Frank Calzón. Published Tuesday, May 16, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Frank Calzón is executive director of the Committee for a Free Cuba.
I always thought it was impossible to be a liberal and a bigot. Say what you want about liberalism, but it avoided the sweeping generalizations, the mean-spirited assumptions, the resentment that characterize a real bigot.
The Irish bigot thinks the English are perfidious and haughty, the English bigot thinks the Irish are drunken thugs. The Arab bigot thinks the Israelis are thieves, the Jewish bigot thinks the Arabs are liars -- and each thinks the other is a coward and a racist. And each takes it as a personal
affront when a third party pays respectful attention to the other.
Nothing has brought out this aspect of the bigot's temperament better than the Elián Gonzalez case, which is being used by the most surprising range of people to dump on Cuban Americans. I have concluded that it is part of our great American melting pot that bigotry -- no less than noble
sentiments -- sometimes gets into places you least expect it. I expect Patrick Buchanan to make a statement occasionally that will identify him as prejudiced, and it doesn't surprise me when Rev. Al Sharpton forgets his religion and makes a comment devoid of Christian charity. But John McLaughlin?
Consider my surprise, therefore, when I found myself on his influential television program, One on One and heard him state coldly that South Florida's politics are ``dominated'' by Cuban Americans, with the clear connotation that this domination had been achieved by nefarious means and was
exerted for selfish ends, such as getting something for Elián that he doesn't deserve.
And this was not just McLaughlin being his provocative self. A lovable liberal Democrat, Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, complains that elected representatives from heavily Cuban-Americans districts ``pander'' to their constituents' whims. Rep. John Conyers, the long-serving democrat
congressman from Detroit, puts an added twist to this by suggesting that Cuban-American members of Congress are ``too powerful'' and advance their community's interests at the expense of others' -- for example, distracting attention from the needs of African and Haitian children. Even a man who has
helped give liberalism its ethical content, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, described efforts to help Elián as excessive compared to efforts on behalf of other children.
WHAT'S THE REAL ISSUE?
Is Elián the issue, or resentment of Cuban Americans? While writing on the Elián Gonzalez case, the liberal Washington Post columnist Judy Mann sweepingly refers to ``the Cuban exile community'' and ``its ridiculous reaction to the INS decision.'' What if Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
suggested Rangel ``pandered'' to his Harlem constituents? A high point is reached when even a leader of a Cuban-American organization finds himself agreeing with the bigots. For how else can one characterize the astonishing statement by Delvis Fernandez Levy, published in Portland's The Oregonian,
that if other immigrants received the benefits and attention accorded Cubans, ``the America we know would cease to exist''?
There are three Cuban Americans in the U.S. Congress, a tiny band compared to the powerful Congressional Black Caucus, whose members' seniority -- notably Conyers' and Rangel's -- has given them positions of influence in key committees. What would they say if, having succeeded in getting public
opinion more interested than it currently is in the admittedly deplorable fate of children in Sudan or Haiti, someone were to accuse them of engaging in group politics and pandering to their own communities? Would Fernandez Levy dare suggest that bills designed to aid Haitian immigrants risked the
very existence of ``the America we know''? What America is he talking about? An American safe for Fernandezes and Levys and McLaughlins and Conyerses?
Bigots come and bigots go, as do the objects of their bigotry. They always reveal more about themselves, though, than about the groups they stigmatize.
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