Eli?n Should Stay
EDITORIAL Elián Should Stay Last week, lawyers for 6-year-old Elián González filed a motion in federal court to prevent the boy from being sent back to Cuba. It's an uphill battle. On...
...Two years later, the mother arrived in California to demand her children's return...
...Who are they to say what her will is...
...No one ever suggested in the 1970s that we return refusenik relatives to Brezhnev's Russia, or in the 1980s that Sandinista opponents in Miami be forcibly reunited with their persecuted families in Nicaragua...
...What do they know about her...
...Earlier this month in Havana, opposition journalist Victor Rolando Arroyo got a six-month jail term for cooperating with a Miami charity that sends toys to poor Cuban children for Christmas (celebration of which has been legal only since the pope's visit in 1998...
...According to these guidelines, "the parent shall be given notice of the juvenile's application for relief, and shall be afforded an opportunity to present his or her views and assert his or her interest to the district director or immigration judge before a determination is made as to the merits of the request...
...In an asylum case, the country of origin is always on trial, and the country of origin knows it...
...The marching Miamians understand something the others do not...
...Before El Duque himself boarded a raft for the Bahamas and freedom, he was earning nine dollars a month mopping floors in a hos-pital—and living in a cinderblock outhouse...
...All of which flew in the face of American precedent...
...interests section in Havana made contact with Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Relations to explain: All the father would have to do is provide proof of paternity, and state that he was willing to care for his son and wanted him back...
...Two things make it necessary that Elián have his day in court—with his father in the United States...
...Rodríguez has been rendered irrational by grief...
...And when someone proves unreliable, it is often children who are required to take part in the Cuban state's Maoist response: an "act of repudiation...
...We hear about these things only when they happen to famous people, but "family life" in Cuba is tens of thousands of such incidents, 365 days a year...
...and that there is evidence González may originally have approved of his ex-wife's flight...
...After all, if this is a regime to which a defenseless 6-year-old dissident-by-association can be entrusted, by what logic do we block grown men from trading microchips for cigars...
...It has been clear since 1994, when the Clinton administration agreed to repatriate Cubans found in international waters, that thawed relations with Castro are what the president wishes, too...
...Who called the boy's Miami relatives to alert them he was on his way...
...Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors...
...Fidel Castro understands that if Elián can be sent back without a court hearing, the whole of U.S...
...We need the father, Juan Miguel González—along with his wife, Elián's newborn stepsister, and anyone else Castro might later employ as a hostage—before we even consider sending Elián back to Cuba...
...The Immigration and Naturalization Service would have summarily returned the boy in December, but legal motions filed by Elián's relatives prompted Attorney General Janet Reno to wait for a federal court decision...
...And maybe he is...
...At its crudest, the case sets up Al Gore—who has been admirably forthright in his insistence that Elián's family be brought to the United States—as a hero to Florida's swing voters...
...The 1971 case In re B.G., Vlasta Z. v. San Bernardino County concerned a Czech dissident and his 5- and 6-year-old children, who had fled Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion— against the mother's will...
...Every alien resident on American soil is protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, and has a right to apply for asylum...
...The INS has guidelines for cases in which a child applies for asylum and his "interests are adverse with those of the parent...
...It is a routine...
...Not even the daughter of Raúl Castro, Fidel's brother and designated successor, was allowed to accept a scholarship to study in Mexico, for fear she would defect...
...But unifying families has generally meant bringing them together in free societies, not repressive ones...
...Last week, the State Department announced that both Elián's grandmothers had been given U.S...
...Cuban-Americans say we must not condemn a boy to life in a totalitarian state...
...Cuban citizens may be jailed for "dangerousness," "disrespect," or even for owning a fax machine...
...The Economist calls the Miami exile community "deaf to reason...
...More broadly, the president is getting the rapprochement with Castro he wants, but dares not admit...
...Cubans say we must not break apart a father and his son...
...If, as is more likely, he is forbidden to take a 90-mile trip to retrieve his child, then Cuba is self-evidently not a free enough country to send anyone back to without due process—least of all a 6-year-old kid...
...But it also ruled on the inhumanity of the Prague regime—and ordered that the children remain...
...It has been up to Elián's lawyers to root out that Munero was a dissident who was jailed, beaten, isolated, and deprived of food...
...The behavior of the Clinton administration and the INS has been highly irregular...
...Since the boy's rescue, hundreds of thousands have marched in Miami to demand that his dead mother's wishes be respected—that he be allowed to live in America, with members of his extended family...
...It is to this the United States would return Elián...
...She was a "fit parent," the court found...
...His father...
...We are here talking not just of Castro's crimes against would-be emigrants, grisly though they sometimes are...
...But the reverse is true...
