THE AGE WHEN politicians and journalists publicly denounced entire ethnic groups as “a bunch of wackos” or “crazies” or possessing a “mob” mentality is long gone, right? Not if the group in question is Cuban-Americans. It’s been open season on Cuban-Americans ever since they took the lead in trying to keep Elian Gonzalez in a free country. Perhaps not since the Irish-Americans of South Boston resisted a federal judge’s school busing order a quarter century ago have bien-pensant newspaper editorialists and liberal pols felt so free to express open contempt and loathing for a group they look down on.
Pete Waldmeir of the Detroit News, for instance, laments Al Gore’s decision to break with the Clinton administration’s policy on Elian Gonzalez: “If he’d cave in to a bunch of wackos just because they hint at civil disobedience if they don’t get their way, what would Gore do as president if some Third World nut case got in his face in a real crisis?” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch views the efforts of Cuban-Americans to keep Elian in the United States as “mob rule,” saying the demonstrators have a “blindingly obsessive hatred of Fidel Castro.” The Seattle Times thinks Elian should not be “a trophy to be paraded around by zealots.” Syndicated columnist Mark Russell refers to “the crazy Cubans in Miami” (though maybe that’s part of his comedy routine). The San Francisco Chronicle, for its part, calls the peaceful demonstrators near Elian’s Miami relatives a “racket of rabble rousers” and “shouting street mobs.” (Such rhetoric for the Chronicle is highly unusual, to say the least: When its own city erupted in violent riots along with Los Angeles in May 1992, the Chronicle sympathetically noted that the “riots spring from years of injustice.”)
Other journalists not ordinarily identified with the cause of law and order have lost patience for the first time in their professional lives with the venerable idea of civil disobedience. “Are we going to be governed in this country by law or by mob?” asks Anthony Lewis in the New York Times. David Rieff, author of The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami, also felt free to vent in the New York Times: The “most extreme and fanatical elements in the Cuban exile community” want “to defy both the United States and common-sense morality.” Miami, claims Rieff, is “an out-of-control banana republic within the American body politic.”
Perhaps most remarkable in the Times was columnist Bob Herbert, a man who calls his own city a “police state” even as he urges Miami police to unsheathe their batons and go after “the crazies”: “These kinds of disputes,” says Herbert, “are usually resolved peacefully. The authorities are called in, the crazies are routed and the rule of law prevails. But in this case the authorities have largely linked up with the crazies.” Al Gore, he complains, is “giving aid and comfort not to the rule of law but to the mob.”
It’s been much the same story in the broadcast media. The Nation’s David Corn sneered at “those extreme Cubans” on public radio without a demurral from the usually let’s-be-nice-now host, Diane Rehm. On the McLaughlin Group, Eleanor Clift offered this nuanced view of Cuban-American political attitudes: “Frankly, for a community which fled a dictatorship under Batista, they have come over here, and now they are trying to set up their own dictatorship.” Lawrence Kudlow was on hand to point out that the Cubans fled Castro, not Batista. Not that this slowed Clift down: “Yes, they fled Castro, but they seem to enjoy living under a dictatorship. And my point is they are establishing their own dictatorship in this country!”
This was the big-city version of the hoary love-it-or-leave-it trope, which was actually pulled out of cold storage by the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in Indiana, which chastised politicians of both parties for not having “the guts to tell the most obnoxious Cuban immigrants that if they don’t like it, they can go back to where they came from.”
Wackos. Crazies. Mob rule. Banana republics. Dictatorships. One starts to visualize Al Pacino as Tony Montana, the Cuban emigre in Scarface who “loves America . . . with a vengeance,” prowling the streets of Miami. But, it bears repeating, all the anti-Cuban slurs came at a time of peaceful protest by citizens concerned that Janet Reno’s Justice Department was unjustly trying to deprive a young boy of the freedom his mother died to procure for him.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Liz Balmaseda of the Miami Herald told Katie Couric she expects “the next thing we’re going to see is the Discovery Channel coming down here and documenting us eating mangoes and talking really fast with our hands. We have been called a banana republic, an out-of-control banana republic.” The critics don’t understand, she continued, the “city essentially is asking two things. It’s asking that the boy be given a fair asylum hearing, which he has not had. And it’s also asking, where [was] the father? Why wasn’t he here day one?” Or maybe the critics understand all too well. They just can’t stand the idea of uppity, anti-Communist Cuban-Americans standing up for a boy’s freedom.
Victorino Matus is an associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
