Well, the 20th century is over and the kooks won. All of those trendy lefty intellectuals turned out to be clueless about politics, economics and human nature, though of course many could never admit it. Whatever their excesses, the hard-liners were closer to the mark.
I thought of Captive Nations Week last week when I was in Miami interviewing people in the crowd outside the Gonzalez house. These Cuban-Americans are wrong to resist returning Elian to his father and, despite Gloria Estefan and Andy Garcia, decidedly unhip. Public opinion has turned against them; elite opinion has been withering. But like the Chicago spittle-spewers, the Keep Elian Here crowd is on the right side of history, and that should still count for something.
Look at it through their eyes. Until Castro’s tyrannical regime falls, they can’t move on. The cold-war struggle that seems so passe elsewhere remains vivid and life-threatening to them, with boatloads of refugees still pouring into south Florida. The crowd outside the house has some older folks of Bay of Pigs vintage, but plenty of people in their 30s and 40s, too. Assurances that Castro, 73, will be gone soon are cold comfort to them. Most of the family of the “Maximum Leader” lived into their 90s.
While they pray for him to die, the people of Little Havana continue to be their own worst enemies. By turning Elian into a symbol, they let Castro–who believes children belong to the state–pose as the defender of family values. By manipulating the boy into making that hideous videotape, the family ceded the high ground to a dictator who has spent 40 years indoctrinating his people. (Not that Maxine Waters ever expressed any outrage about that.) And by spreading kooky tales about Castro (my favorite, offered in sworn testimony on Capitol Hill, has him eating Elian on his return), the Cuban-Americans are undermining true stories about Castro’s wickedness, which are plenty bad without embellishment.
I called Castro “wicked”: how uncool. Despite all of the denials, the American left still has a bit of a soft spot–or at least a postmodern ironic appreciation–for the guy with the beard and cigar. The more that Cuban exiles attack him, the less comfortable American liberals feel in identifying his abuses. The respectable left now views Fidel with a kind of offhand indulgence, as if he’s faintly comical. In Miami, of course, they rightly see nothing funny about him at all.
The merit of Elian’s case–the bottom line–is supposed to be the rule of law, and the law favors the sole surviving parent. But all laws are open to interpretation in special circumstances, and the Miami family deserves its day in court. President Clinton’s sudden reverence for the strict letter of the law sounds a little suspect coming from a man who said in 1998 that “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” The liberal baby boomers who are so sure exactly what the law and morality require once took a more situational approach to civil disobedience. In the 1960s, protesters at antiwar demonstrations chanted, “Hell no, we won’t go,” and were seen as brave resisters in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi; today, protesters outside the Little Havana house holding signs reading hell no, he won’t go have been seen for weeks by many critics as lawbreakers in the spirit of George Wallace.
But it was the release of that videotape that sent many viewers over the edge. I have a 6-year-old; kids that age are highly suggestible. Why couldn’t the protesters outside the house see the manipulation and exploitation recognized by everyone else?
The answer came from their life experiences. Almost everyone in the crowd had fled Cuba, and many with whom I spoke said they, too, had been separated from their parents for years. As painful as those separations were, not a single Cuban-American has come forward to say that in balancing family unification against freedom in the United States, he or she would have preferred to stay in Cuba. So when they saw Elian in the tape resisting a return home, they saw themselves.
The great irony of the Elian Gonzalez case is that the Cuban-American community might have harmed its cause enough to actually help it. If the Miami exiles lose the TV propaganda war, as now looks likely, American politicians will be less afraid to dissent from the exiles’ party line. Al Gore’s pander has backfired so badly that it may be the last pander by a Democrat to Little Havana for some time.
This means there’s a better chance of finally establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and at long last lifting the counterproductive trade embargo. Clinton and Congress have refused to do so out of fear of alienating Cuban-Americans. But any student of Cuba knows that resisting the embargo is how Fidel stokes resentments against the United States; ending it might hasten his demise, which would give the exiles a victory in spite of themselves. Juan Miguel Gonzalez told the New York Daily News last week that “I just want [Elian] to change the world somehow.” By the time this is over, he might.
