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| THE ELIAN DEBATE | |
 April 26, 2000  | |
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MARGARET WARNER: Controversy over the fate of Elian Gonzalez and the
government's handling of the case has roiled the editorial and op-ed
pages of the nation's newspapers. Now, four columnists who've weighed
in on the issue: Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, "Washington
Post" columnist E.J. Dionne, "Los Angeles Times" contributing
editor Robert Scheer, and Pacific News Service editor and columnist
Richard Rodriguez, who is also a NewsHour essayist. CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, Syndicated Columnist: Well, I think the reason is that it generated the passion it has is because it's got all the elements. At the center is a beautiful young child who arrived here in a kind of a mythic condition, washed up on our shore on Thanksgiving Day in a vain attempt by his mother to escape tyranny -- a rather classical American story. The overlay on that, a custody dispute between two wings of a family. And then you overlay on that an ideology and here's where I think it's so interesting because this is a fight about the nature of communism ten years too late. The Cold War ended ten years ago. It's a rather anachronistic argument, and I think it gives a lie to the idea that how many somehow we all were anticommunist, that we all were on the same page in the cold war. What you have here is a struggle between Cuban Americans, who are very strongly anticommunist and people, like, say the National Council of Churches who are what you might call anti-anticommunists. The overlay on that the extraordinary aggressiveness with which the Justice Department has pursued this boy, this case, that picture which I think will be indelible and will be the legacy of this administration, of a commando pointing his machine gun at the boy and his rescuer, and you have combustion. MARGARET WARNER: Robert Scheer, a couple of words you used, "shameful and cynical." How do you explain the passion? Do you see it the way Charles does in terms of the elements? ROBERT SCHEER, Los Angeles Times: No. I think it's the dying gasp of the right wing Cuban émigré community to prevent normalization. I think they're partners in that, in some respect, with Castro, himself, who also must fear normalization. I think a good number of Cubans in Miami must favor it because they send lots of money to Havana, they visit, and I think what would solve this whole problem is trade and tourism. And the embargo never should have been slapped on way back in October of 1960. It's made no sense, and I think with normalization, will come the same sort of relationship between émigré communities here and, say, the Vietnamese and Vietnam or the Chinese Americans and China. MARGARET WARNER: But if I could just interrupt you for a second, you're making it sound like just a foreign policy debate. We wouldn't have columns in editorials like this if we were just having a normal discussion about whether we should normalize relations with Cuba. ROBERT SCHEER: Well, we wouldn't be having this debate if in fact the Miami exile community had not intervened, and the leadership had not intervened to heighten passions about this and in fact do something that I don't think any other immigrant community can do, which is tell the Justice Department and the Immigration Service to go fly a kite. They exerted a great deal of independent power. I don't know what this business is about, Janet Reno acting in an aggressive way. It seems to me she hesitated an awful long time, and I don't think we'd extend that to Mexican Americans or any other group, Haitians or any other group that we're trying to protect someone who came here for freedom. They would be back, sent home. And certainly if there was a father... What happened to Republican family values? What happened to being concerned about preserving a family? Here is obviously a fit father, wants to take care of his child, was taking care of his child before the mother made this reckless trip, and yet somehow conservatives are silent about the family values in this case. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let me let E.J. Dionne on in this. Do you think that this case raises issues significant enough to warrant this level of public attention and controversy? E. J. DIONNE, Washington Post: Well, I think some of the attention owes to what you might call a cable news environment. This is a classic story for our time, where you have a combination of politics and real political issues, as we just heard, and at the same time the personal saga, the family saga, the story of this beautiful little boy. And so I suspect that at some level, when we look back, compare the treatment on certain cable television shows to the treatment in the newspapers. I think that's part of it. But I think there are some very deep issues here. I mean if you are... I had Easter dinner with a Cuban friend. Her family sent her over here, her and her brother, without her parents because they valued freedom even more than they valued their parental rights. So to say that the Cuban American community has suddenly become inconsistent on family values I think is not true. On the other side, I find the ferocity of the response to Janet Reno and Bill Clinton, the product of what you might call Clinton poisoning in your politics, that whenever those two names get mentioned, I think people who are their enemies react in a much stronger way with words of outrage that I don't think you would hear if the same things had been done by somebody else. Those pictures are arresting and scary, there's no question about that. On the other hand, you can also be certain that if Janet Reno had tried the soft entry into that house and some agent had been hurt, then the world would have come down on her for that, too, in not using enough force. So I think it says something