Minority Report
America's Sweetheart
ELIAN GONZALEZ AND THE IGNOMINY OF CUBAN POLICY
A press release from the United Nations General Assembly, dated November 9, 1999, details two recent developments in US-Cuban relations(1). First of all, the Gen. Assembly demonstrated its traditional disdain for the US-imposed economic embargo on Cuba, in place since 1962. They reaffirmed their opposition by voting 155-2 to adopt resolution 54/21, which "...urges all states that applied laws and measures of an extraterritorial nature that affected the sovereignty of states and freedom of trade and navigation to repeal or invalidate them as soon as possible."
The tally breaks up in a rather interesting way: 8 abstentions, from such global superpowers as Morocco, Nicaragua, Estonia, Latvia, Uzbekistan, Senegal and the Federated States of Micronesia. Only the US and Israel voted nay on the resolution, which is more than enough to negate the opinions of every other country in the world. Cuba's UN representative introduced the text into the record, saying "...that despite seven previous resolutions in the same vein, the US has continued to engage in pressures and maneuvers intended to thwart the will of the Assembly....The United States' objective since 1959 had been to destroy Cuba. That was pure and simple genocide. For four decades, the blockade has caused illnesses, death, pain and suffering to millions of Cubans. The guilty parties should be punished in compliance with the convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide." That's an example of strong, unequivocal language. One may doubt that all those other countries want the instigators of this policy hauled before some masked tribunal, seeing as how time has already exacted revenge on the guiltiest parties, most notably JFK.
When conservatives speak of the UN as an oppressive force trying to neuter our virile democracy, this is what they mean. Representatives of 32 countries all spoke for 54/21 except us, including Japan (Nippon), Canada, China, Russia, Norway, Indonesia and Mexico. Finland's rep, speaking on behalf of the entire European Union, said they'd love to trade with Cuba, but our laws make that impossible. That same day, Cuba announced the filing of a $100 billion-dollar lawsuit against the United States for damages rendered by our bully tactics. These events went unmentioned on TV, relegated in print to the wire service wasteland, a needle in the Internet haystack. However, within three weeks the country became obsessed with a photogenic young tot who cheated death on the high seas, in the process becoming a posterboy for the immediate reevaluation of US-Cuban policy. His name is Elian Gonzalez.
Six year-old Elian Gonzalez boarded a boat with his mother and her boyfriend under circumstances that remain convoluted two months after the fact. That's because only the child survived; his mom and her boyfriend drowned when the boat capsized just off the southern coast of Florida. He was rescued by the Coast Guard (who were out looking for Haitians to send back home), and taken to his mother's relatives in Miami.
America was instantly captivated by the child's sad tale, his boyish charisma. He was like Ricky Martin, except he didn't piss us off by trying to sing all the time. He was showered with gifts: a trip to Disneyland, a puppy from a congressman, and the opportunity to see his face plastered across newspapers, magazines and TV screens for months. He was given cool stuff and encouraged to play with it while strangers took pictures of him. Wonderful, except that Elian has a father and two sets of grandparents in Cuba, who want him returned there, as does the INS, which ruled in December that EG must be sent back. Well, that's just not going to happen. His return was postponed by a congressional subpoena, and talk began to circulate that EG might be declared an American citizen, even though both parents are Cuban and he was not born in America. Elian was far too valuable as PR tool to permit his return to what remains of his immediate family, and the law must reflect our anti-Communist convictions. And so they have, from the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to the '62 blockade, to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act which effectively grants citizenship to any Cuban who finds himself upon our shores.
It's a simple premise: 38 years of economic sanctions have lowered the general conditions in Cuba to the point that many residents decide to flee. Never mind that America is the main source of their problems; they quickly assimilate into the anti-Castro clique in Miami and Washington, insisting that Fidel's ouster is the key to a Cuban ideal. The unofficial consensus among my contacts is that our economic warfare will not cease until Castro is deceased. That won't be more than five years or so, and the resultant power vacuum, soon filled by American influence, will likely spell the end of communism in Cuba. Until then, however, it's well worth the lives of Cuban people to make Castro's revolution look like a failure. So imagine our shock when ABC News reported on January 13 that America's Sweetheart, Elian Gonzalez, had said something in Spanish that observers translated as "I want to go back to Cuba!" That was very inconvenient, given his pending congressional testimony, and efforts were soon made to alter the boy's values in advance of his DC debut.
The Florida Times-Union ran an unsigned article by the Knight-Tribune news service on Jan. 20 that made it very clear what young master Elian is learning in his first month at Little Havana's Lincoln-Marti school. Demetrio Perez is owner of the school and about a dozen others in the area. His 315-page Citizens Training Handbook: Discipline, Moral, Civism, Urbanity is the "main textbook...from kindergarten through 12th grade," according to the anonymous author, who really should step forward and take credit for this. I read it with shock and horror, but such a piece brings squeals of approval from the right, and it works great as political satire. L-M's curriculum is briefly encapsulated in the story's lead sentence: "He lives in a Christian society and should support prayer in public and private schools. He should oppose abortion, homosexuality and racism. He should love the American flag and realize that the influence of the United States in the world has been beneficial to all." Unless you live in Cuba, but that goes unsaid.
I'd really like to read Mr. Perez's book, especially the parts dealing with US-Cuban relations, because nobody's been able to explain the American position in a comprehensible way since JFK died. The embargo was supposed to trigger discontent with the Cuban people, who were expected to believe that Castro was the bastard we said he was. That didn't work, despite our best efforts to accelerate his ouster, from providing training and intelligence to potential insurgents to numerous Wile E. Coyotesque assassination attempts, which officially never occurred. Instead of inciting his displacement, our actions began to paint Fidel in a sympathetic light, and any failures on his part could be dismissed as the consequence of resisting the wrath of American power.
The last 38 years have been a continuous reductio ad absurdam of our bully pulpit pretensions. So why continue? Because the Cuban people have to be punished for failing to prove that they deserve American food and medicine. Elian's studies included a lesson on the teachings of Martin Luther King: "'Dr. King teaches people to love, not to hate,' a picture caption said.
'We want the children to love as long as they understand they must love the liberty in this country, and not a Communist system,' Perez says.
Lovely. Perez has a clear and decisive vision for his charter school and its most famous pupil: "We want Elian to know that in this country, we in no way support Cuba or people in Cuba who believe in that system." Welcome news for Castro's apostates.
(1) www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/cuba/cuba9.htm. This site also contains detailed information on Cuban policy dating back to the 1996 Helms-Burton act.
(2) "A different type of education for Elian: Private school teaches specific values, politics." Florida Times-Union, Jan. 20, 2000, p. A-1 & A-8.
Shelton Hull (aka Archibald Bobo) has been writing professionally since 1995. He also does the column "Money Jungle" for FolioWeekly (Jacksonville). His work has appeared in places like Section 8 Magazine, Movement, CounterPunch, Lew Rockwell.com and the Florida Times-Union. He was a 2002 Fellow at the Academy of Alternative Journalism, AAN/Northwestern University. He works for himself.
