By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources, (www.originalsources.com)
March 29, 2000
"Juan Miguel Gonzales was not able to communicate with his son on the day of the ruling by Judge K. Michael Moore, given that when he tried to call at the agreed time of 4:00 p.m. the wife of kidnapper great-uncle Lázaro González hung up on him," a Cuban Newspaper reported.
"What, if not fear, could keep a person from making a 30-minute trip to reclaim his son?" asked Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, the president of the college where Elian Gonzalez met with his aunts from Cuba," Asked columnist Thomas Sowell in a column entitled "Why the Left Desperately Wants Elian Back in Cuba."
Who is right? Well, of course, Elian Gonzalez didn’t meet with "his aunts from Cuba" at Sister O’Laughlin’s college. He met with his two grandmothers. And, on that day, we know from the U.S. press that Elian had the telephone snatched from his hands by people bursting in the room who, apparently, were listening to what was going on inside the room.
Apparently Elian was also denied the opportunity to speak with his father on the day of Judge Moore’s decision. So, who is it now that is denying the most basic of all freedoms to six year old Elian - the freedom to talk to his father?
In this morning’s Washington Post it is reported that the " Miami relatives of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez refused today to meet a key demand of federal immigration authorities." The great uncle refused to sign an agreement to "surrender the boy should they lose their next court battle" in spite of the INS letter on Monday which warned that In a letter late Monday, INS officials warned that the US government would terminate Elian's temporary parole--or permission to remain in the United States--at 9 a.m. Thursday if the relatives do not give their written assurances on this point. Since shortly after the boy was rescued at sea four months ago, INS officials, backed by the Clinton administration, Cuban President Fidel Castro and now a federal judge, have agreed Elian should be returned to his father."
Conservative writers and papers, on the other hand, who have claimed in the past to be in favor of "family values" have couched the debate over Elian in extraordinary terms. A senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute at Marina de Rey, California, compared the very notion of returning six year old Elian Gonzales to his father in Cuba with an obscure 1854 episode in which an adult run-away slave in Boston was arrested and returned to his slavemaster in Virginia.
So, what is the Conservative press saying? That six year old children are slaves to their parents and should have the "right" to run away to a foreign country at will? Exactly what does THAT kind of thinking do to the fabric of American law which has ruled, in a number of Supreme Court decisions the rights of parents over the demands of the state? There simply IS no American law which provides for the "right" of a grand-uncle who has been arrested four times for drunken driving, to prevail over a father’s right to raise a minor child. The father has not agreed to allowing someone else to act in his place. He has said consistently from the moment he found that his child had been sneaked out of Cuba by his ex-wife and her boyfriend without his knowledge that Elian should be returned to him. Distant relatives, with the backing of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Cuban American political lobbyists in Florida have consistently thwarted the father’s parental rights with the battle cry that he is "not free to speak his mind" but is a "prisoner or war" or a "tool of Fidel Castro" in his normal, natural desire to raise his son himself.
"The INS, with help from Miami police, has kept Elian under surveillance for some time now," the Washington Post quoted a government official as saying, "always knowing where he is. If official action is needed to bring the boy to his father, the officials said, it likely would be done by U.S. marshals." "Janet Reno shouldn't provoke this family and hold a gun to its head," said Jorge Mas, chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, the nation's largest Cuban exile group.
For all its pretended concern for a "legal" challenge to Juan Miquel’s rights as a father, it is becoming increasingly apparent to even the most casual observer that the group in Miami of Cuban exiles who have influenced U.S. Foreign Policy for nearly forty years towards Cuba, demanding a continuation of the hate and the hostility and the sanctions, have no respect for the rights of Elian Gonzales’ father.
Does Juan Gonzales have a reason to fear if he came to Florida to pick up his son or to appear in a Miami courtroom to personally demand his son’s return? He obviously believes that he does have reason to fear. Based on the determination of those holding his son, and their own public statements to date, is his fear that either Elian would be sprinted away or, perhaps, Juan Gonzales would meet with some unfortunate "accident" that would be fatal to him totally unreasonable?
