One of the first news photos of Juan Miguel Gonzalez arriving at Dulles International Airport to reclaim his son Elian showed him in mid-stride, so you could see the soles of his shoes. They were unmarred by any contact with pavement; they’d obviously been in a box when the plane took off from Havana. Had he bought himself a new pair of shoes for the trip? Unlikely, once you looked at his shirt-collar, which was two inches too big for his neck. Clearly it was the Cuban government that had decided how to present Juan Miguel to the American public, and that should not be surprising. With the collusion of the Clinton administration, they’ve called the tune of this custody battle since last Thanksgiving, when Elian was found tied to an inner tube three miles off the Florida coast.
Standing in his fishy suit, Juan Miguel gave a bizarre speech. “For exactly 137 days,” he said, “I have lived unjustly and cruelly separated from my son.” Whose injustice would that be? Whose cruelty? “I became aware how during this time my son was being subjected to cruel psychological pressures intended to influence his character. . . . And as if that were not enough, Elian has been exhibited in parades . . . ” When? What parades? Most stunning was his description of the Lazaro Gonzalez family of Miami as “distant relatives he had never seen or who had met him only once.” Your father’s brother is hardly a “distant relative.” And “met him only once” is a dismissive way to describe the extraordinary two-week visit that Lazaro and Delfin Gonzalez made to Cuba in 1998, for the express purpose of visiting Juan Miguel and his son. Said Juan Miguel Gonzalez to his Cuban TV audience on the night of his arrival, “Those people really don’t want the best for my son.” That’s a weird way to characterize the very people Juan Miguel phoned the day after Elian’s departure to alert them that their nephew was on his way.
Mr. Gonzalez’s statements since arriving from Cuba last Thursday to claim custody of his son have been so far removed from reality as to raise the possibility that he is out of his mind. But we pass no judgment on Mr. Gonzalez’s decency or his fitness as a father. We do not underestimate the pressures he is under, political and otherwise. NBC reported last week that Mr. Gonzalez’s mother, who remains in Havana, has been moved to a secure government building for the duration of his trip. We think it likely he is operating under coercion, or at least strong influence.
There is another possibility, of course — that Mr. Gonzalez is the sincerest of Communists. There’s some evidence for this. He has been described in press accounts as a doorman, security guard, cash register operator, and the employee of a tourist agency — a protean job description that fits many an Interior Ministry secret policeman. Mr. Gonzalez lives in a protocol house in a diplomatic neighborhood, of the sort the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez lives in; he has air conditioning in a country where many lack electricity.
There may be a good explanation for Mr. Gonzalez’s cushy setup and his strange comportment in the United States. But whatever that explanation is, we don’t yet have it, and only a court of law can give it to us. So why is the Clinton administration doing everything it can to keep this case out of a court of law?
To listen to the Clinton administration, the sudden visit of Juan Miguel Gonzalez, after four months’ absence spent largely calumniating the United States, should arouse no suspicion and requires no explanation. “The law is very clear,” says Attorney General Janet Reno. “A child who’s lost his mother belongs with the sole surviving parent.” What law is that? The Child-Who-Lost-His-Mother Law? If this is what the debate was about, why didn’t you tell us in the first place?
Because this is the exact opposite of what the administration argued in the first place. The administration now insists emphatically that it has no way to stop the process of hustling Elian back to Cuba. (Although it claims to prefer that Juan Miguel and his Castroite handlers stay until the appeal by Elian’s Miami relatives of the INS decision reaches the appeals court.) But the administration’s insistence is simply not true. The INS can issue a no-exit order for anyone — including you or me — at its discretion. It can mandate that Elian stay by the very same authority under which it now mandates — yes, mandates — that he be sent back to Cuba.
Nor has this always been the administration’s position. In the days following Elian’s rescue, spokesmen for the U.S. Border Patrol announced that Elian could stay, the INS issued a statement that Elian’s fate was a matter for state court (or family court if it came to a custody battle), and the State Department concurred. It’s the INS that paroled Elian to the Lazaro Gonzalez family to begin with. Then in December of last year, two things happened. First, Castro demanded that Elian be returned within 72 hours, implicitly threatening to send a flotilla of unsavory refugees towards South Florida. Then he agreed, in an unprecedented, if minor, act of neighborliness, to accept the return to Cuba of eight Cuban nationals who had been rioting in a Louisiana prison.
