UNITED STATES: Elian's rescue a blow to 'Miami Mafia'
ATLANTA — Almost five months after he was found adrift on the high seas near Florida, six-year-old Elian Gonzalez has been reunited with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at a resort near Washington, D.C. But he is not yet home in Cuba.
In what is surely one of the most bizarre judicial rulings ever, a three-judge panel of the Federal Appeals Court for the south-eastern United States granted Elian an injunction forbidding him from leaving the country, or even visiting his own country's diplomats in Washington.
The boy was rescued in a dramatic pre-dawn action April 22 that was televised live internationally. US federal government officers raided the house, in Miami's "Little Havana", where the child was being held, and, with a display of force, were able to extract him. Apart from a couple of bruises to right-wing emigres who tried to get in the way, there were no injuries.
Cuba's President Fidel Castro hailed the raid in a speech to a previously scheduled rally in Cuba on the evening of the same day. The rally, to commemorate the 39th anniversary of the victory over the US-organized Bay of Pigs invasion, was held at the sugar mill that served as Cuba's field headquarters during that fight. Some 45,000 people had been expected at the event, but with the day's news the crowd swelled to an estimated size of between 200,000 and 400,000 people.
US had no choice
Castro declared a symbolic 24-hour truce in the revolution's battle against the US, and praised the efficacy of the federal officers involved in the action. He gave a detailed account of the negotiations leading up to the raid which made clear why, after nearly five months of stalling, the US authorities felt they now had no choice but to act.
Castro revealed that the boy's father, who had come to the US two weeks earlier on the basis of US government representations that the child would be immediately restored to him, had decided to act on his own to end the intolerable abuse his son was being subjected to.
As the Justice Department was continuing to play along with right-wing emigre groups with one round of fruitless negotiations after another, Gonzalez told Reno hours before the raid that if he did not have his son back in his arms on Saturday (April 22), he would be board a plane to Miami on Sunday to retrieve him.
Although both the government and at least one major news organisation (CNN) knew about the father's ultimatum, it has been left out of virtually all accounts of the raid.
The host of the CNN program Crossfire, Bill Press, got the story first-hand from Juan Miguel Gonzalez hours before the raid, but if the information was passed on to journalists preparing the on-air reports in Atlanta, they kept quiet about it.
According to Press's account, which was released 24 hours late and buried in the CNN allpolitics web site as if it were an election campaign story, Elian's father's plan was to hold a news conference prior to departing Washington urging that the people of the US join him in confronting his son's kidnapper uncle the next day.
Instead of presenting a true account of the circumstances surrounding the raid, from the first moments the capitalist press focused on whether the raid had been "violent" and the use of force "excessive".
Media distortion
An Associated Press photographer sympathetic to the Miami relatives was inside the house to "document" Elian's "capture". AP chose one misleading frame to flash around the world to make it seem as if the federal officers had terrorised the boy.
The entire sequence of seven AP photographs makes clear, however, that the boy was traumatised by the efforts of an Anglo supporter of the relatives to hide him in a closet; that the federal officer did not threaten the boy nor anyone else with his weapon; and that the accomplice, contrary to his claims that the child was "ripped out" of his arms, in fact handed the child to an immigration service agent.
Elian's rescue caught the Miami relatives and the right-wing Cuban emigre groups completely by surprise. US attorney-general Janet Reno had shown such extraordinary forbearance, even after the relatives openly defied an order to return the child and dared the government to try to take him by force, that they could not believe the US administration had finally found the political will to end the kidnapping.
Of course, what the gusanos [Cubans refer to counter-revolutionary emigres as "worms"] could not take into account was the impact of Cuba's international campaign to free the child, and how it was forcing Reno's hand.
When Elian was first found last November, the administration's initial response was to give the Miami relatives and their right-wing allies a green light to keep the boy, saying it was a custody dispute that belonged before the elected judges of the Miami family courts.
But after Cuba launched a massive campaign to demand that the child be returned to his family, and protests started pouring in from all over the world, the Washington thought better of it. It discovered that the boy's immigration status was still pending, and thus his fate was in the hands of federal authorities.
They also tried to blame Juan Miguel Gonzalez for the delay in sorting out the case, claiming he had been reticent to meet with US officials in Cuba.
That marked the beginning of an extraordinary four-month spectacle during which the federal government, although officially claiming to recognise the rights of the Elian's father, did not lift a finger to reunite the boy with his family. Instead, the father was subjected to extensive questioning by US officials in Cuba, as if he were the kidnapper, and the Miami relatives were courteously encouraged by Reno to tie her up in court.
Even after the relatives lost in court, for weeks Reno engaged in fruitless "negotiations" over the boy's return with the Miami relatives.
The reason for the ruling class's reticence is that they wanted to find a face-saving way out for the right-wing counter-revolutionary groups that Cuban revolutionaries call the "Miami Mafia".
These groups form an essential prop and valuable tool in the US ruling class's continuing war against the Cuban Revolution; they help set the terms and limits of discussions about Cuba in the US press and academia; and they serve as a convenient pretext for politicians to hide behind in carrying out new aggressions against Cuba. The US rulers wanted to find a solution which did not damage this valuable imperialist asset.
Contrary to the arguments of liberal commentators, these groups do not control or dictate US policy towards Cuba, nor do not they keep alive the hostile policy. It is the US policy — and the millions of dollars voted every year by Congress — that keeps these outfits on life support.
This does not mean that these groups are simply puppets. They have a logic of their own, mostly dictated by the hysterical anticommunism that has been necessary to keep them together through four decades of uninterrupted impotence and defeat.
That visceral hatred of Cuba is what led to the Miami relatives and emigre groups to try to keep Elian from his father to begin with, and what prevented them from listening to US President Bill Clinton's and Reno's repeated entreaties to climb down from the untenable position they had taken.
That Reno and Clinton finally acted to bring the kidnapping to an end does not mean that they have changed course on Cuba. As if to underscore that point, assistant secretary of state Peter Romero, in charge of Latin America policy, denounced Castro's handling of the Elian case as "absolutely deplorable". An AP report stated: "[Romero] said the administration intends to retain economic sanctions and other kinds of instruments to isolate the Cuban regime, which he described as 'renegade' and 'undemocratic'."
It was only the powerful protests of working people in Cuba and around the world, together with Juan Miguel Gonzalez's extraordinary courage, that finally forced the Clinton administration to rescue Elian. Still more protests and pressure will be needed to convince the US authorities to complete their break with the kidnapping and allow Elian and his family to go home.
BY GILBERTO FIRMAT