3/29/00 4:20 p.m.
Elian and His Enemies
This editorial is from the April 17, 2000 issue of National Review.

By NR's Editors

 

A federal court in Miami has ruled that six-year-old Elián Gonzalez must be returned to his father in Cuba. The only alternative is a grant of political asylum by Janet Reno; but that eminent person is, Judge Moore tells us, “determined to see that a father’s wishes to be reunited with his son be given primacy in law and fact.” Absent from the opinion of the federal court, and from the pronouncements on the matter by the attorney general, the INS commissioner, and the president himself, has been any understanding that the wishes of Juan Miguel Gonzalez cannot be known to us while he is in Cuba. Missing, indeed, is any understanding of what life is like in a totalitarian state, where the wishes of the individual count for nothing, and the child of an “enemy of the people” (Elián’s mother committed an act of treason by attempting to flee Castro’s paradise) may not enjoy even that semblance of a normal life grudgingly permitted to other citizens.

Actually it would not be difficult to determine Mr. Gonzalez’s true feelings. We need only insist that he travel the 90 miles to the United States to state his case, bringing with him anyone Castro might hold hostage to his behavior. Fox News has already offered to pay his entire expenses for the trip. Parents in similar cases routinely travel halfway round the world at their own expense to assert their rights. Where is Mr. Gonzalez? But no one in the Clinton administration is going to insist on his appearance. These are people who, 30 years ago, decorated their college dorm rooms with posters of Che Guevara. Castro, of course, knows very well what kind of creatures he is dealing with.

Casting its shadow over the whole Gonzalez affair is the strange, hulking figure of Reno. It beggars belief to recall that our current attorney general first came to the attention of the Clintons as a champion of children. What more dire fate could befall any child than to find himself the object of her cold gaze? As a state attorney in Florida during the 1980s, Reno distinguished herself as a leader of the “child abuse” witch-hunts. At her urging, preschoolers were subjected to long sessions with interrogators like the unspeakable Drs. Joseph and Laurie Braga. With the aid of anatomically correct dolls, the tots were browbeaten and intimidated into “remembering” abuse by innocent child-minders—whose own children were then deprived of loving parents for the decade or so it took the authorities to realize that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake.

At the siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Reno was told—she cannot remember by whom—that the cultists were “beating babies.” To spare the little ones this abuse, she had them incinerated alive. Now Elián Gonzalez must be returned to a father whose feelings and character cannot be known to us, and to the phalanx of secret policemen who ensure that Mr. Gonzalez says and does nothing unscripted. Such is the determination of Janet Reno. Add one to the tally of kids who have suffered and died to advance the career of this latter-day Bluebeard.