstream America--by portraying the Bay of Pigs as an act of treachery and
cowardice, instead of stupidity and confusion--may in fact be feeding the resentment.
The informal, unscientific and relatively small sampling that my mail on Elian represents suggests that any residual mainstream American guilt for the Bay of Pigs wore thin long ago.
This leads to the second point that struck me: Fatigue with the now clearly vindictive, ineffective U.S. economic embargo of Cuba is widespread. The Clinton administration appears ridiculous, and gutless, as it argues that "normal" trade will save China from repression and/or chaos but
cannot be risked against tiny Cuba.
Lazaro Gonzalez and his supporters are on the wrong side--or at least the other side from me--on these issues, as well as on the father's right to custody. Even before hearing from readers, I had no doubts about the unpopularity of the Miami group, which did irresponsibly jerk around Attorney
General Janet Reno.
But that is point three: It is the nature of the American system to offer equal protection and rights to obnoxious, wrongheaded jerks. They are in fact more likely to need it than others. Our anger at them should not erode our commitment to fair treatment and constitutional restraints on the
state's use of force against citizens in their homes.
The raid on the Miami bungalow suggests that the quest for zero risk that the U.S. military has enshrined at the heart of its operations abroad is creeping into domestic law enforcement, with the encouragement of Reno and others.
No one wants the police or the military to run unnecessary dangers. But zero risk does not exist in life. Every beat patrolman or sheriff's deputy knows and accepts that, as does the average citizen stepping off the street curb every day.
America's politicians are directly and indirectly telling their growing security bureaucracies to guarantee them risk-free environments, physically and politically, and to cut corners to get there. That trend needs to be spotlighted and resisted--even on behalf of those who make us
understandably angry.
Move to Ease Sanctions On Cuba Gains Ground
By Eric Pianin. Washington Post Staff Writer. Friday, May 12, 2000; Page A28
A drive to ease the economic sanctions against Cuba and other rogue countries gathered momentum on both sides of the Capitol this week in the latest sign of congressional skepticism that hard-line policies are having any beneficial effect.
The push is being fueled by farm-state Republicans and commodity dealers frustrated with the loss of an estimated $7 billion of annual overseas sales, and by churches and humanitarian groups that argue that the 40-year-old sanctions against Cuba have done nothing to undermine the Castro regime
but have hurt millions of innocent people.
Proponents in both the House and the Senate succeeded this week in attaching amendments to agriculture spending bills lifting the sanctions on the sale of food and drugs to Cuba as well as to Iran, Sudan, Libya and North Korea.
And in the most striking sign of the coalition's growing strength, the House Appropriations Committee voted 35 to 24 Wednesday evening to spurn an effort by Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) to strike the amendment from the spending bill. Fifteen Republicans, including chief sponsor George R.
Nethercutt (Wash.), opposed DeLay's effort.
Last year, the Senate approved a similar provision lifting the sanctions but House GOP leaders intervened to prevent their own negotiators from accepting the measure. While DeLay and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) began mapping a strategy to try to block the measure in the Rules
Committee, Nethercutt and Senate advocates predicted that they will have enough support to prevail this year.
"I think we have the votes to sustain our position," Nethercutt said yesterday. "There is a consensus that this not a good foreign policy measure. It doesn't change minds or hearts . . . it puts [our farmers] at a competitive disadvantage, and it's counter to our humanitarian
nature."
Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), a chief sponsor in the Senate, agreed that a combination of factors--including the gradual softening of U.S. sanctions against other so-called terrorist nations--have increased the odds that the sanctions against Cuba will be lifted this year. Earlier this year,
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), long a hard-liner against Cuba, permitted his committee to approve a bill authorizing the sale of drugs and food to Cuba under certain conditions, although he personally opposed the move.
Rep. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), a Cuban American and critic of the Castro government, assailed GOP leaders yesterday for "holding themselves out as strong defenders of the values of the Cuban community" and yet allowing their own members to pass legislation to end the U.S. leverage with
Cuba.
"They seem to be able to control everything else if they want to," he said.
An administration official said that while the White House is not averse to the idea of modifying the sanctions on some countries, it opposes the legislation on grounds that it interferes with the president's ability to make foreign policy. "Sanctions decisions--either to impose, lift or
modify--should reflect a cooperative relationship between the Congress and the president," the official said. "Sanctions legislation should give the president the flexibility he needs to conduct foreign policy and protect national security."
The long-simmering controversy over the wisdom of the sanctions, first imposed at the height of the Cold War during the Kennedy administration, has received renewed attention during the custody battle over Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who was plucked from the ocean last Thanksgiving and became
a cause celebre of Miami's anti-Castro Cuban American community.
Even as DeLay and other GOP leaders seized on the Gonzalez custody fight to stoke anti-Castro sentiment, many rank-and-file Republicans have been quietly working for months to try to lift the economic pressure on the communist regime. "I cannot look my farmers in the eye and say I haven't
done everything possible to help you," said Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), who lobbied her colleagues to overturn the embargo. "We're facing now the third year of terrible commodity prices."
Yesterday, DeLay conceded that he had been "a little" surprised by the outcome of the vote in the House Appropriations Committee but declined to say what he would do next.
One obvious step would be to use the Rules Committee to strip the measure of any protection so that it can be challenged on the floor when the House takes up the fiscal 2001 spending bill, as early as next week.
Staff writers Juliet Eilperin and John Lancaster contributed to this report.
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