Over recent months, the exile Cuban community in Miami plumbed new depths in its efforts to undermine the Cuban revolution with the kidnapping and systematic brainwashing of a six-year-old child.
On 25 November 1999, Elian Gonzalez was picked up at sea by the US Coastguard. His mother, stepfather and nine other Cuban would-be emigrants had drowned when their flimsy raft capsized. The little boy was handed over to distant relatives in Miami whom he had never met. With the backing of the virulently anti- communist Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), Elian has been turned into a cause celebre for the entire exile community. When US Immigration ruled that the boy must be returned to his father in Cuba, CANF promised mass action on the streets, violence and a blockade around the house where Elian is staying to prevent his removal. This powerful lobby ensured that an elected Florida judge, with known connections to the Miami relatives, set aside the immigration service ruling. US presidential candidates from both parties have spoken out against returning Elian to Cuba and the legal procedure is being deliberately strung out.
Shameful manoeuvres
Elian is being used as a political pawn to extol the ‘freedom’ and good life of the United States (capitalism) against the so-called poverty and misery of ‘Castro’s Cuba’ (communism). To this end, a vulnerable and traumatised child has been denied a return to his family and normality in Cuba and instead is cynically paraded around dressed in the emblems of his country’s enemies, draped in the US flag and photographed sitting in a toy plane to look like a member of Brothers to the Rescue. There is talk of offering Elian ‘political asylum’ or imposing US citizenship upon him. At the same time, he is showered with expensive and sophisticated toys, sweets, a trip to DisneyWorld. He is allowed to go nowhere without his Miami relatives – not even to meet his two grandmothers, who flew over from Cuba to visit him at the end of January. His father reports that when he phones him from Cuba, the Miami relatives stuff the boy’s mouth with sweets and tell him what to say.
This cynical abuse of a young child by his self-styled guardians should be cause enough for Elian to be sent straight home to his father. International law demands it; natural justice demands it. Even the US’s own discriminatory immigration policy towards Cuba – the Cuban Adjustment Act – demands it.
For 33 years, the Act has actively encouraged illegal migration from Cuba to the US by the promise of US citizenship to those who leave the island illegally, while severely restricting visas to those who wish to go through the proper channels. Meanwhile the illegal US propaganda station, Radio Marti, blares out lies about the capitalist paradise that awaits just the other side of the shark- infested Florida Straits. Those seduced by the propaganda often pay huge sums to ‘traffickers in persons’ and risk their lives on unseaworthy vessels and rafts. Elian’s stepfather apparently charged those who travelled with him $1,000 each. However, the Act stipulates that those picked up at sea – as Elian was – should be returned to Cuba immediately.
Rank hypocrisy
This politically-motivated immigration policy applies, of course, only to socialist Cuba. CANF claims it would be a ‘human rights abuse’ to return Elian to poverty in Cuba. But immigrant children from neighbouring Haiti are unceremoniously deported back to the island, where life expectancy is nearly 30 years less than that in Cuba; where infant mortality is 95 per 1,000 live births (6.4 in Cuba) and where they have 50% less chance of learning to read or write than a Cuban child.
Within the United States itself eight million children are without healthcare, many of them from immigrant families. Infant mortality in the USA is 7.2 per 1,000 live births, higher than in Cuba and, when statistics are analysed, twice as high for black children as for white. Drugs and guns are rife in US schools; a third of all inner-city children have had someone they know killed by the time they are 15. The Nike sweaters and Mickey Mouse baseball caps, hi-tech toys and DisneyWorld glitz which surround Elian are a glittering sham. A regretful Cuban exile wrote to Elian’s father, imploring him not to give in ‘to a bunch of wackos who have power in this country in which there is not the least bit of respect for a child’s life. This I tell you, as an exile, because I was one of those who, perhaps like Elian’s mother, left from there thinking for the land of the free, and I found out that there’s nothing of the sort and the power of those who have money rules.’
The Cubans may be poor in material resources, but are rich in their socialist society and the gains of the Revolution. In Cuba, every child goes to school, has access to healthcare and is cherished and valued. Elian’s father has refused attempts by CANF to bribe him with offers of millions of dollars, a house and a car to defect to the USA. Instead, Cubans have mobilised in their millions to demand Elian’s return to socialist Cuba. Hundreds of thousands demonstrate daily outside the US Interests Section in Havana; the Cuban children’s organisation, the Pioneers, has brought the youth of Cuba out onto the street; all over the country placards, banners and t-shirts demand that Elian be returned to his family, his home and Cuba.
Cat Alison
FRFI 153 February / March 2000
Demand Elian’s return to Cuba!
President Bill Clinton:
e-mail [email protected]
tel: 00 1 202 456 1111/fax: 00 1 202 456 2461
Attorney General Janet Reno
Tel 00 1 202 514 2001/Fax 00 1 202 307 6777
Vice-President Al Gore:
[email protected]
Send messages of support to Cuba via Granma International: [email protected]
