Michael, this is a case fit for Solomon, but I think our own laws and basic respect for a parent's rights are not being taken seriously enough. There are children living under totalitarian regimes all over the world. Does that mean that our antipathy to these regimes trumps the basic human right of raising one's own children? The irony is that to do that is in some sense to place politics above simple human rights in a totalitarian fashion. It may just be Elian's destiny to be raised by a loving father and stepmother in Cuba--this is not simply consigning him to a living hell, no matter how black and white the Cuban nationalists may portray the issue. If anything, this particular boy will probably be a "state hero" when he gets home and grow up with quite special priveleges--no tobacco fields for this kid--I really doubt that. What really prevents Juan Gonzalez from staying here if he wants to anyway--the threat of torture of his relatives back home??
(On a trivial note, do you think Castro's personal tailors made that apparently tasteful, expensive suit they've dressed Gonzalez in? It's not exactly everyday business wear for Cubanos.)
Also, the portrait of Elian's mother bravely risking her life for freedom for her boy plays well to violin music, but is too black and white in itself. I understand that she was considerably ambivalent about making the trip in the first place and really just went along with her boyfriend on it. At least that is one version and it may well be true. I don't think her motives were so elegantly and nobly simple. The human reality is, in any case, complex.
What about this opinion?====>
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Elian is a victim of disregard for dads
April 3, 2000
By Lance Morrow
(TIME.com) -- The Elian Gonzalez case is too black or white. Too either/or. Too binary.
The satisfying political solution (the boy stays in Miami) does not square with the commonsense human solution (he belongs with his father).
Why should they square? Exile itself is binary -- and, almost by definition,
enraged. Exile politics festers with wounds of separation -- the loss of homeland,
culture, family, of an essential part of one's identity. The boy's mother drowned
between homeland and exile. The child is perched on the far shore. But he is
suspended in the most complicated, inconclusive state of multiple loss (home,
mother and, quite unnecessarily, father too). Cuban exiles, of course, have built
another Cuba in Florida -- a better Cuba in its essentials (notably its American
freedom and American money), but nonetheless not Cuba, really. Where exactly
is Cuba in this boy's mind? He lost his mother. Cuba is his father.
I am astonished by the blitheness with which American television commentators
(for example, ABC's Cokie Roberts on Sunday's "This Week") dismiss
consideration of the father. I do not mean merely "the father's rights." That's a
legalism that assumes the father is as selfish, as narcissistic as most Americans
have become in asserting their "rights." I am speaking of something deeper, more
basic, more fundamental, more humanly essential -- the father's love, his
connection with his son. If the boy has a basic right, it is the right to his father.
Americans have grown stupid and confused about the meaning of fatherhood.
That stupidity is the reason, in this case, that mere politics, however principled
or however sleazy and craven (sometimes misbegotten principle curdles into
sleaze), has been allowed, so casually, to trump what should be a reflexive
respect for the father's place in the picture.
Don't look for such respect in America. It has vanished in the incomplete
American transition out of, er, patriarchy. Americans operate as if fathers were
secondary and essentially dispensable. The destruction wrought by that premise
is strewn about the landscape -- in the form of crime, drugs, suicide, family
misery.
The alternatives in the Elian Gonzalez case have about them the
simple-mindedness of mere politics -- a raw power struggle especially obscene
when its object is a 6-year-old boy. The law will ultimately, maybe messily, win.
In the worst nightmare version, there could be riots, Cuban exiles in pitched
battle with the National Guard, and a screaming 6-year-old dragged out to be
delivered to Fidel. On the other hand, perhaps the law will change. Maybe the Al
Gore bill (granting Elian permanent resident status in exchange for Florida's
electoral votes in November) will compose a happy American ending.
I keep wondering how much Elian knows about all this, how much he
understands. One news story says the Miami relatives claim that the father is
abusive, that he yells at Elian on the telephone and tells the boy his mother is still
alive. Does Elian believe she is still alive? When he grows up, what will he be
like? Will he be sane?
What a stupid mess. The little boy is lost, the grown-ups are fools, and politics is
a vicious idiot.
Copyright ¸ 2000 Time Inc. |
