The Life and Trials of Elián
In the sad adventure that the Cuban boy Elián González has been living ever since he was left adrift in the middle of the Caribbean at the mercy of sharks, then miraculously saved by a fisherman who brought him to Miami, the great victor has been Fidel Castro. Even those of us who believe him to be one of the most repugnant dictators ever produced by the authoritarian fauna of Latin America must take off our hats to him: in the forty-second year of his absolute rule over the unhappy island of Cuba, the longest-lived tyrant of the Western Hemisphere has managed to manipulate Elián’s case with such cold clarity and incredible cynicism that for several months no one has mentioned the autocracy he has made of his country or the catastrophic economic situation of the Cuban people. The only subject of discussion has been the child-martyr and the legal and political controversy surrounding his fate, with the Cuban exile community publicly condemned as intolerant extremists who have no respect for the law and with the government and justice system of the United States cornered into seeming agreement with Castro and accession to his wishes. To such a pass have we come: Fidel Castro, backed by the United States, plays the defender of parental custody and the champion of a poor father whose son is about to be snatched from him by the Nazi-fascist bandits of Miami.
Nevertheless, instead of becoming indignant, we should try to examine these events with a cool head. It seems hopeless, at this point, to recall that the person at the heart of this story is a young child of divorced parents who has just lived through one of the worst experiences imaginable—flight from Cuba in utterly precarious circumstances, shipwreck, the death of his mother and almost all the other fugitives, and long hours afloat on the high seas clinging to an inner tube—which ought to have earned him a minimum of consideration, since it is obvious that anyone who has been through such an ordeal is in delicate shape, with profound trauma ahead of him. But that has not been the case, since from the very beginning Fidel Castro, then the Miami exile community, saw the boy as a weapon to be used in a political battle to score points against their adversaries. The fatal error of the Miami exiles, who fell naively into the trap set for them by the dictator, was to accept a political struggle over a matter that should have remained on a strictly legal plane. Since it was logical to conclude that parental custody rights, which are universally acknowledged, would prevail before a court of law, it was imprudent to turn the argument that Elián should stay in the United States into a campaign in the fight against the dictatorship, since the battle would be difficult, if not impossible, to win. This has been borne out so far, and will probably be confirmed when the Atlanta jury delivers its final verdict: that Elián should be returned to the person who exercises the unquestioned right of paternity over him.
That this conclusion was predictable and that it is lawful don’t make it right. I believe it is wrong, and immoral, because, given the very special circumstances of Elián’s case, the person to whom the United States will turn the boy over isn’t his father but Fidel Castro, the only person who really has custody over all the Cubans on the island, as the historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals explains in an admirable article refuting the propagandistic book by García Márquez on the subject. But this is an ethical and political truth, and the courts in democratic countries judge not on the basis of political and moral realities but according to the law, although the latter might contradict and make a mockery of the former, as has happened in this case. With the great instincts of a political animal who never strays from the central aim of his existence—clinging tooth and nail to the absolute power he has wielded for more than four decades—Fidel Castro realized the good he could get out of Elián, and moved to act.
To understand that his concern was not the welfare of a helpless child, we need simply cast a glance at his record. Just seven years ago, in 1993, untroubled by the least twinges of conscience, the Cuban dictator ordered the sinking of the tugboat March Thirteenth, in which many defenseless Cubans were trying to flee the island; among those who died were nearly a dozen children, some of them just a few months old. And the Cuban writer César Leante has recently testified, drawing on the evidence of his own children’s lives, to the kind of childhood and adolescence afforded by the Castro regime, with its rigidly run schools, obligatory work camps, three years of military service, and international military expeditions ordered to satisfy its leader’s megalomania. So there is room to doubt that the massive mobilizations unleashed by Fidel Castro over the last few months in “defense” of Elián González were occasioned by his altruistic desire to defend fatherhood. They are really a psychological maneuver intended to distract those on the home front and a clever attempt to provoke the exile community in Miami into taking positions that will hurt its image and seem to confirm the extremism and insularity attributed to it in Cuban propaganda. In both objectives, the dictator has triumphed.
From the outside, the mass gatherings that took place every day all over the island demanding the return of Elián had the same pitiful appearance as the grandiose demonstrations of Stalinist Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Maoist China, or Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, which were intended to show the tight political unity of a people rallied behind a maximum leader but really revealed the servitude and regimentation of a society deprived of even the most insignificant measures of freedom, initiative, or spontaneity and turned into an army of automatons, blindly propelled by fear, propaganda, servility, and the demands of power. But on the inside it is likely that the spectacle took on a different aspect and that, barraged with the incessant and demagogic one-sided information delivered by a media system designed to manipulate the minds of the nation, many Cubans swallowed the official story and went out to protest of their own accord, declaring themselves against Elián’s “kidnappers” and for the poor father whose child was taken from him. If even distinguished poets and a Nobel laureate put their pens at the service of this farce, what could be expected from the average misinformed Cuban, his only news that filtered down to him by the regime’s propaganda machine? For several months, hunger, miserable living conditions, the shameful state of political prisoners, and the total lack of freedom and rights of citizenship were reduced to secondary importance for a nation caught up in the commotion of fighting to “free Elián.”
