Two Cuban baseball players — the star Andy Morales, the record-holding slugger who helped Cuba defeat the Baltimore Orioles with a dramatic three-run homer in an exhibition game last year; and Carlos Borrego, whose only record consists in his having been caught nine times by the Cuban Coast Guard while trying to escape the tropical prison that is Fidel Castro’s Cuba — were apprehended by U.S. immigration authorities on a speedboat in the Caribbean last week.
And we sent them back.
What a disgrace. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokeswoman Maria Cardona says we sent them back because their worries about Fidel Castro’s Communist dictatorship didn’t rise to the “credible fear threshold.” According to Cardona, “To pass the credible fear threshold they would have to demonstrate that they would be persecuted or physically harmed if they were to be returned to their home country.”
This is raison d’etat masquerading as legalism. There is prima facie evidence that both Morales and Borrego, as defecting celebrities, will be persecuted. New York Yankees pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez was kicked off the Cuban national team — and condemned to residence in a concrete shack and a life swabbing floors in a provincial elementary school — when his half-brother Livan defected to the United States. But let’s not dwell on hypotheticals: Last Thursday, the Cuban government issued an official attack on Morales, saying he was past his prime as a ballplayer. Furthermore, sources in the Morales family say that he has already been informed he won’t be invited when Cuba’s baseball team goes to the summer Olympic games in Australia in September.
There is a name for this kind of government action: persecution. Sorry, Maria Cardona, but those who fear persecution in Cuba — baseball players or not — fear it “credibly.”
The INS is reversing 40 years of sound Cuba policy. That’s why we won’t be able to take the Elian Gonzalez case and “put it behind us” until the Cuban people are able to put persecution behind them. The events of last week indicate that, while Elian may be headed back to Cuba, the muddled American thinking that denied Elian Gonzalez an asylum hearing persists. It is now crystal clear that if nothing is done to correct our current policy, others fleeing totalitarianism will be denied due process just as Elian was.
The Clinton administration wants to cozy up to Communist Cuba. It is not obvious why. But the more we learn about the Elian Gonzalez case, the uglier it looks. Documents unearthed by a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act request, dated in mid-January, show the U.S. government colluding with Castro against the Cuban people. There are two documents. In the first, a mid-level administration official writes: “DOS [the State Department] wants to have a daily conference call to coordinate press guidance and communications with the Cubans. They have lots of questions concerning the timing of litigation.” It adds: “Have we coordinated this with the press office and the chief of staff’s office?” So much for the president’s “hands-off” policy on the Elian case.
The second document involves the visit of Elian’s grandmothers to the United States in late January of this year, an idea that the administration tried to fob off as having originated with the grandmothers themselves. “DM [INS commissioner Doris M. Meissner] was firm about not having any INS involvement in this initiative. If our conversations in Cuba can proceed with the understanding that INS would not be involved, then DM would be most interested in hearing more about this idea.” The letter adds a reading of the Eleventh Circuit court proceeding that belies the administration’s claim that it was merely waiting for legal guidance on Elian’s fate. (“The judge’s decision is unlikely to contain clear cut language re the disposition of Elian.”)
Our big question is: Who are “the Cubans” here? An anonymous administration source has tried to claim that the phrase refers to the U.S. government’s Cuban interests section in Havana. Malarkey: No one calls the staff of our embassy in Paris “the French.”
Justice Department spokeswoman Carole Florman, responding to such allegations, says: “Oh, please. These are internal documents between U.S. government agencies about how we are going to deal with a foreign government. . . . They clearly state that Doris didn’t want to be involved.” But they don’t. What they clearly state is that Meissner didn’t want to be seen to be involved. It sounds to us as if the administration was colluding with the Cuban government to launch a PR campaign on the American people. The last we noticed, it was the job of executive agencies to protect the interests of the American people, not those of the Cuban government.
There’s a classic Clinton excuse for this wobbliness on Cuba that we hear over and over. It’s: “This happens every day, and no one notices when it doesn’t involve a baseball player.” We plead guilty. We’re more fascinated by the travails of El Duque Hernandez than by those of Jose Fulano de Tal. But now that we’ve noticed, let us declare that we’re ashamed of our country’s willingness to send Cubans of any description back to a life of indigence and terror.
It is time to extend a more generous welcome. To be more specific, it is time for Congress to reverse the executive orders of 1994 and 1995 that tore into tatters the Cuban Adjustment Act. That legislation, dating from the Johnson administration, held that any Cuban found in international waters was eligible for American citizenship. Today, Cubans are subjected to a wet foot/dry foot test. If you’re on the beach, you’re in. If not, wet-suited goons will wade out to push you onto a boat and send you back to Cuba. This is barbarism.
The Clinton administration has a fallback. It asks: “What’s so special about Cuba?” The Clintonites confront us with claims of hypocrisy. Haitians are coming here all the time, they say, and you don’t want to let them in! Let us hereby call their bluff. We say to the Clinton administration: You declare Haiti, whose politics are still dominated by the left-wing demagogue Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Communist mess that it is in fact becoming, and we’ll declare the same policy for Haiti as for Cuba.
Okay, this is an idealistic point of view. But if you want to be more “realistic”: We undermine our trustworthiness as a nation and as a people when we break our promises. And when we yield to pressure. Don’t think other nations don’t notice.
Besides, Cubans are special. We favor loosening Fidel Castro’s Communist stranglehold over Cuba by any means necessary — if he threatens a flotilla of refugees, we would suggest sending aircraft carriers to welcome them and bring them to our shores — as if the Cold War were still going on. Because the Cold War is still going on for those freedom-loving millions in Cuba who kept faith with the United States and trusted that the United States would keep faith with them.
Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors
