Posted on 12/07/2003 3:32:47 PM PST by Holly_P
Elian Gonzalez, who floated in Florida's waters four years ago on Thanksgiving, was 10 years old yesterday. The media spectacle that surrounded his arrival and departure has given way to obscurity; the world has forgotten Elian.
Those who ignore Elian's legacy may be driven by guilt: Most Americans opposed granting him asylum in America and their complete repudiation of the Statue of Liberty's Emma Lazarus poem was accompanied by unrelenting assurances that he would live like he owned a sugar plantation (if ownership were allowed in communist Cuba) or that he would become a media celebrity (if media were allowed). Elian, for anyone bothering to account for the child whose mother died coming to America, has disappeared, though he occasionally appears on state-run television in his communist uniform. The public won and moved on. Elian lost his freedom -- and America lost its way.
Each branch of government rejected Elian's right to live in liberty. The legislative branch refused to consider making Elian a citizen, though exceptions had been made for Vietnam's Boat People, for Cuba's Mariel boatlift, for Cuba's Operation Peter Pan and for generations of Mexicans, all of which included children. Congress granted no such exclusion to arbitrary immigration laws for the smallest minority: the individual.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Elian's plea for asylum, made on his behalf by Elian's Uncle Lazaro, an auto mechanic who fed, clothed and housed the child at his two-bedroom home in Little Havana. Though Elian's defenders failed to make the case for his asylum on principle, his Miami family stood against a judicial system that had fundamentally betrayed its founding principle: individual rights.
The nation's most powerful official approved the initiation of force. On April 22, 2000, President Clinton, backed by the public and by each branch of government -- executive, judicial, legislative -- dispatched gun-toting agents to seize Elian, marking the first time America's government forced a child from a free society and returned him to a dictatorship. The conviction that it is better to live in the land of the free than to live under tyranny had been abandoned.
Educated by modern intellectuals, Americans had become ignorant of life under communism. Throughout Elian's saga, people expressed disbelief that life in Cuba includes no right to property, association, travel or speech. Elian, they insisted, belongs with his father. Whether father and son lived in freedom or slavery was judged irrelevant: What mattered to most Americans was that the two blood relatives were bound together -- even if it meant they would be gagged by a dictatorship -- and, anyway, they chortled, communism in Cuba couldn't be that bad.
Over three years later, not one reporter has been permitted to observe his condition unmolested by communist agents. Elian Gonzalez is fully enslaved and unseen, except when he is used by Cuba's dictatorship as a pawn for propaganda.
Yet it is America that has suffered for its philosophical inversion. As government agents were snatching Elian, Islamic terrorists, living illegally in Florida, were busy plotting the worst attack in U.S. history -- an attack that would probably have been stopped had the government enforced its laws. Forcing a child to return to slavery while our enemies were miles away planning the most diabolical act of war offers proof that America has lost any sense of what matters. A free republic that refuses to judge its enemies while spurning a child refugee from tyranny is doomed by its own contradictions.
As America approaches its third Christmas at war, we must restore the idea of inalienable individual rights to a sacred place in our hearts. There is no better time to do so than Christmas, which still represents benevolence, redemption and the notion that children should bask in the light of joy, not totalitarianism.
We can start by recognizing that a truly happy birthday -- a celebration of one's life and future -- is impossible for anyone living under communism and by acknowledging that nothing -- not family, not tradition, not religion -- is more important than an individual's freedom. It is why the enemy hates us -- and it is why Elian should be celebrating his birthday in America.
Scott Holleran (scottholleran@mac.com), a freelance writer in southern California, was the first reporter permitted into the Gonzalez family¹s Miami, Fla., home, where Holleran met Elian Gonzalez and wrote about the encounter for several American newspapers.
Due Process was ignored, perverted, run rough-shod over. There was an armed kidnap -- under false warrants! A machine gun pointed at a boy in the closet..
pcx99, perhaps you are unaware that Elian's dad, when approached early on by the INS with the offer of a visa to come to the US and retrieve his son, refused. Not once but twice. Castro stepped in and changed Juan's mind.
The rest is history.
Sink knows this but refuses to admit same.
aka.....fleebag
To do that, you would have had to demand that the father be left alone to go get his kid, free from Fidel's goons, and that Fidel release his family in Cuba, and allow them to freely come here if they so desired.
Tell me, from the looks of this story, who is using Elián as a political tool?
Do you think his father could have told Castro that he would rather NOT have a national celebration for Elián's birthday?
The amazxing thing is that in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you still have some f%*$d up notion that we know what the father wanted in that case.
Regards,
When it fell apart he had to cooperate with Castro's goons.
Regards,
Sorry, "pcx99", but the whole incident still, to put it mildly, sickens me.Absolutely, AnnaZ, that's the Elian affair in a word: sickening.
pcx99, you might wish to play a while in the FR archives from the time. I'm not interested in re-living it, but neither do I want to forget it.
Elian's "fifteen minutes"? Hell no. Elian's monument lies in the hearts of those who yet hurt for him, and who yet cringe over what was done to him.
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JV, nice to see ya, you old thief. How's the Bro? I'll be away, and can't make the DC Chapter party. Please say hello to folks for me, if you're there.
Luis, was in Miami a few weeks ago, and I thought of Elian and all you good folk who fought so hard for him.
That's was the most disgusting raw use of power I have ever seen in my life other than Waco. And it is no coincidence that both events took place under the watchful eye of Janet Reno and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Except, of course, for the right of asylum -- Clinton assured Castro that if Elian's father came here, he would not be allowed to seek asylu. (I read somewhere that he tried to several times, but was turned down.)
The writer rights for a lefty newspaper and supported Clinton. So he just assumes we all think the same as the intellectually superior left.
How wonderfully you express that.
Count me among those who will never forget. I continue to pray for the day that Elian can return to the US ... or, better yet, live in a free Cuba.
When the boy's father's dictator demanded that he demand his son back.... There are no parental rights in Cuba except for Papa Fidel Castro.
Parental rights are for FREE PEOPLE, not for subjects under a communist dictator.
And you think he has the freedom to make his own mistakes with Fidel Castro???
Nah, that's 'just politics.' </sarcasm>
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