Don't Believe Granma
EDITORIAL Don't Believe Granma It's now three months since little Elian Gonzalez was discovered lashed to an inner tube three miles off the Florida coast, after a crossing in which his mother and...
...This month in Guantanamo women's prison, Yesenia Rodriguez Aguilar—serving three years for "illegally attempting to leave the country" much as Elian did—was denied medical treatment for a kidney infection and cystitis in an attempt to get her to abort the baby she is carrying...
...Perhaps what had looked like inexplicable behavior on the part of Elian's Cuban family—the grandmothers' biting Elian's tongue and grabbing his penis, neither of them a "Cuban custom...
...The reasons for the crackdown are clear...
...Perhaps the Justice Department thought so, too...
...But the central truth has become less ambiguous with each passing day: Elian's relatives in Miami—the ones who wish to raise him—deserve custody...
...That is, Elian's family was doing all they could, in the context of a totalitarian society, to keep him out of Cuba...
...Whatever the intentions of Elian's father in Havana, Castro's Cuba is not a fit place for the boy...
...Christopher Caldwell, fo^ the Editors...
...That led to understandable speculation that the request came not from him but from the Cuban government...
...Then, in the wake of an expose of past drunk-driving arrests of Elian's relatives in Florida (which led the Castro government to describe them as "a bunch of drunks"), Elian's father, Jose Miguel Gonzalez, allegedly sent a request from Cuba asking that Elian be sent to live with less anti-Castro family members, such as his great Uncle Manuel...
...Consider the developments of the past week...
...the father's threat to get a gun and start shooting American politicians if he ever got to the United States—was merely a faked irrationality for the consumption of the jury that decides on Elian's custody...
...Fidel has seized on any chance to fire his people up again—even sending to Bolivia for Che Guevara's body to be displayed as a kind of relic earlier in the decade...
...and on a conviction that it's time for a thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations...
...Elian's two rejected asylum applications passed through Faget's office...
...But it has certainly provided Castro with a chance to slap around the dissidents who are still trapped in Cuba...
...Putting the Cuban government's behavior together with Sister Jeanne's belief that (a) Elian's father planned his flight and (b) one of the grandmothers wanted to emigrate led some Miamians to a new line of thinking...
...First, she believed one of the grandmothers—Raquel Rodr^guez, mother of Elian's drowned mother—had wanted to defect...
...This last revelation, if true, scuttles any rationale for sending Elian back under any circumstances...
...The independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation has released evidence that 262 dissidents had been detained in Cuba in November and December alone...
...We say "allegedly," because when the INS tried to contact Elian's father about the matter, he was incommunicado for four days...
...EDITORIAL Don't Believe Granma It's now three months since little Elian Gonzalez was discovered lashed to an inner tube three miles off the Florida coast, after a crossing in which his mother and 10 other Cuban rafters died while attempting to reach the United States...
...The liberal nun, who had provided the "neutral" site for a January meeting between Elian and his two grandmothers, gave three reasons why she soon threw off her neutrality and began to plead that Elian be allowed to stay in the United States...
...Inconveniently for the party of normalization, and coming on the heels of the Cuban government's attempts to manipulate the Elian case, Mariano Faget—^the son of a hard-line anti-Communist in the pre-Castro Batista regime, and now a high-ranking official of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Miami—was arrested on February 17 for feeding classified information to the flamboyant Cuban-American businessman Pedro Font...
...It would be churlish to doubt the sincerity of his father's or his grandparents' love for him...
...Unfortunately, that love doesn't put them in a position to protect Elian from the government under which they live...
...For one, Barry University president Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin spoke out at length...
...Oscar Elias Biscet, who was arrested 12 times last year for carrying placards protesting the death penalty, has just received a 10-year jail sentence...
...Oswaldo Paya of Cuba's Christian Liberation Movement and Hector Palacios of the Democratic Solidarity Party have been arrested...
...Robert W. Edgar, general secretary of the NCC, said "Sister Jeanne has to live in the neighborhood"—as if anything but full-throated advocacy of Elian's remaining in the United States would leave her vulnerable to mob violence in Miami...
...The case for returning Elian to Cuba has always depended on an optimistic view of Castro's regime...
...Whatever the disposition of Faget's case, it was only the latest in a wave of Cuban spy episodes that began before Elian washed ashore...
...And the Immigration and Naturalization Service was wrong when it ruled that Elian should be repatriated...
...Given that Sister Jeanne herself comes from this same sliver of the hand-holding left (she calls the golf cart in which she travels her "hug-mobile"), it's unlikely she was thinking along these lines...
...Such outrages are becoming better known in the west, now that the Internet is helping dissidents to break the information monopoly of the Cuban government's propaganda sheet Granma...
...Two-thirds of Cubans were not even born when Castro came to power in 1959...
...It denied Jose Miguel's request to have Elian move to his Uncle Manuel's house...
...on a belief that it is no longer a Stalinist redoubt...
...And the events of the last several weeks—from the spying to the barrage of propaganda to the interventions to the dubious requests for custody changes—make it clearer that Castro's wishes are the only ones that count here...
...But neither was it without relevance to the Elian affair, as Castro's supporters in the American press tried to claim...
...The FBI affidavits released did not point to an open-and-shut case of spying, as Castro's harshest detractors in Miami said—much of Faget's conduct was consistent with a desire to start a Cuban-American business consortium after his impending retirement...
...The FBI reportedly has 50 more Cuban immigrants under surveillance for suspicious activities...
...And lesser day-to-day humiliations continue apace...
...The revolutionary struggles of almost half a century ago are—quite properly—meaningless to them, weighed against the world of terror, penury, and stupidity they inhabit...
...The Elian case may not be the cause of Cuba's bustling espionage activity...
...That's why Elian's case should be decided in an American court, with his relatives making their cases here...
...Ten spies were arrested in September 1998, in connection with Cuba's shootdown of two planes belonging to Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami group dedicated to finding Cuban rafters...
...So there's good reason to believe that Fidel doesn't particularly wish to have Elian back, and would rather have him at his disposal as a propaganda tool...
...This month in Camaguey, Victor Manuel Gar-c^a Yaque was expelled from the Camilo Cienfuegos military school for telling a joke about the government...
...Jose Imperatori, the diplomat at the Cuban Interests section whom the State Department identified as Faget's contact and ordered out of the country, was the man who flew with Elian's grandmothers from Washington to Miami...
...In recent days, the case has begun to take on the bizarre coloring of a Latin American novel—packed with ambiguities and surrealism...
...This month in Canaleta prison near Matanzas, the inmate Juan Carlos Car-rillo Mart^nez was beaten to death by authorities...
...That's why the left-wing National Council of Churches, which has been agitating for Elian's return to Cuba, was quick to try to discredit Sister Jeanne...
...Third, she had discovered that Elian's father's family in Cuba had contacted his father's family in the United States, 10 days before the fatal voyage, to announce that Elian and his mother were on their way...
...In other words, Elian's father knew and must have approved of his boy's departure for America...
...Second, she had reason to think that Elian's father had beaten his late ex-wife...
Vol. 5 • March 2000 • No. 24
