Barry Farber. Wednesday, May 24, 2000
The best swordplay in the movies of my boyhood occurred when the good guy was completely unarmed and managed to kick the sword right out of the hand of the bad guy and bring him to heel.
We can do that tomorrow to master swordsman Fidel Castro.
Back in the early days of Lenin the communists crafted a weapon they openly called "agit-prop," a Russian abbreviation for "agitation and propaganda." Agit-prop consists of pulling things – stunts, if you will. In football they call it "running a play." The
purpose of these maneuvers was to focus and arouse the insufficiently attentive masses over something of advantage to the communists or of disadvantage to their enemies.
We are now in a state I never dreamed I would ever see. Our administration is doing the dirty work of a communist dictator with almost total media acquiescence. Thanks to polls that overwhelmingly favor the return of Elian Gonzalez with his father to Cuba, the jelly-spined Republicans have
turned from giving Cuban communism a beating to giving Chinese communism great joy.
Never mind. We don't need the government or either political party to do this. We can do it ourselves.
Note where we are. Elian and his father and stepmother and half-brother are in an American-made, Castro-designed cocoon at the Wye Plantation in Maryland.
The Iron Curtain, long down across Europe, has come to Maryland as surely as London Bridge moved to Arizona. The Iron Curtain surrounds the Gonzalez family, insultingly so, on otherwise free American soil.
We see about as much of Elian as we did of Bulgarian dissidents under Stalin. We know that Castro has everything his way inside that cocoon, from Cuban "psychologists" to the Communist Young Pioneer uniform Elian was photographed in as the ultimate triumphalist in-your-face to those of
us who despise tyranny.
However, Juan Miguel's parents and his new wife's older child remain in Cuba. Juan Miguel has been in America for a long time now. We don't know how much longer they'll have to wait for the judges' decision.
The fact that the Gonzalezes in Cuba haven't come to visit the Gonzalezes in America is as perverted as the fact that Juan Miguel initially checked into the Cuban Interest Section (embassy!) until Clinton and Castro could prepare a little patch of communist Cuba at the Wye Plantation.
Let's invite the Gonzalezes in Cuba to come on up!
Let's declare as loudly as we can that it's wrong for Elian's stepmother to remain separated from her older child and for Juan Miguel's parents to be without their son for so many weeks that have now turned into months.
Let's invite them all to come on up to America.
The motive of this generosity is not to bring joy to the reunited Gonzalezes, although that's a happy byproduct indeed. Nor is the purpose to stimulate foreign tourism to the eastern shore of Maryland.
The purpose is demonstrate what so many millions of good Americans, including much of the media, either don't know or haven't thought of. Fidel Castro won't dare let them go.
The response to our invitation, if any, will be: "Sorry. We can't afford such a trip."
"Cut it out," we, the inviters, will say. "You're our guests. We'll gladly pay round trip, first class."
There will be no acceptance of the offer. There will be silence, or an angry Cuban accusation that the whole thing is a "maniobra," a maneuver; which, indeed, it is. But what a nice maneuver. A clock starts the minute the offer is publicized – and not accepted.
Those who keep saying Elian's Miami family were defying American law will now start asking: "Why not? Why don't they accept? Nobody expected it would take this long. It's downright unnatural for families embroiled in a custody dispute in a foreign country not to get joined by their other
family members, especially when they're geographically so close. And all expenses are paid."
That puzzlement will eventually ripen into the realization that: "Hey. This is ridiculous. We're getting nothing but excuses. Don't tell me they don't want a free trip to join Juan Miguel and Elian and his stepmother and half-brother.
"Castro won't let them out!"
What I earlier called the pro-Castro media is not hard core. Most of those in the American media doing Castro's public relations deserve the Jesus extenuation: "They know not what they do."
When they see a chance to reunite the family during this wait in Maryland left to lie there with no clear explanation for ignoring it, reporters and commentators will begin to get the point. Castro is terrified to let them go for fear some or all of them will defect. The momentum from such a
dramatic defection could bring down his whole rotten regime.
And day by day the good people of the American media and the good people of America will gradually get the point. Juan Miguel's parents and his new wife's elder child are hostages. Castro has no intention of letting them travel, or explaining why not.
This will reveal Castro's evil in a way no demonstration in Miami or anti-communist rant on a talk show ever could. O. Henry would have loved the final irony. Even though Juan Miguel might very well at this stage want to return to Cuba with Elian as national celebrities, the refusal of Castro to
allow his loved ones to visit him here could guide millions of Americans to the correct impression of the Castro dictatorship.
A simple invitation, well-publicized by us and ignored by Castro's forces, could divert attention from the honest fumblings of a desperate, unskilled and unfunded, freedom-loving family in Miami to the dishonest, super-skilled and well-funded dictatorship in Havana.
The thrust of this sword should draw no human blood or injure any individual.
It should only impale and bleed white the perfidious evil of the only dictatorship remaining in the hemisphere.
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