Editorial #23
by Tom Painter
July 3, 2000

One of the biggest disappointments in the Elian Gonzalez story has been the demonizing of anyone who favored returning Elian to his father.

It is untrue, unwarranted and unfair to place everyone who thought Elian should be returned to his father as if they all love Castro, think Cuba is a workers paradise and want to sing the Socialist International. Nothing could be less true.

The whole process of polarizing people around the issue comes very close to the heart of what was wrong with keeping Elian and his father from each other. It was not a story about the virtues of democracy and capitalism over socialism. It was not a story about the evils of rampant materialism in our mass media driven culture or the evils of a totalitarian government.

It was a story about a little six-year old boy who lost his mother and had a loving father who wants his son with him. That is the primary issue for Juan and Elian Gonzalez. Everything else is an attempt to capture that story and use your own wants, needs and dreams to paint that story in your own terms, give it priorities based on your own vision and restrain Juan and Elian from choosing a vision of their own.

I would not choose to live in Cuba. Most people would not choose to live in Cuba.

However, Elian Gonzalez is not the property of Cuba, no matter what Castro thinks, and neither is he the property of the Cuban-American community or even distant relatives in Miami. He has lost his mother. His father, who he has always been close with, wants him home, with him, in Cuba. Our courts do not have the right to alter a family's life, simply because we disagree with where the father wants to live. Understanding that does not make anyone in love with where the father wants to live or in love with the government there.

What it does make us are people that understand that there is more to our humanity than our politics and our economics. Freedom, intolerance, oppression, hardship, poverty, wealth, success and failure find many forms in our search for happiness. Love, family, community and belonging are the ties that bind us no matter what our life struggles and successes are.

Our nation's basic principles are not advanced when we hold other peoples lives hostage to our attempt to advance those principles in other nations.

Juan Miguel and Elian Gonzalez are not obligated to have their lives used in someone else's struggle to topple the corrupt regime in Cuba, no matter what we think of that regime.

We can speculate all we want about what control Castro might have over Juan Gonzalez. But it is only speculation. There is no real evidence that his choices about Elian are not his own and not sincere. There was nothing stopping him from asking the federal marshals around him to protect him from the Cuban authorities and let him defect to the United States. He had his wife and his newborn child and Elian with him. If he wanted to live here, there was nothing to prevent that. Obviously that's not what he wanted.

We should leave him and his family alone.

Maybe, we will see Elian Gonzalez in our country again. If we do, I hope it will be because he made his own mature decision to come here. Maybe that hope is too late. Maybe what has already happened to him will direct his life towards always being the star in someone's political campaign. If that becomes his fate, whom will we blame?