Why did the exile community respond to this Machiavellian provocation by trying to keep the boy in Miami by whatever means it could, even against court orders and the requests of the U.S. government? Partly, it is clear, because of a genuine feeling of solidarity with Elián’s mother, who lost her life trying to bring her son to a country where he could grow up free, and out of affection for the unfortunate child. But in large part, they reacted out of desperation and frustration with a regime that, despite having ruined their country and turned it into a concentration camp, seems more firmly ensconced than ever, with the international community now increasingly indifferent to the fate of the Cuban people and resigned to Fidel Castro as a mostly harmless pest (except in his dealings with Cubans), even helping him to survive by sending him masses of tourists and dollars, or establishing businesses in Cuba that take advantage of the slave labor the regime offers, and demanding that the United States end its embargo—after all, why deny the Cuban dictatorship what is allowed the Chinese and Vietnamese dictatorships? I understand very well the feeling of impotence and rage that must sometimes overwhelm Cubans in exile, who feel that the years are going by and their efforts to end the tyranny stifling their country are hopeless, that the tyrant remains in power, unscathed and insolent, without giving an inch on questions of repression or public freedoms or human rights, and that instead it is they who are getting older or dying with a terrible feeling of defeat.
But the political struggle must never succumb to irrationalism and mere passion, because if it does, its ideas and principles will be compromised. The exile community is superior to the dictatorship because the latter is founded on arbitrariness and force, whereas the former defends a free and lawful system in which human rights are protected and the general good is defined by a judiciary that freely elected authorities have the obligation to support. The Miami exiles who unwisely challenged the government and the courts, refusing to heed the decision that ordered them to return Elián to his father, didn’t just make a political mistake; they damaged their cause, stripping it of its greatest justification, which is respect for the law, the basis of the democratic system. This respect can’t be subordinated to claims of the justice of a cause, because if it could, society would ultimately be dominated by the chaos, anarchy, and arbitrariness that are the ideal breeding grounds for dictatorship.
The U.S. government’s behavior in this affair has been lamentable, especially on the night of April 22, when it ordered a helmeted commando unit, armed as if to launch a bloody attack on a terrorist hideout, to assault the house of Elián’s Miami relatives under cover of darkness. The New York Times columnist William Safire put it best: what happened there “damaged Clinton’s reputation, incensed moderates, and brought shame on the United States.” This explains why surveys showed that although a majority of North Americans believed Elián should be returned to his father, an even greater majority condemned as excessive the brute force used to capture the child and bring him to Washington. The photograph of the automaton-like soldier pointing a huge machine gun at a terrified Elián, who shrinks in the arms of the fisherman who saved his life, will haunt Clinton as surely as his tendency to lower his pants in the company of Arkansas state employees and White House interns; it will certainly help the Republicans beat the Democrats in the next elections, and possibly prevent Hillary Clinton from winning the New York Senate seat she is running for against Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It is quite a paradox that the president under whose administration the United States achieved the greatest economic prosperity in its history will be remembered primarily for making passes at women working under him and for sending a fearsome military commando unit to capture a little boy in shorts as if he were a highly dangerous assassin, in a house where the FBI found no weapons, where not a single bodyguard was present, and where no one put up the slightest physical resistance to the raid. When, thrilled by what had happened, Fidel Castro proclaimed that for the first time in forty years the United States and Cuba had experienced a truce and a rapprochement that night, he was telling a disturbing truth.
This whole sad story vividly illustrates an ancient maxim: dictatorships have an indisputable advantage over democracies when differences are hashed out on legal grounds, because the law imposes rules that democracies must respect and that limit their actions but that dictatorships ignore, except in specific cases when they suit the dictators’ purposes. In Elián’s case, a bright light has been shed on the way the laws of a democratic society can serve the interests of a despot who uses them to inflict a setback on his adversaries and briefly lend himself a veneer of legitimacy. Parental custody is a respectable cause, even when, as in this case, it only gives Cuban totalitarianism some breathing room and sullies the political image of the Miami exile community.
What will Elián’s fate be if he returns to Cuba? It’s not hard to imagine. For a while, so long as Fidel Castro can still get some political mileage out of him, the playacting will continue. The prodigal child will be the object of popular adoration, the little pet of the regime, and a photograph of him, smiling in the arms of the magnanimous commander—maybe tugging on his beard with his little hands—before a crowd leaping and shouting with joy, will be broadcast around the world. Then, too, perhaps a distinguished writer with many awards to his name will write a long article about the wonderful, painstaking psychological work undertaken by a handful of teachers, analysts, and doctors of the revolution to help little Elián regain his mental and emotional balance after the terrible ordeals he was subjected to by imperialist treachery. In his beautiful house with a pool, Elián will be convinced that life is much more comfortable and luxurious in Cuba than in Miami, and he’ll have a wonderful time in his place of honor at parades when the masses wave and chant his name. Then, sooner or later, while he is still a child or perhaps when he is an adolescent, Elián will no longer be of use to the great dissembler, and he’ll experience another of those radical shifts that will have marked his life since he was born: the return to anonymity, the grayness and scarcity and limited existence that is the shared fate of the immense majority of his countrymen, and the apathy and resignation required for survival in societies ravaged by a dictator. Or—who knows?—maybe he will defect to the ranks of the silent and growing rebellion that leads many of his countrymen to do daring things that might land them in jail, like joining human rights activist groups, or circulating information, or even stepping onto a raft and setting off to sea once more, as his mother did with him in her arms years before, prepared for anything—to drown or be eaten by sharks—just to escape the enslaved country to which the judges, leaders, and soldiers of the most powerful democracy in the world returned him, in strict accordance with the law.