When six-year-old Elián González climbed aboard the rickety, homemade boat with his mother and 12 other refugees, he could not have known all that lay before him. The small group cast off from Cardenas, Cuba, in the dark, early morning hours of November 22nd, headed for Miami. That night, far out at sea, the engine quit, leaving them to drift helplessly. On the following night, when the rough waves of a storm capsized the boat, the desperate voyagers clung to the overturned craft for several hours. But the raging waters picked them off one by one. When the boat finally sank, the remaining survivors continued to cling to two inner tubes which they had hurriedly lashed together. Late that night, only four survivors remained: Elián and his mother, Elizabeth Brotons, and Nivaldo Fernandez and his girlfriend, Arianne Horta. Sometime during the night, the inner tubes separated, and Elián's mother, weak with fatigue, also succumbed to the relentless aggression of the sea.

On the morning of November 25th, Thanksgiving Day, Elián was rescued by fishermen Donato Dalrympler and Sam Ciancio about three miles off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Alone, severely dehydrated, and barely conscious, he was praying in Spanish the prayer that his mother had taught him, to his Guardian Angel. And, according to the boy, his Angel had brought dolphins, which accompanied, guided, and protected him.

News of Elián's miraculous survival and rescue exhilarated Florida's Cuban-American community. Tens of thousands of them had made that same perilous journey by sea. And every Cuban exile who has made it to these shores has family and friends who, like Elizabeth Brotons, perished in the attempt, or are still held hostage in Communist Cuba.

The escape of one small boy from his island prison did not long evade the notice of Cuba's "Maximum Leader," "El Jefe Supremo," Fidel Castro. The bearded butcher was smarting from a series of stinging public relations setbacks, the most immediate being the human rights demonstrations at his Ibero-American Summit and criticism of his dictatorial rule by foreign heads of state at that event, only a week prior to Elián's flight. The Cuban exiles in Florida had spotlighted this public humiliation and trumpeted it to the world, while also continuing to stymie the Clinton-Castro plans for normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. Now, this "miracle child" had provided Fidel's hated enemies in the U.S. with another major psychological victory and rallying point that he could not allow to stand.

Castro determined that he must have the boy back -- at all costs. Mobilizing all of his agents, dupes, and allies in the U.S. Congress, media, academe, and left-wing clergy, and working in concert with an accommodating Clinton administration, he set about reversing the tremendous negatives he had been presented with l'affaire Elián. We must sadly report that it appears he has very nearly triumphed. Thanks to the complicity of the American media, the oppressive Communist dictator has largely succeeded in demonizing the Cuban exile community and convincing a naïve and ignorant American public that returning little Elián "to his father" is the only right thing to do.

Under normal circumstances, returning a child to his parent (or parents) is indeed the moral, legal, and prudent course of action, and in the best interests of the child. But these are far from normal circumstances, and returning Elián at this time, as advocated by the Clinton administration, would not only violate the boy's best interests, but would be a shameful, cowardly, and immoral action. That need not happen, however. The Castro lobby has shrewdly exploited familial sentiments and insidiously manipulated the sense of fairness and decency held by most Americans. Playing cynically on the theme of "parental rights," the Cuban dictator, who has obliterated parents' rights in his own land, has succeeded in neutralizing most of his opposition. But a widespread knowledge of the following information could rapidly change that. Consider these little-reported, but publicly verifiable, facts:

• Parents have no rights in Cuba. The Cuban Constitution and Penal Code make children property of the Communist state, with penalties (for parents or anyone else) for interfering with the development of the child's "communist personality."
• Elián's father, Juan Miguel González, is a prisoner of Castro's total state; he is not free to speak candidly, without fear of retribution. Thus, we cannot claim to know his real desires for Elián.
• Available evidence indicates that Juan González not only knew of and approved of his ex-wife's plans to escape with Elián to America, but intended to do likewise himself.
• Juan González' failure to make the half-hour trip to Florida to pick up the son he claims to love -- after being provided a U.S. visa and free, round-trip air fare -- must at least be considered probable evidence of coercion.
• According to a human rights representative from India who visited Elián's father in Cuba, Juan González is under virtual house arrest.
• If "Papa Fidel" is truly concerned about uniting parent and child, why doesn't he release the thousands of family members -- spouses, parents, children, grandparents -- he is holding hostage, who have been petitioning to leave Cuba for years? And why do none of the "Return Elián" apologists show the same concern for the plight of these families?
• As a Christian, and because of his unprecedented international celebrity, Elián will be especially marked for persecution and brainwashing in "Papa Fidel's" militant atheist state.
• If allowed to grow up here, Elián will have the freedom to decide if he wants to emigrate to Cuba; the reverse is not true if he is returned to Castro's gulag now.
• The bizarre biting of Elián's tongue and checking of his "private parts" by his paternal grandmother Mariela Quintana -- as she admitted on Cuban national TV -- raises the very serious concern of child abuse and molestation if he is returned.
• Elián himself has repeatedly expressed his desire to stay in the U.S. and his opposition to returning to Cuba. Although a child's wishes should not always be determinative in custody cases, neither should they be ignored, especially in a case such as this.
• Elián's mother, Elizabeth Brotons, risked and gave everything, including her life, for Elián's freedom. According to the other two survivors, Nivaldo Fernandez and Arianne Horta, her dying wish was that Elián reach America. Should not a mother's last request count for something?

