Elian Gonzalez, who floated in Florida’s waters four years ago on Thanksgiving, is ten years old on Saturday. The media spectacle that surrounded his arrival and departure has given way to obscurity; the world has forgotten Elian.
Those who ignore Elian’s legacy may be driven by guilt: most Americans opposed granting him asylum in America and their complete repudiation of the the Statue of Liberty’s Emma Lazarus poem was accompanied by unrelenting assurances that he would live like he owned a sugar plantation (if ownership were allowed in communist Cuba) or that he would become a media celebrity (if media were allowed). Elian, for anyone bothering to account for the child whose mother died coming to America, has disappeared, though he occasionally appears on state-run television in his communist uniform. The public won and moved on. Elian lost his freedom — and America lost its way.
Each branch of government rejected Elian’s right to live in liberty. The legislative branch refused to consider making Elian a citizen, though exceptions had been made for Vietnam’s Boat People, for Cuba’s Mariel boatlift, for Cuba’s Operation Peter Pan, and for generations of Mexicans, all of which included children. Congress granted no such exclusion to arbitrary immigration laws for the smallest minority: the individual.
The Supreme Court rejected Elian’s plea for asylum, made on his behalf by Elian’s Uncle Lazaro, an auto mechanic who fed, clothed and housed the child at his two-bedroom home in Little Havana. Though Elian’s defenders failed to make the case for his asylum on principle, his Miami family stood against a judicial system which had fundamentally betrayed its founding principle: individual rights.
The nation’s most powerful official approved the initiation of force. On April 22, 2000, President Clinton, backed by the public and by each branch of government — executive, judicial, legislative — dispatched gun-toting agents to seize Elian, marking the first time America’s government forced a child from a free society and returned him to a dictatorship. The conviction that it is better to live in the land of the free than to live under tyranny had been abandoned.
Educated by modern intellectuals, Americans had become ignorant of life under communism. Throughout Elian’s saga, people expressed disbelief that life in Cuba includes no right to property, association, travel, or speech. Elian, they insisted, belongs with his father. Whether father and son lived in freedom or slavery was judged irrelevant: what mattered to most Americans was that the two blood relatives were bound together — even if it meant they would be gagged by a dictatorship — and, anyway, they chortled, communism in Cuba couldn’t be that bad.
Over three years later, not one reporter has been permitted to observe his condition unmolested by communist agents. Elian Gonzalez is fully enslaved and unseen, except when he is used by Cuba’s dictatorship as a pawn for propaganda.
Yet it is America who has suffered for its philosophical inversion. As government agents were snatching Elian, Islamic terrorists, living illegally in Florida, were busy plotting the worst attack in U.S. history — an attack that would probably have been stopped had the government enforced its laws. Forcing a child to return to slavery while our enemies were miles away planning the most diabolical act of war offers proof that America has lost any sense of what matters. A free republic that refuses to judge its enemies while spurning a child refugee from tyranny is doomed by its own contradictions.
As America approaches its third Christmas at war, we must restore the idea of inalienable individual rights to a sacred place in our hearts. There is no better time to do so than Christmas, which still represents benevolence, redemption and the notion that children should bask in the light of joy, not totalitarianism. We can start by recognizing that a truly happy birthday — a celebration of one’s life and future — is impossible for anyone living under communism and by acknowledging that nothing — not family, not tradition, not religion — is more important than an individual’s freedom. It is why the enemy hates us — and it is why Elian should be celebrating his birthday in America.
Recommended Reading:
- Remembering Elian Gonzalez by Scott Holleran
I met Elian Gonzalez during a visit to the Miami house which had become the flashpoint for a profound philosophical conflict–days before his pre-dawn seizure on Saturday, April 22, 2000. - A Sin to Deport Eli
