Cuban parents have been so desperate to save their children that more than 14,000 of them have been smuggled off the island unaccompanied by their parents.
To quote from an Amicus brief on the Gonzalez case submitted by the Association for Objective Law: “Cuba is a land where one is indoctrinated, monitored, threatened, and even terrorized…from an early age.” Cuba has been listed consistently by Freedom House as one the world’s most repressive nations.
Famed Soviet defector Walter Polovchak, who narrowly escaped the fate that awaits Elian, said, “If I had been returned to the Soviet Union, the plan was to place me in a mental institution, because I was deemed unfit to live in a normal society. My parents were to be stripped of custody.”
The Cuban government has already announced that when Elian arrives they will take custody of him, because he is “a possession of the Cuban government.” He will be sent to a “reeducation” center in order to insure that he grows up with a “Communist personality” as specified under Cuban law. To quote Alina Fernandez, Castro’s daughter: “the American legal system is not sending back a boy to his father. The American legal system is sending a boy to a dictator who, four years ago, sunk a tugboat, killing 11 children, in front of the Cuban harbor.” So much for parental rights in Cuba.
The difference between Cuba and America is not just a matter of lifestyle, as some have claimed. It is not a difference like that between Republicans and Democrats. It is a difference between a country that respects and protects individual rights and one where the concept of rights does not even exist (for parents or children) — where, if one wants to survive at all, one must function not as a man with an independent mind and a desire to manage his own life but as a selfless, mindless servant of the total state.
The people who seem most able to grasp this difference are those Cuban-Americans who actually lived under Castro and escaped to tell about it. It is a disgrace that these people have been vilified as the Cuban Mafia, as neurotic emotionalists, and as narrow-minded bigots. What they are, in fact, is heroically courageous people who fully understand what dictatorship means in practice and who, like the Founding fathers, risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to gain their freedom. They are quite properly passionate about their anti-Castro, pro-freedom views, as all Americans should be. To them, the proper resolution of the Elian issue is self-evident.
But why don’t President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno see it? They claim that it is all an issue of the father’s rights. But this claim cannot be taken seriously.
First, there is no way to know the father’s true feelings. There is considerable evidence that the father wanted Elian to come to America, and we also know that the rest of his family are being held hostage by Castro, so it is very doubtful as to whether the father can express his true wishes.
Second, even if the father did want to return to Cuba with Elian, we should not allow it. Parental rights are not absolute. If a parent is abusing a child, the child is removed from the parent’s custody. What more flagrant form of child abuse could be imagined that taking a child from a free country to a dictatorship where he will never have any rights for the rest of his life? Certainly, as a symbol of Castro’s power, Elian will not only be subjected to intense indoctrination when he goes back, but he will be watched closely so that he never has a chance to escape. Is this what Janet Reno means when she says she only has the child’s best interests at heart?
Is this what Janet Reno had in mind when she ordered a Gestapo-like raid to grab Elian from people who really did care about this welfare? Is this what she had in mind when she decided to hide Elain from the press and allow access only to people who represent, directly or indirectly, the Cuban government?