We’re beginning to see what the big rush is about. Clearly, the administration has cut a deal with Fidel Castro, in which Elian is a pawn. The officials involved in the case want to make sure that this is taken care of before anyone has a chance to find out what the terms of that deal are. We know certain of its conditions — and they’re an affront to America’s conscience. One was that Juan Miguel stay in the home of the head of the Cuban interests section — and by what right does our government negotiate with Fidel Castro about the movement of a human being on American soil? The second was that Juan Miguel be given custody of Elian with no questions asked — and by what right does our government deliver a 6-year-old guest of the nation to a dictatorship his mother died trying to escape?
In cutting this sneaky deal, the administration has contaminated our own system with a little bit of the mendacity, opacity, and brutality of the Cuban one. The INS, after having interviewed Juan Miguel Gonzalez only under the eyes of a Communist regime that rules by terror, saw no need — had no inclination, even — to conduct a fresh meeting once Mr. Gonzalez arrived on free soil.
Mr. Gonzalez’s meeting with Reno and INS commissioner Doris Meissner, meanwhile, seemed to consist of receiving unilateral assurances that his suit would meet no obstacles. “All you had to do was look at him and listen to him and see how much he loves the little boy,” said Reno, as if that were dispositive. (What was that about the rule of law, again?) Reno’s assistant Eric Holder then added, “We have engaged psychologists, who have told us it is in Elian’s best interest to reunite him with his father as quickly as possible.” What psychologist — outside of Cuba — would make such a judgment without having met Elian? President Clinton, meanwhile, assures us that Juan Miguel is a “fit” father. On what grounds? Are there any other custody battles he’d like to weigh in on?
For all Janet Reno’s pretty talk, this case is not about the rule of law. The administration’s ultimate weapon is not the courts but its threat of criminal contempt charges against Elian’s Miami family if they refuse to abide by executive-branch dictates. Here as elsewhere, the Clinton administration is invoking the “rule of law” as cover for an increasingly arbitrary set of make-it-up-as-you-go-along fiats and executive actions.
And in this power struggle, Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer, Gregory Craig, plays a murky role. We now know that at least part of his legal fee is being paid by the National Council of Churches. But we have plenty of other questions. Who hired him? We’ll bet it wasn’t Juan Miguel who picked up the phone. If Mr. Craig’s client really is Juan Miguel and not Fidel, why was Castro present at their Cuban meetings? Has Mr. Craig told his client he has the right to meet alone with Americans — without Cubans? If not, why not? Does Juan Miguel know his rights as a client? Or is he being played for a fool in a game of raison d’etat?
There used to be an institution that could be trusted to remain vigilant about the actions of Communist regimes, and to ask such questions about the way they operated. It was called the Republican party. But Senate majority leader Trent Lott has refused to bring to the floor a bill to give Elian citizenship — or even permanent residency — until he can be assured it will pass in a rout. House speaker Dennis Hastert is AWOL. Steve Largent, after a political career built on describing Christian worship as a bulwark of citizenship, has suddenly agreed to deliver a boy to a regime where Christian worship has been illegal for almost all of the past 40 years. George W. Bush, preoccupied with trivial education-policy speeches, has been more interested in snickering at Al Gore’s vacillation on Elian than in Elian himself. Shame on them all.
It’s a shame for the United States, but not just for the United States. Whether we like it or not, Cubans view this situation much as Fidel Castro does — as a straightforward power struggle. They’ll draw the correct, if demoralizing, conclusion — that the one power that could have stood with them against communism refused to do so, whether out of cowardice or outright Communist sympathy. Here it’s worth repeating the position of Cuba’s constitution on parenting. Parental rights exist “only so long as their influence does not go against the political objectives of the state.” We are not returning Elian to Juan Miguel Gonzalez; we are returning him to Cuba. When Elian gets on the plane, Juan Miguel doesn’t get the little boy; Cuba does. Juan Miguel will not make the final decisions that shape Elian’s life; Cuba will. Under the guise of the “rule of law,” we’re returning a little boy to a world where no rule of law exists.
Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors
