SEND THE BOY HOME
CUBAN-AMERICANS ARE SYING 6-year- old Elian should stay in America because he would live better and "prosper." What doesn't matter is that the 6-year old boy was raised by two grandmothers and his father now awaiting the boy's return. The Miami Cubans would like the boy to remain with distant relatives--a great-uncle and cousins--because this was never about family or children or what is best for Elian. This is all about politics and right-wing Miami Cubans using Elian as a pawn against the Cuban government.
These distant relatives claim to be serving the will of the child's mother, Elisabet Broton, who died along with her boyfriend, Larazo Rafael Munero, when their boat capsized and everyone except the boy and two adults perished at sea. The Miami Cubans claim that the mother and Munero were escaping Castro's dictatorship. This is the biggest lie of all. Munero had a criminal record in Cuba and had been in jail for 3 years for violently slicing off a man's finger in a bar room brawl. And, this wasn't his only offense and jail time for criminal acts. He went to America illegally before, and a few months later returned to Cuba, where he was caught and jailed again.
Munero had violent tendencies, and the maternal grandmother insists that Munero compelled her daughter to come with him to the US, which may or may not be true, but is immaterial. What is material is the illegal kidnapping of 6-year old Elian by the US government in not sending him back to his father.
Munero was a smuggler--witnessed by the two adult survivors--who charged nine Cubans on that boat $2,000 to come into the US illegally. If the mother participated willingly--and there is some doubt that she did--she would be a smuggler's accomplice in an illegal act, subjecting her to extradition back to Cuba. So it was not, as the right-wing Miami Cubans claimed, a "heroic flight to freedom."
Presidential candidates John McCain and George W. Bush and Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jesse Helms, who claim Elian would "prosper" in America, are clueless if they really believe it. The income gap in America grows daily between the rich and the poor. But if Elian emulates the Florida Cuban Mafia's drug trade, as well as Miami Cuban business practices that squeezed out non-Cubans in South Florida, he should do rather well, and he may indeed "prosper." This new-found criterion based on where one would "prosper" has never been a precedent in law for determining custody. Parents still do have some rights--unless they are Cuban communists (since Russian communists are now our friends).
The right-wing Cuban-American relatives offered the father $2 million, a house, and a car to not protest nor fight for the boy's return to Cuba. He refused.
"I am no longer neutral," Sister O'Laughlin said to reporters, and separating the boy from his relatives would be "another traumatic loss for him" because the boy has already bonded with those relatives.
I would also--at six--have bonded with anyone who took me to Disney World and Universal Studies and gave me everything I wanted. They have had since November 25, 1999, to "bond" and win the kid over to their propaganda model. It didn't take Janet Reno's friend--the nun--very long to dispel any suggestion of neutrality. Did anyone think she ever was "neutral" when she wore religious cloth?
In a letter published in Granma, the daily Communist Party newspaper, Elian's father asked the grandmothers to call him by cell phone during the meeting with the boy, but when the grandmothers attempted to use their cell phone, it was taken from them.
"Four to five thousand kids are apprehended every year," said Wendy Young from the Women's Commission on Refugee Women and Children. "I have never heard anything like what is going on with Elian."
"Thousands of children who enter the country alone are returned every year to live in conditions much worse than those in Cuba,"said Ann Pillsbury, director of Brooklyn's Central American Legal Assistance.
In America, we don't give a second thought to returning children every day to poverty, persecution, sickness, and misery, but give almost half a million dollars to a presidential candidate and hundreds of thousands of dollars to members of Congress to create special litigation and trample laws. What great statesmen we have in men like Bill McCollum, Sen. Connie Mack, Gov. Jeb Bush.
How long will it be before this government can remove any child from its home because of its parents' political views? Could it be any less ironic that the Florida Supreme Count reaffirmed the constitutional rights of parents to raise their children without interference in a case involving grandparents' visitation rights?
The weight of law is clear and favors sending Elian home. But if we can bomb Iraq back to the stone age and kill millions of children there, we can certainly keep a Cuban child away from his father in Cuba.
--The Golem, <http://pnews.org/>