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The Elián photo conspiracy
Once again, Republicans let their hatred of Clinton cloud their political judgment.
By Joan Walsh
[04/25/00]

What did we learn from Vietnam? Part 2
Author Todd Gitlin, filmmaker Frieda Lee Mock and journalist Andrew Lam on the lasting effects of the war.
By Fiona Morgan
[04/25/00]

The Elián metaphor
If we really cared about Cuban children, we'd end the embargo.
By Joe Conason
[04/25/00]

Looking back on Vietnam
Salon presents a week-long retrospective on the war and its consequences, at home and abroad.
By Fiona Morgan
[04/24/00]

What did we learn from Vietnam?
Bobbie Ann Mason, Michael Lind, Philip Caputo, Jonathan Schell and others talk about how the war changed the U.S., and the world.
By Fiona Morgan and Daryl Lindsey
[04/24/00]

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Also Today The Elián metaphor If we really cared about Cuban children, we'd end the embargo. By Joe Conason The Elian photo conspiracy Once again, Republicans let their hatred for Clinton cloud their political judgement. By Joan Walsh

The entire premise of the Elián drama -- that the Miami relatives have kept the boy from his father -- is false. Elián was separated from his father not by Lázaro González and company, but by Fidel Castro: the world's longest surviving and most sadistic dictator, a man who has murdered and tortured personal friends and close political allies, reduced his people to a state of abject poverty in which all children just a year older than Elián are denied milk by government decree, and made the entire nation an island prison.

There has not been a single day in the four months and two weeks of separation that Juan Miguel González could not have been reunited with his son in Miami. For anyone privileged to live in a democracy, where individuals enjoy the basic human right to pursue their personal happiness, it boggles the mind that Juan Miguel González would not have rushed to the side of his son five months ago, when he was rescued from the sea that took his mother's life.

It boggles the mind that Juan Miguel González would arrive in the United States only to sit tight in the Maryland home of a Cuban diplomat, rather than travel the short trip to Miami to visit his son.

But Juan Miguel is not a free man. He is a prisoner of Castro. It is the sadistic Castro who kept the father from seeing his son. It is the Castro dictatorship that separated them, first because it drove a mother desperate to rescue herself and her child from Cuba's nightmare to seek refuge in a free country; and second, because, to protect its prison state, the Castro dictatorship had to keep the father and the son separated until a reunion could be accomplished on its terms.

It is the everlasting disgrace of the Clinton administration that it has chosen to betray America's heritage as a beacon of freedom, and instead to act as the ally and agent of a police state in retrieving one of its prisoners. To accomplish this, the Clinton administration and its willing servants have behaved like the very police state whose interests they are defending.

They have resorted to Orwellian doublespeak (Clinton the perjurer: "The rule of law has got to be upheld. If we don't do it here, where do we stop?" Reno the storm trooper: "Elián is precious ... he needs quiet time.") They have used deception and brute force, and secrecy to protect their deceptions. When Elián was in free Miami, the press had total access; now that he is in the clutches of the U.S. government, he is incommunicado. Cuban intelligence agents can see him; his cousin, Marisleysis, who cared for him for the last five months after his mother's death, cannot.

They have demonized a decent, law-abiding immigrant family, whose members had suffered in Castro's jails, and who came to America to seek refuge from his grotesque tyranny and the horrific poverty he has imposed on his nation. It is a grievous day for America when the refugees from oppression are painted as oppressors and treated as enemies by the government they believed would protect them, and when the tyrant who had oppressed them praises these actions as noble deeds.

Next page | The reprehensible Rev. Campbell, apologist for Castro