Castro’s Slavery Dictates the Gonzales Family be Reunited in Freedom — and Clinton’s Normalization Plan Be Stopped

(Washington, D.C.): Rarely has the plight of a single human being — let alone a
six-year old boy
— so powerfully illuminated the moral underpinnings of and critical choices confronting
American security policy. The Clinton Administration’s decision to deport Elian Gonzales is
such a case, however, reflecting not only the odious lengths to which it is prepared to go to
appease Fidel Castro. It also lays bare the larger purpose of such appeasement: A
desperate
bid to normalize relations with Cuba’s totalitarian ruler before President Clinton’s tenure ends
and the opportunity is lost, possibly forever, to throw Fidel the political and economic life-line
his regime so desperately requires.

Three articles that appeared in leading papers yesterday make clear the stakes not only
for
Elian, but for a nation that would abandon him to Castro’s totalitarianism. The third, an op.ed.
article in yesterday’s Washington Times by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, is especially important
for
its insights into the kind of company the Clinton Administration is keeping — and, for that
matter,
utilizing — in its campaign to promote relations with a country the National Council of
Churches fatuously believes is committed to “removing inequities,”and therefore
justified in its
enslavement of not only political prisoners but the Cuban people as a whole.

Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2000

What Clinton Is Sending Elian Back To

By Michael Gonzalez

When I was seven or eight years old, not much older than Elian Gonzalez is today, the
principal
at my school in Cuba forced me to wear a Young Pioneer scarf. He simply announced, in front of
the whole class, that he’d had it with my refusal to join, and that I couldn’t say no any longer.
The Pioneers are the communist version of the Hitler Youth. All those kids you see on television,
wearing blue-and-white scarves around their neck and taking part in government-staged
demonstrations for Elian’s return, are Pioneers.

I had again and again, for two years, told my teachers and the principal that I would not join
the
Pioneers. I was the lone holdout in a classroom that included the children of political prisoners
and others from known anticommunist families. My conscientious objection cost the class a
100% participation rate and therefore perks such as field trips. I wasn’t the most popular kid in
school.

But my new status as a Pioneer also did not make me very popular with my father, as I had
feared. Dad had his ear glued to his (highly illegal) shortwave radio when I arrived home for
lunch. I can still picture him, sitting in his rocking chair. He was home because he was very ill;
he had two to three years left at most and he (and all of us) knew it. Just after the
revolution he
had walked away from a post as a professor of law at the University of Havana, an
institution he loved, because — the words still ring in my ears — “you can’t teach law in a
country not ruled by it.” He died soon after because lack of a proper diet aggravated his
diabetes.

It didn’t take too long for me to explain to my father why I was wearing the Pioneer scarf, or
for
him to renounce me for my weakness. He also decided that if they were going to take his family
away, there was nothing left, so he would have to go to the school and kill the principal. Since
this was the agent of government who had transgressed his family’s freedom, he was the obvious
choice. Killing the principal’s boss would have made no sense, and killing Fidel Castro was
impossible. I don’t fault my father’s logic in the slightest.

Castro had forced Cubans to hand over all their private weapons very early in his rule, but
Dad
had kept his father’s gun, thinking the ability it gave him to take one last stand for his family
against tyranny was a thread of freedom to cling on to. Again, I admire him for thinking this
way.

My grandmother had other ideas. She promptly locked her son up in his room as he was
getting
the gun, and announced to him that he would have to go through her on his way out. Mother soon
was fetched from her office, and she informed my father that he would have to do away with two
women in his family.

While he remained pathetically locked in his room, my mother walked me back to school,
still
empty of schoolchildren at lunchtime, and had a quick word with the principal as she handed
back the Pioneer neckwear. The essence of it was that her husband was very upset and that the
principal had better not try this sort of thing again. Until I left Cuba three or four years later, I
was not bothered on this score again.

My father and I made up that evening, of course, and he explained to me that once I was
living in
freedom, I’d be able to make up my own mind, and that if I then turned into a communist, that
was my business. I didn’t — far from it — and I’m glad my father decided to try to get us out,
though he did not live to see the day.

Even if you think my father may have been right about wanting to shoot the principal, you
might
wonder if he was not a bit too severe with me. I was, after all, just a kid, and the principal had
forced the thing on me. In fact, Dad understood all too well that I had had it with resistance, for
otherwise the principal really couldn’t have forced anything on me. Dad knew that after putting
up a good fight for some time, I too had had enough, and that I was more than happy to join in,
not to stand out, not to have to fight after school or suffer the taunts of others, including teachers.
That’s why he acted the way he did, and why I remain so grateful to him.

In totalitarian systems it takes desperate measures to remain an individual, to have
any
degree of autonomy even within the most narrowly defined private sphere. Our natural
instinct for survival militates against fighting the system; we have to overcome human
nature just to resist.

This is the kind of world that produced Elian Gonzalez’s father, the man who, after
Castro
organized anti-American rallies, said he wanted his son back — even though he knows that
his ex-wife, Elian’s mother, died taking the boy out, and that Elian would have a better life
in America, and not just materially. This is the world that produced the people at the
rallies, very many of whom would escape Cuba if given the chance.

And much, much worse, this is the kind of world President Clinton is sending Elian
Gonzalez back to. If he’s strong, he will survive, but I somehow think his father is very
different
from mine.