"Parents' Rights" in Cuba

The state of parents' rights and children's rights -- as with all human rights -- in Cuba is not a pretty picture. "Inalienable," God-given rights, as recognized by our Founders, do not exist in Castro's Stalinist paradise.

Cuban legal scholar Alberto Luzarraga points out that a basic understanding of Cuban law is key to the question of whether Elián González should be returned to his father in Cuba. The central issue, he notes, rests on whether Elián's father has real or only illusory parental rights in Castro's Cuba and whether, if even effective rights exist, he has the sole right to speak for the child. According to Dr. Luzarraga, who holds a Ph.D. in Civil Law from the University of Villanova in Havana, and an MBA from the University of Miami, the Cuban Constitution is resolved to build socialism and, led by the Communist Party, to build a Communist society. In Article 6, the Union of Communist Youths is exclusively recognized by the State "to promote the active participation of the juvenile masses in the tasks of the socialist construction" of society.

Under Article 38, Luzarraga notes, the parents have the "duty" to "actively contribute to their children's education and their integral formation as useful citizens including preparations for life in socialist society." Article 62 criminalizes resistance or opposition to these edicts, stating clearly that "no rights granted by this constitution and the laws can be exercised against the existence of and objectives of the communist state. The infraction of this article is punishable."

Now, contemplate Article 5 of Cuba's Code of the Child and Youth: "Society and the state work to ascertain that all persons who come in contact with the child … constitute an example for the development of his communist personality." That's all persons -- including parents.

"To insure no deviation from Marxist dictates," says Dr. Luzarraga, "a 'cumulative dossier' is compiled for each student wherein his political attitude is recorded. Your merits and demerits are minutely recorded and form the basis for your opportunities to obtain a higher education. This is persecution pure and simple and on a daily basis. Persecution is a recognized basis for asylum." This should be commonly understood by Americans, but, unfortunately, it is not, he told THE NEW AMERICAN. "This is exactly what Pope John Paul II was talking about when he visited Cuba in 1998. The Holy Father criticized Castro's interference in the family -- taking children away from their parents and sending them to Communist camps where they are indoctrinated in atheism and taught to spy on their families and neighbors."

In her powerful new book, Blessed By Thunder: Memoir of a Cuban Girlhood, Dr. Flor Fernandez Barrios describes her own heart-rending childhood experience of being wrenched from her weeping mother's arms at the age of ten and sent to Fidel's glorious work camps. What was supposed to be a 45-day camping adventure turned into a two-year ordeal in hell: malnutrition; rancid, worm-infested food; mud-floor huts with clouds of mosquitoes; ever-damp burlap hammocks; nonexistent hygiene; bullying, beatings, and harassment; slaving in Castro's sugar and tobacco fields from sunup to sundown; incessant indoctrination and group criticism sessions. This forced separation of children from their parents continues still.

The Father's Desire

What's wrong with this picture?: A "loving father" claims his young son was kidnapped and taken to a foreign country, where he is, allegedly, being exploited and endangered by unscrupulous relatives. The foreign government gives the father a visa and every reasonable assurance of safe travel to come and pick up his son, all expenses paid. What father worthy of the name wouldn't make the half-hour trip immediately? Yes, it's a no-brainer. Only a totally unfit father, or one who is being coerced to parrot the lines fed to him by his police-state controllers, would allow his child to languish under such supposedly terrible conditions.

Must we really point out that Castro's Cuba is a brutally repressive police state, one of the few remaining dictatorships where it is still a crime to try to leave the country without the regime's permission? Is it not obvious that Fidel has staked everything on winning this fight for "Our Elián": printing hundreds of thousands of Elián placards, posters, T-shirts, and billboards; ordering daily mass demonstrations; filling the airwaves with violently "anti-Yankee" propaganda; disrupting all of the island's work and production schedules; squandering scarce resources on his Elián campaign? Having made such an all-out commitment, is Castro likely to spare any effort at insuring that Mr. González performs according to his orders? Fidel's operatives are notoriously capable in the arts of persuasion. For firsthand evaluation of Cuba's torture techniques, the reader may wish to sample the prison memoir of Armando Valladares, Against All Hope, or Hijack, the late Anthony Bryant's report on his dreadful torments in the Cuban Inferno.

There is a substantial body of evidence, both factual and alleged, indicating that Juan Miguel González did want Elián to come to the U.S., and would probably still want to come here himself, if freely allowed to do so. This is a partial list of the evidence:

• On November 22, 1999, at 9:01 p.m., Georgina Cid, an aunt of Juan Miguel González, received a call at her home in Miami, alerting her that Elizabeth and Elián were on their way from Cuba. The call, she says, was from her brother, Juan González (Juan Miguel's father), and originated from the González' home telephone number in Cardenas, Cuba, where both Juan Miguel González and his father Juan González live with their wives and Juan Miguel's infant son. The call from the González phone in Cuba is confirmed by Mrs. Cid's phone records.
• According to Elián's great-uncle, Lazaro González, who was given temporary custody of the boy, Juan Miguel had asked him in a telephone call from Cuba to protect Elián "by whatever means available." When Lazaro called Juan Miguel to tell his nephew that his son was okay, Juan Miguel told him, "Take care of him for me until I get there."
• William González says that in 1998 he visited his cousin, Elián's father, in Cuba, and discussed with Juan Miguel Juan's plans to come to Miami.
• The Miami Herald discovered that on November 26, 1999, the day after Elián was rescued, Juan Miguel González had obtained certified copies of Elián's birth certificate and his marriage certificate to his deceased ex-wife, Elizabeth. These documents would be required for Juan Miguel to obtain a non-immigrant visa. More proof he was hoping to leave -- legally?
• Elián's father told reporter Mauricio Vincent of the socialist Madrid paper, El Pais, that he wanted Elián to go to America.

On February 18th, Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin told the Miami Herald that Elián's maternal grandmother, Raquel Rodriguez, had stated that she wanted to defect, and that Elián's father had known in advance of, and had approved of, his ex-wife's plan to escape with his son. O'Laughlin, the president of Barry University, hosted the meeting between Elián and his grandmothers.

On February 20th, the day the story appeared, O'Laughlin retracted her statement and said that Rodrieguez had not personally told her of her desire to defect. O'Laughlin claimed not to have told the Herald of any personal knowledge of the wish to defect. O'Laughlin also said she would give no further interviews. The Herald assured THE NEW AMERICAN that it was standing by its story and provided us with sufficient details to convince us that O'Laughlin had indeed told them the defection story. Why then did she reverse herself? Fear, perhaps, that her revelations in the Herald may have doomed Elián's family in Cuba? Was that fear helped along by a phone call from Cuba, or from one of Castro's agents here? We don't know; Sister O'Laughlin is not talking now.

In his December 13th interview in Cardenas, Cuba, with the INS, Juan Miguel González spoke well of his ex-wife Elizabeth's common-law husband, Lazaro Munero, Elián's stepfather, who organized the ill-fated escape attempt and died at sea. Juan Miguel said Munero "would come here and talk to me and eat here. My parents also liked him a lot. I liked him also because he never mistreated my son, whom he loved very much, and I appreciated that from him." Subsequently, Juan Miguel changed his story to conform with the Castro regime's smear of Munero as a vicious criminal who beat and abused Elizabeth and forced her and Elián to accompany him to Florida. According to survivors Nivaldo Fernandez and Arianne Horta, Munero was kind to Elizabeth and Elián; he sacrificed himself, giving them his small share of precious water. This comports with the earlier portrait given by Juan Miguel. Why did he change his story? The answer is self-evident to anyone who is not terminally stupid or willfully blind: Elián's father caved in to the Communist authorities, either out of fear of reprisal against himself, or to protect his wife, baby, or other family members.

On January 31st, Reverend Kilari Anan Paul, an evangelist and founder of Gospel to the Unreached Millions, went to Cuba to see if he could meet with Juan Miguel González in person. He had been in favor of returning Elián to his father, but the Cuban visit changed his mind. Rev. Paul, a Hindu convert to Christianity from India, says Cuban officials refused to allow him to meet with Juan González alone, without their interference, so he did not see him. But he did talk to at least three sources there -- a friend of González, a relative, and a church leader -- who claimed Elián's father truly wants his son to stay in America, and wants to come himself, with his family. "The truth must be told," Reverend Paul insists.

Those who know him best insist Juan Miguel's statements and behavior are evidence that he is being coerced. "This is not Juan Miguel talking," says Alfredo Martinez, a boyhood friend who has known Elián's father all his life and who has recently come to the U.S. from Cuba. "This is all manipulated by the Castro government." Uncle Delfin González says of Juan Miguel, "My nephew is a very good actor." Cousin Marisleysis González, who has become Elián's surrogate mother, says, "I am positive his father is not speaking from his heart. If he could speak freely, as I am, I am sure he'd speak for Elián's freedom."

Why is this so difficult to understand? Why can't those who insist that Elián be with his father insist also that Juan Miguel González come to the U.S. so that his fitness as a father and his will concerning Elián can be truly determined? The poor man is trapped in a deadly vise; only persons totally insensitive or cruel could take his force-fed words at face value and contend that sending Elián back to Cuba is the desire of a father's heart.

Let him come here freely -- and let him bring his wife and baby also. And let him meet with Elián and his relatives without the prying eyes and ears of Castro's omnipresent agents, which we witnessed in the tightly controlled "visit" by Elián's grandmothers. Sr. Jeanne O'Laughlin, a friend of Janet Reno, had favored returning Elián, which surely was a major factor in her selection by Reno as a "neutral" party to host the reunion between Elián and his grandmas. However, as Sister O'Laughlin states, she saw firsthand the fear and trembling, and she saw the Cuban government's heavy-handed attempts to control the event. "I became a wiser woman at that moment, wincing at my own naïveté," she said, in a potently revealing New York Times op-ed (see "Why I Changed My Mind About Elián"). We have no excuse for further naïveté.

Families Rent Asunder

From the earliest days of his despotic reign, Castro's wretched regime has been about tearing families apart. In her important new book, Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children (1999), Yvonne Conde has documented the extraordinary story of the thousands of "Peter Pan" children who were sent out of Cuba by desperate parents between 1960 and 1962. Many of them ended up in orphanages and foster homes throughout the U.S., and it was months, years, or even decades before their parents escaped from Cuba to reunite with them.

In 1991, Major Orestes Lorenzo flew his Cuban MiG-23 to Florida and defected to the U.S. He obtained visas for his wife and children to join him, but Castro refused to let them leave. His wife was alternately pressured, harassed, and offered bribes to denounce him as a traitor on radio or television, Lorenzo told THE NEW AMERICAN. She refused. She was threatened and taunted on the street. She and the children were forced to go to Communist psychologists. She was told her husband had found a new woman in America. Maj. Lorenzo offered himself in exchange for their freedom, but Cuba refused the offer. A year after his dramatic defection, Lorenzo flew back to Cuba in a small, private plane and landed at a prearranged, secluded spot, picked up his wife and children, and flew back to America. This daring exploit is recounted in his inspiring memoir, Wings of the Morning.

Thousands of families have been petitioning Fidel's regime for years for the release of their loved ones. Among them is José Cohen, who escaped on a raft with his brother in 1994. In 1996 he obtained U.S. visas for his wife and three children, but Castro refuses to give them exit visas. Mr. Cohen, who has not seen his family in nearly six years, told THE NEW AMERICAN, "They are hostages of Castro; he has no valid moral or legal reason to keep them there -- except to punish me." His youngest daughter, Yamilla, age 13, recently was forced to join in the government-organized Elián demonstrations. "That's the way of things there. I am positive Elián's father is only saying what he is being told to say," says Cohen. "Everyone who knows the reality of Cuba understands that. It's ridiculous to think otherwise." Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, president of the Miami-based New Generation Cuba, informed THE NEW AMERICAN that her group is pursuing hundreds of cases similar to Mr. Cohen's, some of which are highlighted on the group's newly launched Internet web site (www.ngcuba.org).

If an East German mother had been shot dead while climbing over the Berlin Wall with her child, would we have favored throwing the child back over the wall to the Communist side because the father was still there? Or a Jewish father who gave his life trying to get his son out of Nazi Germany: Would we have said it was in the boy's best interest to be sent back to Hitler just because the mother, who was still a Nazi captive, said so? Or the Negro slave who sacrificed her life to escape a cruel master and get her child to freedom: Would we have argued that justice was best served by returning the child to slavery because the father assured us he loved his shackles and wanted to remain a slave? In each of these cases, we know with certainty what was the will of the dying parent, while the true desires of the living parent must be divined through chains, prison bars, and other instruments of coercion and brutality.

