FACES AND PLACES: Elian's return profanes mother's memory (01/23/00)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Elian's return profanes mother's memory

The brouhaha swirling around 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez regarding his Cuban father's rights proves that some of us still have no clue what life under Marxist totalitarianism is all about.

Once again we are projecting our own traditions on a thug society. We believe that Cuba respects family values.

Once again we are elevating a Marxist nation to parity with our own democracy. We believe that Cuba is governed by the rule of law.

Once again we are being told that we must respect the father's rights as if "rights" had any meaning at all in Castro's Cuba.

Some commentators are writing that "our hatred of Castro" prevents us from doing "the right thing." Others are dismissing protests by Miami's Cuban community as "politically motivated" as if "spontaneous protests" by Cuba's children are not orchestrated by Cuban secret service.

Shamefully, we still have commentators who, as in Soviet times, argued that Soviet citizens were not all that unhappy. They may not have enjoyed the prosperity we did in the United States, but hey, no big deal. The Soviet Union guaranteed them proper medical care, a job and an education.

What about Elian's mother risking and losing her life in an effort to see that her son lived in a free country? One columnist, Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times, isn't sure about that. "Maybe she wanted to breathe the sweet air of freedom," he writes. "Maybe she wanted cable TV." Now there's a moronic thought.

America isn't all that it's cracked up to be, suggests Neil Steinberg. "Don't get me wrong," he writes. "We've got a great nation here and many people show up seeking a better life. But not everybody does or wants to." The fact that some of us believe most people would love to live in America is "an outgrowth of our own bottomless self-regard," according to Mr. Steinberg.

People have choices, suggests Mr. Steinberg; "if the choice was sending my boys to some supposed 'better life' in a nice, developed country - say Belgium - and never seeing them again, or moving as a family to 1956 Chevy-clogged, Castro-dominated, Communist Cuba, it would be the no-brainer of all time. I'd buy a few straw hats, and we'd head southward, to spend our days in a large factory rolling cigars, padre e hijos, and our evenings - the soft, warm, Havana evenings - in front of one of those crumbling ruins playing dominoes. Actually, it doesn't sound too bad."

If life in sunny Cuba doesn't "sound too bad" for Mr. Steinberg, those Cubans who risk life and limb to leave "the soft warm, Havana evenings" must be totally demented.

Wondering what was best for Elian, Mr. Steinberg called Barbara Rowman, president of the Erikson Institute, a neo-Freudian center for child study. Early childhood ties are very important, she stated; breaking them can be "a severe blow to development." She assumed, of course, that father and Elian were close. So why didn't Elian's mother stick around? Why won't the "anxious father," a privileged member of the Communist nomenklatura, fly to Miami to get his son?

What about all those toys and other "cool stuff" Elian will lose if he goes back to Cuba? asked Mr. Steinberg. Cuba offers more important benefits. It "is notoriously famous for making sure children get health care, universal schooling, universal literacy," Dr. Bowman argued. Gimme a break. The Soviet Union was also "notoriously famous" for providing all of these things. We read all about it in Soviet Life! Remember? Now we know that a large percentage of Soviet hospitals had outdoor plumbing.

Besides Janet Reno, the ACLU and poor Cuban children who lockstep to Castro-orchestrated political protests on demand, who else is demanding that poor Elian return to Cuba? Not surprisingly, it's the National Council of Churches (NCC), a haven for left-wing radicals that could never say anything negative about the Soviet Union, much less Cuba. Like its parent organization, the World Council of Churches (WCC), the NCC has identified itself with "social justice" and the "class struggle" against "political repression" "economic bondage" and "Western imperialism." For the WCC, and many other left-wingers, Third World poverty is the fault of the United States, a nation that remains "profit-hungry."

Too many Americans still don't get it. Cuba is a totalitarian state that survives on terror. Family life there requires far more than buying "a few straw hats." Soon after consolidating power by killing some 10,000 alleged criminals, and imprisoning another 30,000, Fidel Castro formed Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), small neighborhood groups based around the "cuadra" (block). According to "The Black Book of Communism," the CDR leader "is charged with surveillance of 'counterrevolutionary' activities. The resulting social control is extremely tight. Members of the committees attend all CDR meetings and patrol constantly to root out 'enemy' infiltration. The surveillance and denunciation system is so rigorous that family intimacy is almost non-existent."

As in all Communist countries, parents are perceived as "representatives" of the state in raising their children whose first obligation is to the state. Soviet Ukrainian children were made aware of young Pavlik Morozov who betrayed his father to the authorities for alleged crimes against the USSR. The father was executed and Pavlik was lynched by angry villagers; he was later eulogized as a Soviet martyr-hero. These are the kinds of role models young Elian will have in Cuban schools. He will also have to serve in the army, since military service is mandatory. During Soviet times Fidel Castro sacrificed his militarized young men to fight in Angola where thousands died and hundreds contracted AIDS.

Concentration camps abound in Cuba. "From 1959 through the late 1990s, more than 100,000 Cubans experienced life in one of the camps, prisons or open-regime sites," writes Pascal Fontaine in "The Black Book of Communism." He notes: "Between 15,000 and 17,000 people were shot." He notes Cuba also has concentration camps for children and adolescents: "In the Palos zone is the Capitiolo, a special internment camp for children up to age 10."

Despite the fact that Castro sends helicopters to drop sandbags on their rickety boats, some 100,000 people have attempted to flee Cuba during the past 30 years. Two of them were Elian Gonzalez and his mother, a martyr-hero for freedom. His mother drowned. Elian survived. Sending him back to Cuba profanes his mother's sacred memory.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

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