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Parents are not free to raise their children in Cuba


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By Claudio Campuzano
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

February 28, 2000

Opinion polls in the United States have consistently shown that around two-thirds of Americans believe that Elián González—the six-year-old Cuban who survived his mother’s death when the boat in which they were escaping from Cuba sank in the Caribbean four months ago—should be returned to his father in the island rather than be allowed to remain with his great-uncle in Miami.

This is understandable. Unless a parent is proved to be unfit to raise his or her own child, the law in the United States says that parental rights should prevail, that a parent is best qualified to see after the interests of a minor son or daughter. However, this presumes that the parent in question is not in any way constrained in the exercise of his or her rights as a parent in a way that could be damaging to the child; a parent in jail would not get custody of a child, fo example.

One wonders what America opinion would be if it were known that, by the laws of the state — which are vigorously enforced — parental rights are severely limited under Fidel Castro’s regime and that parents are not allowed to guide freely the life and education of their own children, a fact which the U.S. media have not generally reported.

Law Number 16 promulgated June 30, 1978, in Cuba’s Official Gazette lays out the “Children’s and Youth’s Code”, which states that the young generation must participate “in the construction of Socialism” and that “the Communist formation of children and young people” must be carried out “through a coherent system . . . in which it is the responsibility of the Communist Party of Cuba to play the leading role as the Marxist-Leninist vanguard.”

In its Art. 1, the Children’s and Youth’s Code states that the people, organizations and institutions that intervene in their education are under the obligation of “promoting the formation of the Communist personality of the new generation.” Art. 3 declares that the Communist formation of young people “is a goal of the State” and, therefore, young people should be inculcated with “dedication to the cause of Socialism and Communism and faithfulness to the working classes and its Marxist-Leninist vanguard, the Communist Party of Cuba.” Education must also promote among children “loyalty to the principles of the international proletariat and to the relations of brotherhood and cooperation with the Soviet Union and other countries of the Socialist community.”

Art. 8 makes it clear that “society and the State work together for the protection of young people from any influence contrary to their Communist formation.” And Art. 14 establishes that the “combination of work and study, which are Marxist and Martians principles [the latter a twisted reference to the writings of José Martí, the nineteenth century hero of Cuban independence from Spain] is one of the foundations on which revolutionary pedagogy is based.” In this way, young people “acquire work habits and are formed in other qualities of the Communist personality.”

Art. 33 establishes that “the State gives particular attention to the teaching of Marxism-Leninism, because of its importance for the ideological formation and the political culture of young students . . . Given the work the State performs for providing a Marxist-Leninist formation, young people assume the duty of deepening their knowledge of the scientific conception of the world as the necessary base for all learning.”

This law effectively bars Cuban parents from freely making decisions on their children’s education. To the tune of songs such as “Seremos como el Che” (“We will be like the Che”, Ernesto Guevara, the secular saint of the Cuban regime), Cuban children learn to read repeating “F for Fidel, R for Raúl, G for guerrilla.” They are left out of the system for life if they don’t join before their teens the “Communist Pioneers, where they learn that God doesn’t exist and that, were it necessary for the defense of the fatherland, they must denounce their own parents to the police if, in their judgment, their parents were “counterrevolutionary.

When their children reach high school, Cuban parents have no choice but to send their sons and daughters to the so-called “Escuelas de Campo” (Schools in the Country), criticized by Pope John Paul II, away from the families for months at a time, where they have to perform agricultural labor half of the day. The children of top regime and party officials attend other “special schools” in the cities where they live with their parents.

It’s hard to believe that, if they knew how parental rights are practically non-existent in Cuba, two-thirds of Americans would support sending Elián González back to a father that has almost no say on how his son is to be reared. And it is also hard to believe that, as they press in the courts for their decision to send him back, the president of the United States and his Attorney General are not aware of the laws that strongly limit parental rights in Cuba. But perhaps U.S. district judge Michael Moore, who will hear the case this weeek, will take this into consideration.

Claudio Campuzano is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com

February 28, 2000


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