Elian Should Stay

President Clinton is in a fix. He has always had two goals regarding Cuba: first, to normalize relations with Castro’s regime, which he continues to work on through back channels; and second, to avoid a massive refugee influx such as the Mariel boatlift of 1980. (Clinton blamed massive riots by marielitos in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, for his loss in the Arkansas governor’s race that year.) In 1994, he issued an executive order he hoped would serve both ends. It re-interpreted the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1996, which had granted Cuban refugees the right to stay in the United States once they got here. Clinton adjusted the Adjustment Act so that it applied only to the American mainland, not territorial waters.

That’s why, over the past decade, nightly news programs in South Florida have increasingly shown barbaric battles in waist-deep water, with exhausted rafters trying to stagger onto dry beach, while customs and immigration officials try just as desperately to swarm them and heave them back up onto boats, where they can be transported back to their island homes. (Or, just as likely, jail cells — since “illegally exiting” Cuba remains a crime.)

If the fishermen who picked up Elian Gonzalez had dropped the boy onto the beach rather than handing him off to the Coast Guard, this case would be bound for an asylum hearing of the sort Elian’s Miami relatives demanded. But they didn’t. Clinton’s Immigration and Naturalization Service moved to send Elian back. His relatives went to court, and the administration obtained a “favorable” ruling rejecting a stay on the INS’s decision. This was scheduled to go to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on May 8.

Then, last week, Attorney General Janet Reno, who has jurisdiction over the INS, showed the impatience on child-welfare matters she last displayed over Waco in 1993. She decided to wield the executive power over the Gonzalezes that she does in fact possess. After bragging about her forbearance in the case, she gave Elian’s Miami relatives less than 72 hours to sign a document promising to turn Elian over if the appeal went against them. Her aides at INS and Justice proceeded to brandish the order with bureaucratic sadism and swaggering machismo. “They think we’re bluffing but we’re not,” said Carole Florman of the Justice Department. After months of posturing by the administration, during which it claimed to have only the interests of Elian at heart, Reno’s assistants last week were threatening to “move him to different custody.” Armando Gutierrez, spokesman for Elian’s Miami relatives, said this was “not the American way.” He’s right: No law-abiding citizen we’ve ever heard of has ever been coerced into signing a document promising to obey the law. The Miami Gonzalezes didn’t sign.

The Clinton strategy of pretending to follow the courts is a con job. What the Florida court decided in the Elian case was basically that the INS has the right to enforce INS policy. Big deal. The INS, or at least its boss, Janet Reno, and her boss, Bill Clinton, also have the discretion to let Elian stay. So what’s at issue is whether the United States can in good conscience return a 6-year-old to one of the few remaining descendants of the mid-century totalitarianisms.

That’s why Al Gore deserves some credit for his two-part break with the administration. He’s right to say that the matter belongs in a family court, rather than in the INS bureaucracy. A real court could air such matters as the nature of the Castro regime and the extent to which Elian’s father is speaking his own mind in asking for Elian’s return. We can even give Gore tepid applause for supporting a congressional bill giving Elian permanent residency, which would make such a courtroom hearing inevitable. Republicans should move this legislation now, and challenge Clinton to veto it. He won’t.

We’re struck by the way Bill Clinton’s interests and Fidel Castro’s interests have thus far converged on the Elian matter. Castro’s pronouncements on the affair — he recently accused Miami Cubans of wanting to kill Elian rather than repatriate him — have been so intemperate as to be inconsistent with his expressed wishes to have the boy back. Last week, Castro weighed in once more. After four months of mocking suggestions that Juan Miguel Gonzalez be sent to Miami to reclaim his son, he suddenly announced that not just Juan Miguel, but a 31-person delegation including Elian’s stepmother, half-sister, grandparents, and various classmates, teachers, doctors, and Cuban officials was ready to leave for the States on a moment’s notice.

