“I THINK it’s his school uniform,” said Justice Department spokesperson Carole Florman of the white sailor shirt and blue scarf Elian Gonzalez appeared in at Wye Plantation last week. The editors of Cuba’s government newspaper Granma recognized Elian’s outfit, and that’s why they ran five pictures of him wearing it. It’s the uniform of the Pioneers, the Communist-indoctrination group that Cuban schoolchildren are required to join. Pioneers are taught guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and gun assembly, instructed to inform on their parents’ ideological deviations, and led in the singing of hymns to Che Guevara. “How Elian is educated is up to his dad,” Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesperson Maria Cardona said. If so, Elian’s dad is the only Cuban parent allowed to make such decisions.
The administration has allowed the Cuban government to set up a patch of Communist sovereignty on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Elian’s school, according to Granma, is meant “to save Elian not only from the clutches of the empire and the Miami Mafia but also from the clutches of ignorance, lack of culture, and selfishness.” There is a great hypocrisy here. The administration won support for its April 22 raid by arguing that Elian was being “exploited” by his Miami relatives. “In Miami,” said presidential spokesman Joe Lockhart on May 9, “there was a media circus atmosphere. And the idea of bringing the boy out and sitting down with reporters and doing videos, that certainly was close to the exploitative line.”
But now the administration is allowing the boy to be used as a prop by both Democratic fund-raisers and Cuban propagandists. In so doing, it is violating the law and engaging in systematic distortions that could be described as propaganda themselves.
Elian has been allowed out of Wye only once, to attend a dinner at the Georgetown mansion of Democratic fund-raising powerhouse Smith Bagley. Bagley is a close associate of Al Gore’s longtime fund-raiser Nathan Landow and the chairman of the Arca Foundation, a lobby dedicated to strengthening ties with Cuba. Last year, Arca bankrolled Pastors for Peace, the left-wing Latin America think-tank WOLA, and Randall Robinson’s TransAfrica, whose ferocious lobbying effort spurred a U.S. invasion to install the Aristide dictatorship in Haiti. We seem to be getting closer to an answer to the question of who is bankrolling Juan Miguel’s “lawyer” Gregory Craig. But one of the guests bristled at the suggestion that the Bagley dinner was a fund-raiser. “Not one dollar changed hands,” he said. (Do such evenings generally involve handovers of cash?)
Arca was also involved in the cultural exchange between Cuba’s national team and the Baltimore Orioles, owned by seven-figure Democratic contributor Peter Angelos. Angelos himself made news last week when it was reported that he would not sign any defecting Cubans, but backed down when several conservative thinkers, most notably Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, pointed out that such an exclusion would likely be illegal under the national-origins provision of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The INS’s reading is that, since Elian’s not a resident, the laws don’t apply to him — at least in the matter of schools. You can’t just set up a school in the state of Maryland without a thorough credentialing process, but that bothers no one in the administration. According to Cardona, “If [Elian’s teacher] were purporting to teach American children, or non-Cuban children, of course it would be different.” But that’s not what the law says. In Plyler v. Doe (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that the state cannot exclude illegal immigrants from the benefits of its educational regime. Presumably those benefits include credentialing. But even so, Elian’s Communist outfit shouldn’t bother anyone. “It’s not the INS’s business what Elian wears on a daily basis,” says Cardona.
That, too, appears to be untrue. In fact, the idea that Juan Miguel has the final say-so on who Elian sees and what Elian does is, both legally and logistically, the main fiction on which the administration’s — and Cuba’s — other fictions rest. Let’s go back to the warrants the administration flashed at its predawn raid. The Justice Department entered the house of Lazaro Gonzalez for the purpose of arresting Elian as an illegal alien. If it did not arrest him, it has defrauded a court of law. If it did arrest him, it took custody of him. It would then be able to transfer custody to the father, of course. But there is a legal procedure for that, and we have no indication that it was ever followed. Did a prosecutor consent to the custody transfer? Was there a bail hearing?
So who calls the shots? Is it Juan Miguel who decides that Cuban politicians can visit but Americans not? That Elian can appear on Cuban television but not answer questions from American audiences? The Wye Plantation is protected by 58 federal agents and several coast guard cutters. Are they at Juan Miguel’s beck and call? If so, is there any other private individual whose private residence is protected from media scrutiny by such firepower? When Elian was brought by motorcade to Smith Bagley’s house, did Juan Miguel call the limos as he’d call a cab?
Of course not. The Elian affair is — and has always been — a matter of raison d’etat. The rule of law has never stood a chance against the make-it-up-as-you-go-along pretexts negotiated between the Clinton administration and Cuba. This setup would not withstand the slightest media scrutiny, which is why the administration has worked overtime to obscure the truth. In this, its interests now coincide perfectly with Castro’s. In Washington and Havana, the propaganda side of the Elian affair has now become the whole of it.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