Two or three months ago I would have thought it would be ridiculous for Juan Gonzales to actually fear assassination if he showed up in Florida to demand his son be turned over to him. After the last few weeks of receiving increasingly intemperate, hysterical and totally illogical writings from those opposing Elian’s return to his father, I can certainly understand the father’s fear, even if Sister O’Laughlin can’t. If Juan Gonzales came to America and promptly disappeared or met with an "unfortunate fatal accident," THEN what would happen to Elian? He’d probably be grown before the legal mess was untangled.
If Elian is denied the right to even SPEAK to his father in the presence of his two grandmothers, and if Juan Gonzales reads the Washington Post and learns that the INS apparently fears the power of those behind the efforts to keep Elian from returning home to his father in Cuba enough to be keeping Elian "under surveillance" it’s not a big jump to have the father worrying about assassination of himself or harm to his son should he show up in Miami in person. That is especially true considering the police record of some of his Miami cousins who are involved in this determined effort to try to make Fidel Castro look bad with a barrage of news stories about the lack of freedom on the island.
Over the week-end I received a copy of a letter signed by eight members of Congress, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Bill McCollum, Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, (Republicans) and Peter Deutsch, Democrat of Florida; Tom Delay, Republican Majority Leader, (R-Tx), John Shadegg (R-Az) and Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md), which they sent to Janet Reno in which they urged her to "abide by fundamental principles of due process" in the Elian Gonzalez case "until he has had the opportunity to exercise all his legal options, including appeals to federal and state court.""
Of course, six year old Elian Gonzalez is not the one making those appeals or paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawyers to file them. Someone is doing it in his name. According to both American law and Cuban law, the only person in this situation who has the legal right to MAKE such appeals is the child’s father, Juan Gonzalez, who has consistently refused to sign over his rights to decide his child’s future to either his distant relatives or to the well-heeled group of Cuban American lobbyists who are pretending THEY have the right to decide who raises Elian.
The letter to Reno from the members of Congress ends with the following statement: "At a minimum, this child deserves the opportunity to exercise every legal option available to him, and no action should be taken that would pre-empt these rights. Likewise, the constitutional rights of his relatives in this country must be given full consideration through the appeals process. There is absolutely no justification in short-circuiting the legal process in this case."
Elian Gonzales should have been returned to his father, as requested, back in November. He has been used by strangers for their political advantage for four months. That’s enough. He needs to be returned to his home and his father. If the Cuban American foundation that is paying for this charade in the courts wants to continue their efforts all the way to the Supreme Court, let them. In the meantime Elian, who has turned from an innocent, smiling six year old into an unhappy, sad-eyed six year old in full view of the American people should be returned to his father, grandparents and great-grandparents in Cuba to await the months and possibly years of legal maneuvering through the appeals process to the U.S. Supreme court.
Of course, anyone with a passing understanding of U.S. law knows that they haven’t a single law on their side in this case. The Cuban American lobby that launched this effort has over-played its hand. The U.S. politicians who have gone along with the charade that, somehow, Juan Gonzalez who has, with his parents and parents-in-law, raised little Gonzales, while his mother was off living with a man she was not married to, is going to torture and persecute his own son, have managed to make Fidel Castro look good. Castro and his supporters have come across as the good guys working to reunite father and son.
The Clinton Administration and its Republican opponents have come across looking like tools of the monied Cuban Americans.
"WHAT is happening with Elián is an evident demonstration of a lack of respect for justice, centered around the fact that the Immigration and Naturalization Service did not return the child to his country." Jose Estevez, a Los Angeles Lawyer observed. "In all of this, they are not seeking votes in the political sphere, but money for presidential campaigns."
If that’s true, Elian could be having to wait until the Presidential elections are over to return to his father and grandparents in Cuba.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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