...Orlando "El Duque" Hernández, now of the New York Yankees, was banned from Cuban baseball for life because his brother defected to the United States...
...Castro's Cuba—Americans, for some reason, need be reminded—is the most repressive society in the Western hemisphere, and one of the most repressive on earth...
...Assuming Elisabet wasn't simply showing her son what sharks look like up close, we have a pretty clear idea of what her wishes were, of course...
...Elián González is a means by which Castro can undermine the trade embargo for free—no human rights concessions required...
...Similar marches in Havana have demanded Elián's return to Cuba, where his father still lives...
...Rodríguez has been portrayed sympathetically by a disgracefully incurious North American press, which has tended to adopt the rest of Castro's line, as well: Elián's drowned stepfather, Lazaro Munero, is a bandit and a "smuggler...
...Meanwhile, the boy's father, Juan Miguel González, is depicted as a saint...
...Rather, it is the way Castroism treats families and children that renders ludicrous the notion that any Cuban father can speak freely about what is best for his son...
...Elián's mother, Elisabet, meanwhile, is portrayed as a flighty tart trailing after her boyfriend...
...After conducting such an interview with Juan Miguel González in Havana, the INS withdrew Elián's application on his behalf...
...In early December, an hour after Fidel complained that he hadn't been informed of American immigration rules, the U.S...
...Family reunification," Meissner says, "has long been a cornerstone of both American immigration law and INS practice...
...The president favors Elián's return...
...Arroyo was convicted of "hoarding toys...
...They are welcome here, but not material to the case...
...Nor is it merely a question of the "laws" Cuba applies to the unfortunates it manages to retain...
...Amnesty International called it an "extrajudicial execution...
...It determines whether they are politically reliable enough to go on to higher education or even to hold jobs...
...That does not, however, mean that Elián's return should be automatic, even if his father continues to insist on it...
...It is never mentioned that she, too, was interrogated on several occasions for political deviation...
...In the summer of 1994, the Cuban coast guard fired water cannons at a refugee tugboat at 2 o'clock in the morning, washing dozens into the sea, where they drowned...
...Fifty-six percent of Americans tell pollsters they think Elián should be shipped back...
...Elián's grandmother, Raquel Rodríguez, was asked in Cuba why she wanted the boy returned—against the wishes of his late mother, Elisabet, Rodríguez's daughter...
...In other words, Elián's father—whose wishes are filtered through the raison d'état of a totalitarian regime—is enjoying greater rights than he would if he were on American soil...
...Perhaps Mrs...
...It has already happened in Elián's case...
...The father died of cancer weeks after arriving, leaving a testament expressing his wish that the children stay...
...diplomatic mission...
...Cuba policy—the trade embargo, Helms-Burton, isolation through the OAS—will collapse into incoherence...
...Ten-year-olds are being trundled onto Cuban television to denounce the "bandits," "worms," and "kidnappers" hosting the boy in Miami...
...But more likely she understands that her daughter was guilty of a counterrevolutionary, unpatriotic "illegal exit," and that she herself is consequently at risk—in a state where "failure to comply with the duty to denounce" is also a crime...
...that González never publicly demanded Elián's return until after Castro did...
...First, in Castro's Cuba, we simply cannot know the underlying facts...
...Family members are Cuban hostages...
...But lost in the discussion is the fact that it is González's Miami relatives, not Elisabet's, who want to keep Elián...
...An INS source told Spain's El País that the required interview "could take place wherever the father wants, not necessarily inside the U.S...
...But the Clinton administration has tried to short-circuit that procedure...
...Cuban children have a political dossier—the notorious Expediente cumulativo escolar—kept on them from the moment they enter school...
...Raquel Rodríguez replied...
...Miami's Cubans are alleged to be politicizing this case while Washington hews to principle...
...Ten others had died in the attempted crossing, including Elián's mother and stepfather...
...Well, yes...
...There is a direct legal precedent here...
...But they're wrong...
...Parents do not have the right to withdraw their children's applications for asylum...
...Almost every powerful institution in North America has lined up on the Cubans' side...
...If Juan Miguel González won't take a 90-mile trip to retrieve his child, then he's hardly the father he says he is...
...Mrs...
...visas...
...The second reason this case must be carefully adjudicated is that it deeply implicates American law...
...According to Freedom House, Cuba's respect for political and human rights ranks lower than that of Cambodia, Iran, both Congos, and Serbia—and no better than Vietnam and the Sudan...
...On Thanksgiving Day, Elián, one of 14 people who had fled Cuba on a rickety raft, was found strapped to an innertube with a drowned 60-year-old woman bobbing alongside...
...Particularly noxious is the rationale INS commissioner Doris Meissner is using to justify Elián's possible return...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 19