Of course, sending a 31-person delegation without the strictest state supervision is not something Cuba does. That’s why the trip, if it ever took place, would be organized like Elian’s grandmothers’ visit in January. According to Barry University president Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, who met with the grandmothers, Castro was calling the shots throughout. The rule was constant communication from Cuba via cellular phone, and zero communication between the Cuban subjects and Americans. This same desire for absolute control is why the trip to pick up Elian was planned for Washington, not Miami. There is no outpost of Cuban territoriality in Miami — such as the Cuban Interests section provides in Washington, protected by diplomatic convention — where the visitors can be kept sequestered and subject to Cuban authority.

It was thus unsurprising that the Cuban government released a letter allegedly from Juan Miguel Gonzalez late last week, denouncing Gore’s suggestion that he be given residency. Not to say that Mr. Gonzalez isn’t speaking his own mind — only that, if he is, he’s the first Cuban who’s been allowed to do so in 40 years. If Elian’s father and his entourage are given the freedom to circulate like regular American residents, their Cuban handlers will not be able to keep them from defecting.

But this trip has the look of a Castro-engineered bluff, a bluff colluded in by Gregory Craig, best known as the president’s lawyer at the bitter end of Monicagate. Craig now claims to be the lawyer for Elian’s father, although since Craig’s hourly fee approaches the per capita annual income of the average Cuban, we’re curious to know who’s actually ponying up for his services. Once the American press showed signs of taking the Castro offer seriously, Craig quickly modified its terms in a way that effectively took it off the table. “He needs only to be told: If he comes here, he will in fact be given custody of his son,” said Craig. In other words, it was the old Brezhnevite tactic — “We’ll negotiate as long as you’ll agree to abide by our wishes beforehand.”

Castro is not short of defenders. The gravamen of their arguments has been that Cuba is a normal country — or at any rate, no more uncivilized than the United States. The most preposterous such defense came from novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Cuban resident and dear friend of Castro, who wrote in the New York Times of the “harm being done to Elian’s mental health” by exposure to American culture: “At his 6th birthday party,” Garcia Marquez wrote, “celebrated on Dec. 6 in his Miami captivity [sic], his hosts took a picture of him wearing a combat helmet, surrounded by weapons and wrapped in the flag of the United States, just a short while before a boy of his age in Michigan shot a classmate to death with a handgun.”

We think we can live with his uncles’ giving him a toy gun and an American flag for his birthday. At least the Michigan boy hadn’t been taught to shoot his classmates, as Cuban students are. It’s the Cuban constitution of 1976 (Article 38, Clause C), not the American, that requires Communist indoctrination and military training for grammar-school children. It’s the Cuban school system, not the American, that keeps a permanent file shared with the secret police (the expediente acumulativo del escolar) on ideologically suspect children, and requires faculty to interrogate children concerning the “ideological integration” of their parents. It is the Cuban regime, not the American, that dragoons 98 percent of school-children into the paramilitary “Union of Communist Pioneers,” and that requires children, starting at age 10, to attend summer Communist indoctrination camps (escuelas al campo). It is the Cuban government, not the American, that publishes a pamphlet called Military Games for Pioneers, which teaches Elian’s classmates how to attack bridges, lay mines, murder sentries, and throw hand grenades through windows.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that when his mother loaded him onto the boat she would drown in, 5-year-old Elian Gonzalez was already a member of the Pioneers. But parents such as Elian’s are not allowed to object to the indoctrination and arming of their children. Constitutionally, their parental rights obtain “only as long as their influence does not go against the political objectives of the State.” This ought to resolve rather starkly the degree to which Greg Craig is Juan Miguel Gonzalez’s lawyer and the degree to which he is Fidel Castro’s.

President Clinton has lately taken to traveling the world apologizing for American collusion with authoritarian regimes. This little obsession has more and more the look of a hobby and less the look of moral resolution. If the president is willing to send a 6-year-old child back to a crumbling outpost of Leninism, what is the point of all these apologies? Apologies are promises. Ultimately, the Elian case is a battle over whether we take Communist dictatorship seriously enough to protect refugees in our nation who are threatened by it.

Our answer to this question is an unequivocal yes. The Miamians who are surrounding Elian’s house, the Cuban-American community organizers who urge wide-spread civil disobedience should federal authorities seek to remove him, and even those local elected officials who say they will refuse to cooperate with those same authorities, have our support. They are protecting more than Elian. They are protecting their country from a historic disgrace.

Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors