But then everything changed. On December 5, 1999, Castro began demanding Elián’s return, and by January 5 the same INS ruled that state courts had
no authority
in these matters, that neither Elián nor Lazaro on his behalf could apply for political asylum, and that Elián had to return to Cuba by January 14.
The mainstream media sang from Castro’s song sheet. But Brit Hume at FOX News asked the pertinent questions, things like: Why is the National Council of Churches involved in this dispute? Are they
really
impartial? Why is Clinton’s lawyer Greg Craig pleading Juan Miguel’s (read: Castro’s) case? And by the way, who’s paying him? Can a man who works as a doorman in a hotel in Cuba afford somebody like Craig?
2
Hume asked the questions other famed investigative reporters wouldn’t—and he didn’t let up. Just a week after the Janet Reno raid—but before Elián was deported—Hume ran a special report: “Customs officials at Dulles Airport caught those doctors sent from Cuba to be with Elián González with drugs, which they seized. The
Miami Herald
reports the drugs included phenobarbital, a sedative, and Miltown, a tranquilizer.”
3
Then came pictures of the calm and smiling Elián in his papa’s arms.
That the liberal media is Castrophilic we know. But why did President Clinton trash America’s legal standards, reverse a refugee policy dating from the beginning of the Cold War, and become Castro’s accomplice in returning Elián to Communism? Some say Castro “had something” on Clinton. Others that Castro threatened him with another Mariel Boatlift. Others say that Clinton wanted, as part of his “legacy,” an opening to Cuba. I think these last two were his motivations for the Elián kidnapping.
The mainstream media did its part by portraying Cuban American Miami as far worse than Communist Cuba. On April 2, 2000, Katie Couric of NBC’s
Today
show read from her cue cards: “Some suggested over the weekend that it’s wrong to expect Elián González to live in a place that tolerates no dissent or freedom of political expression. They were talking about Miami. All eyes on south Florida and its image this morning. Another writer this weekend called it ‘an out of control banana republic within America.’ ”
I’ve already mentioned Eleanor Clift’s gem, but it bears repeating: “To be a poor child in Cuba may be better than to be a poor child in the U.S.” Clift saw the stunned look on Bill O’Reilly’s face and elaborated a bit. Castro’s Cuba, she said “is a place where he [Elián] doesn’t have to worry about going to school and being shot at, where drugs are not a big problem, where he has access to free medical care and where the literacy rate I believe is higher than this country’s.”
Newsweek
writers Brook Larmer and John Leland agreed: “Elián might expect a nurturing life in Cuba, sheltered from the crime and social breakdown that would be part of his upbringing in Miami.”
While hosting Tipper Gore on his show, CNN’s Larry King joined the herd: “Tipper, one of the things that Elián González’s father said that I guess would be hard to argue with, that his boy’s safer in a school in Havana than in a school in Miami. He would not be shot in a school in Havana.”
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, commenting on Castro, found him “old-fashioned, courtly—even paternal.” No one said that about the Cuban Americans in Miami, who were routinely portrayed as extremists.
David Limbaugh seemed to be one of the few commentators who actually studied the INS’s regulations. The INS’s own manual stated: “Asylum officers should not assume that a child cannot have an asylum claim independent of the parents’.” The manual offers guidelines for its officers, including examples of asylum claims from six-year-olds. By April 22, 1999, this same INS was kicking down Lazaro’s door and wrenching a screaming Elián from the house.
Limbaugh also reminds (or informs) us of an affidavit by Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin. Sister O’Laughlin was president of Barry University and a personal friend of Janet Reno. The good sister was a kindly, intelligent person who originally favored returning Elián to Cuba, for the usual well-meaning (though naïve) reasons: a child belongs with his father.
Well, Sister O’Laughlin, a lifelong Democrat, soon changed her mind as she watched the Castroites at work. Her sworn affidavit mentions Castro’s goons scouring her house before Elián met there with his grandmothers, who had been brought from Cuba to meet with him. It mentions the president of the National Council of Churches
confessing
to Sister O’Laughlin that “Castro was dictating negotiations.” But it was the abject fear in the eyes of Elián’s visiting grandmothers that convinced Sister O’Laughlin.
She confessed to praying and weeping all night after the meeting. This, again, was in her sworn affidavit, ignored by the mainstream media but reported in David Limbaugh’s book
Absolute Power
. Limbaugh writes: “After the meeting, Sister O’Laughlin changed her mind. She saw ‘fear’ in Elián’s grandmothers—fear of the Castro regime—and thought it morally wrong to return Elián to Cuba. O’Laughlin was so upset that she decided to go to Capitol Hill at her own expense to lobby Reno to allow Elián to stay in the United States.”
4
But who was Janet Reno going to believe, Sister O’Laughlin or Fidel Castro?
As Dan Rather let America know, this whole problem was America’s fault. “Today’s irony,” he said in grave-frown mode on his April 6, 2000, broadcast, “is that to get close to his son, this boy’s father had to travel more than a thousand miles to a foreign capital and even then, even now, he must wait for the long-sought reunion. Such are the ways of politics and the law in a free society.”
5
Sure, Castro sinks the boats of fleeing Cubans, jails his subjects who try to escape, and puts Elián’s father under house arrest—and it’s all America’s fault.
With the investigation into
60 Minutes
on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, CBS, Dan Rather, and the
60 Minutes
production team finally got their comeuppance. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch. An investigation into the
60 Minutes
show featuring the interview with Juan Miguel on May 2000 might have proven more shocking.
Pedro Porro is a Cuban American who worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in 2000. He was the translator for Juan Miguel during the famous interview with Dan Rather. “I wore an earpiece. Dan’s questions would come through, then I’d translate them into Spanish for Juan Miguel,” Porro recalls. “Well, when I saw the interview as it appeared on the
60 Minutes
show I didn’t know whether to throw up or start crying,” he says. “Even during the interview it was obvious that Gregory Craig [former Clinton lawyer and friend then acting as Juan Miguel’s (read:
Fidel Castro’s
) lawyer] was stage-managing the entire thing. The questions for Juan Miguel were actually fed to Dan Rather by Gregory Craig.
“After a taping session, Craig would call Dan over, give him some more precise instructions, exchange some papers with him. Then Dan would come back on the set and ask those. It was obvious that Dan Rather and Gregory Craig were on very friendly terms. . . . Craig was acting like a movie director, too. He didn’t like the way Juan Miguel’s voice was coming across in the English translation. ‘Not enough drama,’ Craig said. So they went out and got a bona fide dramatic actor to translate and mouth his responses.... It was obvious to me that Juan Miguel was under a lot of stress. You could see it in his face. He never looked at ease. He was never alone, always accompanied by Cuban Interest Section people they called ‘bodyguards’ or by Gregory Craig himself. My father was a newsman in Cuba. So the whole thing, the elaborate deception of this show, shocked me tremendously when I saw the end product.”
NBC’s Jim Avila added to the media’s deception: “Why did she [Elián’s mother] do it? What was she escaping? By all accounts this quiet, serious young woman, who loved to dance the salsa,
was living the good life
. . . . An extended family destroyed by a mother’s decision to start a new life in a new country, a decision that now leaves a little boy estranged from his father and forever separated from her.”
6
(Emphasis mine.)
Hey, at least he didn’t blame the United States. No, Avila blamed Elián’s mother, who gave her life so her son could live in freedom.
CBS’s Byron Pitts went back to the more familiar villains. “Six weeks ago this community [Miami Cubans] embraced a boy who had watched his mother die at sea. Tonight there is fear that the embrace has become a choke hold.”
7
ABC’s John Quinones seconded Pitts. “It seems like such a contradiction that Cubans, who profess a love of family and respect for the bond between father and son, would be so willing to separate Elián from his father. . . . It’s a community with very little tolerance for those who might disagree.”
8
Bryant Gumbel pointed the finger at the
real
enemy: “Cuban Americans . . . have been quick to point fingers at Castro for exploiting the little boy. Are their actions any less reprehensible?” He referred to Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s support for Elián’s staying in the United States as “pretty disgusting.”
9
Time
magazine’s Tim Padgett relied on the classic stereotype: Those Miami Cubans were “a privileged, imperious elite who set themselves up as a suffering people, as martyred as black slaves and Holocaust Jews, but ever ready to jump on expensive speedboats to reclaim huge family estates the moment the old Communist dictator stops breathing.”
10
Alexander Cockburn published a gem in
New York Press,
writing, “There is a sound case to be made for dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on the Cuban section of Miami. The move would be applauded heartily by most Americans. Alas, Operation Good Riddance would require the sort of political courage sadly lacking in Washington these days.” Okay, okay, so the Stalinist Cockburn was joshing. But can you imagine his writing a similar comment about, say, east Los Angeles or Harlem?
The
New York Times
’s incomparable Thomas Friedman was not to be outdone. “I think the American public really got a taste of the degree to which not only Elián had been, in my view, kidnapped by these people [Miami Cubans], but American policy on Cuba has been kidnapped by a very active, vociferous minority.” Then this fervent civil libertarian brightened up. “Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elián González warmed my heart.”
11
Why did Janet Reno’s raiders break in with guns, knocking people to the ground? Clinton’s people acted on
Castro
’s advice. Fidel offered the Clinton administration vital intelligence. His agents in Miami described Lazaro González’s home as a veritable armory.
12
Like the liberal media, the Clinton administration trusted Castro’s Communist spies more than it trusted ethnic Cuban citizens of the United States. To me, a Justice Department that relies on intelligence from Fidel Castro is a hundred times more dangerous and stupid than its law enforcement officers who might occasionally descend to brutality.
“It is brutal, it is monstrous, it is as mad or bad as anyone can call it.” Thus did G. K. Chesterton define Communism in 1919. Chesterton, as usual, was right. Communism started as a monster and grew into a homicidal beast. And President Clinton and Janet Reno handed that beast a helpless child as a toy.
EPILOGUE
COMING TO AMERICA
When Cubans landed
in America’s lap by the hundreds of thousands, the potential for trouble was enormous. Cubans landed in the South as excitable, foreign-tongued, octopus-eating strangers. They applied for jobs, worked and sometimes lived right next door, and filled the pews of Catholic churches.
My family landed in New Orleans—deepest, darkest Dixie, red-state America with a vengeance. The city then hosted a huge NASA project that attracted blue-collar workers from surrounding Southern states: Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi.
We know what liberals think about these people. They’re the backwoods haters and bigots who gunned down Peter Fonda in the film
Easy Rider
and hatched the plot to assassinate the president in Oliver Stone’s ludicrous movie
JFK
. The South, liberals like to think, is a racist place.
My father was a political prisoner in La Cabana’s dungeons when we arrived in Louisiana. He listened to the gallant Che’s firing squads every dawn, wondering when his turn would come. My mother wondered too. They had two nephews—Bay of Pigs veterans—who were under a death sentence. But my mother didn’t have to indulge in despair (and most residents of Little Havana can relate stories ten times as hair-raising and heartbreaking). She was alone in a strange country. She was penniless, friendless, and had three kids to somehow feed, shelter, and school.
A knock on the door in those early days—as we settled into our humble apartment—wasn’t exactly comforting. But the knock came from Mrs. Jeffrey, our new next-door neighbor. She had a bleached blonde bouffant and big smile, and she was carrying a basket of fried chicken. Mr. Jeffrey was there too. He offered to help translate a job application my mother had.