I am an American today, and I love America as only someone with my kind of background
can.
It’s going to take a lot more than a wrong decision by a discredited administration for me even to
begin to feel disappointed in this vast, generous country. But, knowing as I do what kind of place
Elian is being sent back to, I can’t help but wince at the thought of what we’re about to do.

Michael Gonzalez is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe’s editorial
page.

Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2000

‘Asides’
Father Knows Best

An analogy for the folks who want to send Elian Gonzalez back, excerpted from a posting on
Licianne.Com:

James, the father of Elian, a six-year old Negro boy, has petitioned the Superior Court for the
return of his son. James, age thirty, is a Negro slave living in Hanover County, Virginia and has
joined in a petition by his master, Robert Wortham, for Elian’s return to Hanover County. In his
court petition Wortham asserts that six-year old Elian had been taken from the Wortham farm in
Hanover County by his mother, Charlotte, a Negro woman also belonging to Wortham.

Charlotte, a runaway slave under the law, then made her way north with the boy until she
arrivedin Maryland where she unfortunately died of exposure and exhaustion.

James asserts that he wants to raise his son as a father should, that he misses his son’s
company
and laughter. James and Wortham both accuse the boy’s Philadelphia relatives of maliciously
and illegally detaining Elian. Wortham asserts that if Elian is returned to his home, Elian will be
well cared for on the Wortham farm. So do you send the boy back?

Washington
Times, 10 January 2000

National Council of Castro’s friends;
NCC should leave Elian Gonzalez alone

By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley

The National Council of Churches (NCC) wants to send refugee Elian Gonzalez
back to
Cuba. This should come as no surprise since the NCC does not represent American
Protestants and has long served as a lobby for the Marxist dictatorship of Fidel Castro.

The NCC was founded in 1950 as a repackaging of the old Federal Council of Churches, a
body
dedicated to ecumenism and the social gospel. Though the New York based NCC gives the
impression that it represents American Christians, its member bodies amount to only about half
of American Protestants and a fourth of American Christians overall. Major NCC groups such as
the Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians have been losing members in recent decades.
An examination of NCC policy statements and resolutions confirms that the NCC
leadership is far to the left of the rank and file of its own denominations.

The Council took no official notice of Mr. Castro’s rise to power in 1959 and remained silent
while Mr. Castro aligned his regime with the Soviet Union, quashed human rights and brutally
repressed dissent – exiling, imprisoning or executing nearly two-thirds of his original
revolutionary Cabinet. By 1968, when the NCC finally broke silence, nearly a million Cubans
had fled the island. The first NCC statement urged the United States to recognize the Castro
regime.

Church World Service, the NCC’s relief arm, set up the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center in
Miami but when exiles began speaking out in local churches and to the press about Cuban human
rights, NCC officials said the program “abetted our government’s effort to discredit Cuba” and
“encouraged humanitarian sentiment that generated hostile attitudes toward Cuba among U.S.
congregations.”

The NCC fired James McCracken, head of the refugee center, and replaced him with the
Rev.
Paul McCleary, who helped set up an “advocacy” office for Cuban affairs in Washington, and
who later testified in favor of Vietnamese “re-education camps.”

In 1977, a year before his election as NCC president, Methodist bishop James
Armstrong
led a delegation of American church officials to Cuba, where they supported the regime’s
repressions. Said their report: “There is a significant difference between situations
where people
are imprisoned for opposing regimes designed to perpetuate inequities, as in Chile and Brazil, for
example, and situations were people are imprisoned for opposing regimes designed to remove
inequities, as in Cuba.”

On its return from Cuba in 1977, the first official NCC delegation said they were
“challenged and inspired” by Cuba and flatly denied that the Cuban regime persecuted
Christians. The NCC stood in sharp contrast to Amnesty International, which asked to
see those
the group described as “the longest term political prisoners to be found anywhere in the world.”

In other reports, Amnesty International mentioned imprisoned poet Armando
Valladares,
who noted that Cuban officials used pro-Castro statements of American clergy to torment
prisoners. “That was worse for the Christian political prisoners than the beatings or the
hunger,” Mr. Valladares wrote. “Incomprehensibly to us, while we waited for the embrace
of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our
tormentors.”

In 1980, the NCC published a book claiming that “Cubans are the only Latin Americans who
have broken with dependent capitalism and its accompanying dehumanization of the common
people.” Further, the efforts of the Cuban government “affirm that the gospel’s command to feed
the hungry and preach good news to the poor is being fulfilled.”

That is the ethos of the current NCC leadership, which also supports lifting the U.S.
embargo.
Family reunification has nothing to do with it. The NCC leadership believes that Elian
Gonzalez will be better-off under socialism in Cuba, better-off without the right to free
speech, free association, and freedom of movement – the bourgeois capitalist vices that the
NCC believes dehumanize people.

Cuba confirms that nations that are barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. But the
NCC
believes Elian will be better-off under a regime of shared scarcity. The Council’s stand
can
only be described as loathsome, the direct opposite of the most Christ-like figure in this
episode, Elian’s mother. She died that her son might be free.

That heroic sacrifice should be respected and Elian Gonzalez should stay here. Meanwhile,
the
National Council of Churches should drop its religious affiliation and register as an agent of the
Cuban government.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San
Francisco
and the author of “From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of
Churches.”