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Elian Gonzalez, who arrived from Cuba to the capitalistic United States floating on an inner tube, returned last week to the communist island flying on a Lear jet, the aircraft of choice for American millionaires. Maybe in the next few months we will find out the hidden meaning in this paradox.
This six-year-old child had spent 217 days in the United States. How much this stay has affected him is impossible to say. Will it serve him to eventually understand, as the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals noted earlier this month, the “re-education, communist indoctrination and political manipulation for propaganda purposes” which he will endure upon his return to Cuba’s dictatorial regime? Will his father want to shield him from this future? If he wanted to do that, would he be able to?
All we know is that, after being triumphantly welcome, Elian, his family and four classmates are staying at a “special boarding school” in Havana for what the Communist government calls “readaption.” At a mansion in the posh Miramar district, “a room was made into a classroom for the children,” said Miguel Alvarez, a staffer at the National Assembly, Cuba’s rubber-stamp parliament. “They need to catch up in their studies in order to go back and start the second grade.”
When Elian finally returns to his hometown of Cardenas, teachers there will continue to “carry out the task of converting him into a model boy,” said regime spokeswoman Aymee Hernandez.
But the Elian case is having a lasting political impact: witness the move by House Republican leaders to favor, for the first time in 40 years, limited sales of food and medicine to Cuba—albeit with severe restrictions that would make such sales all but impossible. However, Illinois Republican J. Dennis Hastert, the House Speaker, had to give up on his effort to attach the bill to an $11.2 billion emergency spending package passed last week by the Senate when two Democratic senators, Christopher J. Dodd and Byron L. Dorgan, together with Republican senator Slade Gordon, threatened with delaying tactics, complaining that the House measure was too restrictive because it would prevent cash-strapped Cuba from obtaining private U.S. financing of its grain purchases. They are insisting upon their own version, which was approved earlier this year as part of a Senate agriculture appropriations bill.
At the same time, Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott, an opponent of easing economic sanctions against Cuba and other blacklisted countries, vowed to step up his efforts to block passage of either approach. “I oppose both and if I can find a way to kill them I will,” he said.
On this Senator Lott can expect help from Fidel Castro, for whom the U.S. trade embargo is a justification of the miserable standard of living his regime has imposed upon Cuba. Afraid that even a partial relaxing of the embargo might weaken his grip on the Cuban people, Castro has raised the ante by saying he’s not really interested in anything short of “a total change of policy towards Cuba”—suggesting an across-the-board commercial and diplomatic opening—and that he doesn’t expect it now nor with either of the candidates to succeed Bill Clinton in the White House.
“Neither of them inspires any confidence whatsoever,” Castro said last week in a written message read at a rally in the southeastern town of Manzanillo. “Whoever is the next president of the United States should know that here is Cuba with its ideas, its example and the rebelliousness of its people; that all aggression and all attempts to asphyxiate us or put us on our knees will be defeated.”
A crowd estimated by officials at 300,000 packed the plaza of Manzanillo to hear a succession of speakers inveigh against the American trade embargo, which they said encourages immigration, and the Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants asylum to Cubans who reach American soil. They were reminded that they should channel the same energy they used in the last seven months to win Elian’s return into a renewed fight against policies the speakers said have weakened Cuba’s economy and led people like Elian’s mother to take to the sea in risky attempts to flee.
Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque announced that the mass Elian rallies that have been held in a different city around the country each Saturday since December would continue indefinitely, along with round-table discussions among senior government members and Communist Party faithful broadcast live every weekday afternoon. But instead of Elian, the focus will be on the total change of U.S. policy towards Cuba.
Cuba carefully monitored U.S. public opinion throughout Elian’s seven months in the United States. Repeated statements noted with approval U.S. polls indicating that the majority of Americans favored not only the boy’s return to Cuba but that the tide of opinion had begun to turn against U.S. sanctions.
“Now begins the second stage that will also be triumphant,” said Raul Castro, the minister of the armed forces and Fidel’s brother, after the Manzanillo rally, referring to the effort to seek a total change of U.S. policy. But he also insisted that there would be no change in Cuba’s political system despite the speculation about what might happen when his 73-year-old brother dies.
If the movement to lift sanctions were to gain momentum in the U.S., for its own survival the Cuban regime can be expected to raise the issue of a total change of U.S. policy or nothing.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) 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