Nivaldo Fernandez remembers the last words Elizabeth Brotons spoke to him as they clung to the inner tubes in a merciless sea: "I am very tired. Make sure that my son is saved. Make sure he touches land in Miami." In the eyes of Fidel Castro, this heroic mother was a criminal because she had baptized her son. She committed more terrible crimes by teaching little Elián how to pray the "Our Father," the "Hail Mary," and the "Guardian Angel" prayers. She committed the ultimate crime of treason by trying to escape the suffocating tyranny of Castro's Communist gulag. Our crime would be in sending her son back to that hellish dungeon.

Verging on the Abusive

Certainly one of the strangest episodes in the whole Elián González saga has been the U.S. visit by his Cuban grandmothers. After the two women had returned to Castro's prison isle, Americans got a shocking revelation about the bizarre happenings that had taken place during their January 26th meeting with Elián at the home of Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, president of Barry University. In a February 2nd broadcast on Cuban national television, Elián's paternal grandmother, Mariela Quintana, described her efforts to "animate" her grandson and loosen him up. She said: "I took out his tongue and I bit it. I unzipped his fly to see if it's grown."

Now if any of Elián's Miami relatives were accused of such activities, let alone had admitted to it on public television, you can be sure the county and state social services folks would be there in a flash to confiscate Elián and press charges of physical child abuse and sexual molestation against the offending party. And surely this troubling incident should be a consideration in determining the boy's fate. However, it was conveniently ignored by most of the U.S. press, and explained away by the other media that did mention it. No matter how outré the perversion, you can be sure the journalists can dig up a willing double-dome among the tweedy professoriate to "normalize" it. Thus did Uva de Aragon, a Cuban-born historian at Florida International University, appear on the scene to announce that the incident probably only reflected different cultural values and customs. It's just a "Cuban thing," you see.

"Rubbish," roared the Cuban-American community. They'd never heard of such a thing, and Ms. de Aragon could cite no statistical or anecdotal evidence to suggest there is any such Cuban "custom." Ninoska Peréz, who hosts a daily radio show in Miami, told THE NEW AMERICAN, "I asked my audience, especially those who have just immigrated from Cuba recently, if they had ever seen or heard of such a practice. We had people from all parts of Cuba call in, and let me assure you, it clearly is not a Cuban 'custom.' We are all outraged. It's weird and perverted."

Dr. Enrique J. Canton, a Cuban-American pediatrician in Miami for over 20 years, concurs. "This is definitely not healthy behavior, and we can't find anyone who's familiar with any such 'custom,'" Dr. Canton told THE NEW AMERICAN, "although it's been suggested it may have something to do with Santeria," an Afro-Cuban religion utilizing healing herbs and "white magic," under a camouflage of Roman Catholicism. According to the rumors concerning Santeria, the biting of the tongue supposedly has to do with a spell that affects or controls the speech of the one bitten. And the touching of the male genitalia is supposed to take away his power.

On that score we queried Dr. Flor Fernandez Barrios, whose grandmother was a curandera, a female Santeria healer in Cuba. Santeria beliefs and practices figure largely in Dr. Fernandez Barrios' autobiographical account of her childhood in Cuba, Blessed By Thunder, but she said she is unaware of any Santeria practice such as that described by Elián's grandma. As a practicing psychotherapist, however, Dr. Fernandez Barrios found the grandma's actions very troubling and believes it underscores the need for a proper evaluation of Juan Miguel González and the other members of his family who will be living in that home environment before allowing Elián to be sent back there. Dr. Jon Shaw, head of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Miami School of Medicine, likewise, described Mrs. Quintana's acts as "very upsetting" and "verging on the abusive," and said that it had caused him to reconsider his earlier opinion that Elián would be better off with his father.

The big question, then, is why did Castro allow this potentially damaging revelation to be aired on TV? Preemption. He knew Sister O'Laughlin was likely to spill the beans. Like Bill Clinton, he knows it's better to get out there first and put your spin on your own scandals. On January 28th, Sister O'Laughlin told NBC News she had "some embarrassing information that has to do with one of the grandmothers" that she intended to share with Attorney General Janet Reno. Castro knew he had to act fast.

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