A Sordid Struggle - 28 April 2000

A month or more ago I talked about something I hoped and believed I should never have to talk about again.

About the forlorn and by that time bewildered little waif Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old Cuban boy rescued by two fishermen from the seas between Cuba and the Florida coast after a boat had capsized and the boy's mother, her lover and nine others drowned.

The boy floated on an inner tube for two days and nights alone and, miraculously, stayed alive.

Now you will remember that the Attorney General of the United States, Miss Janet Reno, had invoked a federal law which said that a refugee or kidnapped child must be returned to the custody of the next of kin, in this case the father, to whom the mother's flight to Florida was a total shock.

Once this was done, and according to the law, no evidence could be found of any crime or misdemeanour on his part, Miss Reno said she was sorry for the fuming anti-Castro Cubans in Florida but she must obey the law. And we then assumed it would soon be all over.

I left the topic with a deliberately sarcastic paragraph suggesting that considering the American love of litigation the lawyers on both sides - for the government and for the, by now, raging Cuban Americans - might want to keep things going. Here was my facetious ending:

"We may be nowhere near the end. In the words of the immortal baseball sage Yogi Berra: 'It ain't over till it's over.' And maybe there's a long forgotten statute - or several statutes - that will give the attorney general pause. Maybe the ingenious lawyers for the angry Miami Cubans will find a way of taking it all the to the United States Supreme Court. Maybe. Who knows?"

Well in the event, the facts outplayed the fantasy in their sheer unflagging ability to contrive scenarios worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan at the top of their form.

Some of these subtle, not to say paranoid, legal suits are on the shelf until the main legal plea of the Miami Cubans is settled, which is to find Elian eligible for permanent asylum in the United States. The two usual grounds are political or religious asylum, allowed in the belief that the applicant could suffer harm in the land he or she is escaping from.

Well one court turned down the asylum appeal but a higher court's tribunal said that it - the appeal - had merit and should go to the highest federal appeals court in that part of the country which is in Atlanta, Georgia. It has set a hearing for some time in May.

So now the father was brought by the government to Washington to meet his son and Attorney General Reno went plodding on into her third month of negotiating to get hold of the son, first with the Miami Cuban lawyers and then with the family that had taken him in. That family, which with the help of thousands of cheering, rampaging neighbours, had made him a showpiece and a sort of child movie star.

Whether he is happy or totally baffled by now none of us, including Miss Reno and the lawyers and the psychologists on both sides, none of us truly knows.

Although Miss Reno said that her only move now was to obey the federal injunction to see the boy united with his father she went on grinding away at trying to get the father and the great uncle and the Miami family together to see if they couldn't live together in some "neutral place" and discover the boy's true wishes while the district court ruled on the asylum plea.

I really ought to say here that, contrary to what has been a widespread assumption by Americans - of North European origin especially - the Gonzalez family in Cuba are not strangers to the refugee family in Florida. Refugee, by the way, takes in three generations - don't forget Castro has been in sole power for 41 years.

Somebody said that whereas in the waspy Anglo Saxon world you marry a girl and her mother, in the Latin countries - and as much as anywhere in Spain and Hispanic lands - you marry the girl, her mother and father and sisters and brothers and cousins and aunts and grandmother.

Before Elian's mother fled with him and her lover in November the two families spent more than they could afford on telephone calls, day after day, and after Elian was taken in by the great uncle there were frantic appeals from the Florida branch to Juan Miguel - the father - to leave Cuba and come and live in America.

He didn't and he wouldn't. He'd been, since his early youth, a passionate member of the Cuban communist party.

Only a month or so ago he was taken to Fidel Castro himself, who told him: "If you want to leave you may go."

He said: "Absolutely not." He wanted to stay and to live in Cuba but he badly wanted his boy.

It was then, or perhaps weeks before then, that Castro - a wily politician as well as a tyrant - saw the thrilling political prospect of using Elian, as he'd once used the young handsome rebel Che Guevara, as a rallying point - a symbol - of what they call the courage and simplicity of the revolution in its fight against the American bully and its crippling trade embargo.

So, as you must have seen, Castro ordered up hundreds of thousands of T-shirts emblazoned with "Free Elian" on them, put the nation on Elian alert and ordered spontaneous mass demonstrations in Havana and in provincial cities.

The televised scenes of Castro's huge rallies were enough to light the flame of a hot political war between Cuba and the United States.

People grew bored and irritated with the issue, and the taunting of Miss Reno grew louder over her persistent habit of talking about what she would do and not doing it.

Finally, last weekend, without telling anybody except the President of the United States, who curiously has been a lame duck onlooker throughout the whole business, Miss Reno decided to give the Miami family until Saturday morning to agree to deliver the boy, under her department, to the Department of Justice's guidance.

And so, to the shock of the entire republic, in the pre-dawn darkness, at five in the morning, a team of agents from the department, looking like Yugoslav guerrillas - or those mad anti-government anarchists out West - knocked on the Miami door, waited 30 seconds and blasted the door down, sprayed tear gas in the house, terrified the sleepers and had one be-goggled, helmeted man with a gun at the ready while a woman agent took the boy.

A curious, not to say perverse, motive for this assault was given by an attending government psychiatrist who said that by removing the boy from the atmosphere of the Miami family he would no longer be subjected "to psychological abuse".

Is that so? How about, as an exercise in psychological abuse, how about a battering ram at your door, an SS charge with goggles and helmets and machine guns pointed at the ready in the direction of the barely wakened, petrified, Elian crying: "Help, help me?" The gun pointing at - can you imagine? - his saviour, the fisherman - a fisher of men.

Stripped of the goggles and battle gear and heavy armour it was a scene that could have been time warped out of the New Testament.

Miss Reno says she had good cause to know from FBI agents that the crowd might have guns and that there was a secret cache of weapons inside the house. This would have been the justification for seeking a warrant to enter a private house by surprise.

But the warrant made no mention of these suspicions. And the unsatisfied Senate will hold hearings this coming week about what many of both parties at present consider an outrage.

An odd feature of Miss Reno's behaviour which I haven't seen mentioned in the press is her apparent forgetfulness of the famous clause of the Bill of Rights.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized."

Now, I have no doubt the Miami family will sue - it's already been proposed - to find the government guilty of violating the Fourth Amendment which, as one learned lawyer put it, provides specifically against just such impulsive raids on an individual's property. He added blithely: "This thing could go on for a couple of years."

Meanwhile, other suits have been filed to represent other grievances and claims of injustice from the Miami Cuban branch of the beleaguered Gonzalez family. And soon we shall be immersed in the Senate's sideshow.

The public, they say, is weary but not too weary to watch every lurid bit of film shot in Cuba or Miami or Washington or wherever Elian winds up with his dearly beloved, once the courts have decided who is the most dearly beloved.

Anyway a national poll records a bare majority of Americans who say that the family resistance had gone on too long and Miss Reno's means justified the end.

But I'm afraid there's also a very sizeable minority of Republicans and Democrats, liberals, conservatives and just scandalised citizens, who cannot overlook the image that has gone around the world of the lungeing, burly troops, the fearsome goggles and the heavy armour and the terrified Elian - a picture which to them has, in the words of the commentator William Safire, "discredited the administration and demeaned the nation".

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