Castro's American Friends
TOOLEY, MARK
Castro's American Friends The National Council of Churches does a dictator's bidding. BY MARK TOOLEY WHAT IF THE Christian Coalition were fighting to return a little refugee boy to the right-wing...
...Council officials regularly meet with Fidel Castro, both in Cuba and in New York...
...propaganda campaign...
...And the NCC is prepared to be quite nasty about it from time to time, as the denouement of the grandmother gambit made clear last week...
...Imagine the howls of protest...
...But the island's Christians are still routinely denied permits for church repairs and new construction...
...The council speaks only for a tiny group of quasi-religious political activists in the United States, not for the millions of church members it claims to represent...
...One day last summer, before an "ecumenical rally" of 10,000 in Havana's Plaza of the Revolution, NCC's Campbell apologized for the American trade embargo of Cuba...
...The council is Castro's faithful servant in every appeal he makes to American public opinion...
...Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, president of Barry University, is the Dominican nun who hosted the meeting between Elian and his grandmothers in Miami...
...Needless to say, that "teaching" is actually going rather badly...
...And Castro's total censorship of Cuban media and ban on non-Communist political parties...
...Human rights remain a problem in U.S.-Cuba bilateral relations, the NCC's delegation concluded: American "political prisoners" continue to serve "very long" sentences, after all...
...Church leaders are still monitored by the Cuban domestic security service, interrogated and threatened with arrest...
...And Joan Brown Campbell—who chaperoned the grandmothers throughout their weeklong propaganda tour of the United States, oblivious to what was really going on—is mightily displeased over Sister Jeanne's apostasy...
...Religious persecution by Cuba's Communist government is less severe than ten years ago...
...It is the National Council of Churches, of course, that should not be taken seriously as a "neutral" participant in the Elian Gonzalez debate—or in any debate about Castro's Cuba...
...Church properties are commonly subject to government seizure...
...As she explained in a subsequent N^^ Yo-rk Times op-ed, O'Laughlin was alarmed by the two elderly women's "trembling, furtive looks, [and] ice-cold hands" when in the company of their Cuban escort, who spent much of the encounter on a cell phone to Havana, reporting back to his superiors...
...Having "fueled the fire of controversy," the council thundered, Sister Jeanne has "eliminated herself as a neutral facilitator in any future discussions on this matter...
...Is the council's biased presence in the middle of this "negotiation" at all problematic...
...The council has been behaving like this for three decades...
...Public proselytizing remains illegal...
...Poverty on the island, the council's field workers "discovered," is the result of American trade sanctions, not Castro's state-managed economy...
...The council's entente with Castro is an overwhelmingly political affair...
...Beginning in the 1960s, politics—the more radical the better—^became the organization's focus...
...BY MARK TOOLEY WHAT IF THE Christian Coalition were fighting to return a little refugee boy to the right-wing military dictatorship from which he and his mother had fled— she having lost her life in the process...
...Last year the NCC sent a "fact-finding" mission to Cuba...
...Legitimate arguments might be made that Elian should be reunited with his father in Havana, of course...
...While Castro beamed appreciatively from the front row, Campbell went on to ask her audience for forgiveness...
...Ostensibly the voice of 35 denominations that include 50 million American church members, the NCC long ago abandoned formal interest in traditional Christian pursuits like evangelism and spiritual growth...
...Nary a word on those subjects from the NCC...
...The meeting changed her mind...
...We love you very specially, and always welcome you to our country...
...Not once since they involved themselves in the Elian controversy have NCC representatives publicly acknowledged why it is that Cubans routinely risk their lives to escape the Castro regime in the first place...
...Instead, the NCC has actively participated in that campaign, chartering a plane to fly Elian's grandmothers from Cuba for a publicity and lobbying tour through New York, Washington, and Miami...
...Most of the Latin American "liberation" movements of the 1970s and 1980s have expired and most American "progressives" no longer take Marxism seriously...
...Yet there they are: NCC officials busily shuttling back and forth between Havana, Miami, New York, and Washington—all the while huffily insisting that no legitimate arguments exist not to return the boy to the totalitarian society his mother gave her life to escape...
...munist dictatorship in Cuba...
...A show is usually made that this cozy relationship has something to do with religion...
...Four years ago in New York, for example, NCC general secretary Joan Brown Campbell celebrated Castro's pastoral concern for "the poor" and announced that religious intolerance was a thing of the past in Cuba: "The churches now are able to carry out all the work of the church—that is, the training of pastors, Sunday School teaching, evangelism, and service to the society...
...nuclear arsenal also hampers the development of friendship between Washington and Havana...
...Its strenuous effort to return Elian to Castro should, if anything, argue for keeping the little boy with his Florida relatives at least a little while longer...
...But the famously left-leaning NCC, with its rich history of fawning over Castro, is hardly the organization to make such arguments effectively, much less serve as a "neutral" mediator in the dispute...
...The U.S...
...We see in you and your actions the expression of the best values and intentions of the American people," the dictator burbled...
...And radical politics has remained the council's bread and butter to this day...
...She had originally favored the boy's return to Cuba...
...This is the context in which the NCC's "assistance" to Elian Gonzalez and his family must be understood...
...But the NCC has proved singularly unable to abandon bad habits...
...Castro was pleased to agree, and thanked Campbell for her discerning observations...
...And, sure enough, on close inspection, church work turns out not to be the NCC's priority where Cuba is concerned...
...The question has been entirely overlooked by the nation's media...
...The NCC has issued a press release condemning O'Laughlin for daring to express her opinion publicly...
...You are teaching us to be Christians...
...Bible distribution is strictly limited...
...Nor has the NCC admitted that the boy's relatives in Cuba aren't free to tell us what they really think—what with Castro having made them pawns in an anti-U.S...
...How odd, then, that the National Council of Churches (NCC) has received so little criticism for campaigning to return Elian Gonzalez to Fidel Castro's ComMark Tooley is the director of the United Methodist Committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy...
...Shocked by the atmosphere of fear, O'Laughlin now thinks Elian should stay in the United States...
...No serious American church organization could possibly judge this situation praiseworthy...
...House churches and parochial schools are forbidden...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 21