about the political polarization of this moment in the country. MARGARET WARNER: Richard Rodriguez, how do you explain the tempest that's been created by this case? RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Well, the interesting thing is that a lot of friends of mine insist that this is a boring story, that they're not interested in this story. But in fact, everybody's riveted by it. And I think for some of the reasons that some of the other voices have suggested. I think we're getting very close to some Central American story in this tale of Elian. It seems to me, however, that the political voices on the left and the right aren't able to grab hold of what's bothering us. On the one hand, I think the political left is very sentimental about Uncle Fidel and Castro... And Castro's Cuba and does not see it in quite the dark way that, say, John Kennedy saw it 30 years ago. On the other hand, the right wing, as Robert was suggesting, has caught themselves in this tangle of what they call family values and is unable really to challenge the logic of sending the boy back to his father. But I keep thinking that, you know, the real heroine in this story is Elian's mother, who gets me to some central point about immigration and that is that when the immigrant, the 19th century immigrant told her Irish grandmother or her Sicilian grandfather that she was leaving for America, those relatives knew that they were losing her, that to go to America was to leave your family, was to leave your past. That's an extraordinarily radical move. Now we act as though, you know, that that's somehow unsuitable. But I remember as a son of immigrants, Mexican immigrants, when I was handed, by my beloved Irish nuns, a copy of the Adventures of Huckleberry Fin as a child and told that this was the great American romance, it was the story of a teenage boy on a raft who leaves home. Now we tell the story of Huckleberry Fin but we want Huckleberry to go back to his Pappy. We have changed the American myth, and that's probably what most interests me about this ambivalence we feel. MARGARET WARNER: Yeah, how do you explain that, Charles? I mean the polls show a remarkable public consensus on this -- I mean they may not have liked the level of force, but they really think the boy, 2-1, 3-1 they think the boy belongs with his father even if he was going to go back to Cuba. If this was sending a boy back to Nazi Germany, as the Cuban Miami family has been saying, the public wouldn't feel that way. How do you explain that? CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, first of all, I think there is... As Richard was pointing out, there is in many precincts, again, ten years after the cold war, a kind of a sentimental look at communism, a way of saying, you know, was it really that bad, or what was it all about? There was a headline in the New York Times the other day that said, "Cuban Americans still see communism as evil," as if this is a kind of an odd perspective. You know, and so the idea of Cuba as a kind of Sweden with beaches, as opposed to how the Cuban Americans see it, as a Stalinism without factories. But I think more interesting than public opinion is, in reaction to the raid, is people I think principled liberals like Lawrence Tribe, who's the leading liberal jurist in the country, one might say, who was outraged by the raid and who said unequivocally in writing in the New York Times that this struck at the core principle of constitutional government and that it was unwarranted and that, in effect, it was a trampling of what we understand as constitutional safeguards, that you don't send an armed command owe in, in settling a custody dispute. MARGARET WARNER: Robert Scheer, that is true that the criticism of the administration has come not just from republicans, as E. J. pointed out, but also from liberals. ROBERT SCHEER: I think it's nonsense to suggest that the INS acted in an unprecedented way. They probably acted much more carefully than when they crashed into Mexican American homes in Los Angeles looking for immigrants, when they arrest kids they claim are gang members. We have sweeps of the streets in this city all the time. They don't observe the niceties. Families are broken up, children are arrested, strong-arm measures are used all the time. They knew they were under public scrutiny, and they did this job probably as efficiently as can be done and with as much concern for the niceties. I would also point out that the American public is probably concerned that, if you have the principle that you will accept all six year olds that are freeing a less than free society, what happens to Chinese six-year-olds, what happens to Haitian six-year-olds? We've had people taking risky boat yards from Haiti and be returned. So there's that element of hypocrisy. I think the other thing is that we're not serious about having a debate about Cuba policy. The Pope went to Cuba two years ago. He said we should have normal normalization. He demanded that Castro from lighten up on religion. Certainly Cuba is freer on religion than China, with which we have no relations. If you didn't have the ohm embargo, you'd have free movement between Miami and Havana; you would not have this terrible tearing apart of families. MARGARET WARNER: E. J., go back to the issue that Richard raised, if you would. Why do you think that the public wants, as he put it, for Huck Finn to go back to Pappy? E. J. DIONNE: Well, I think there are different issues here and not all of them are flattering to us. I do think there is some anti-immigrant feeling. And I think also there is a great unease on the part of other communities, as Bob Scheer just said, where they say Cuban Americans get certain treatment, Haitians-and-Dominicans and other would get other treatment, and there's a real split between those communities. You can see it down in Miami. The third thing is the old family values argue. I think a lot of people look rat the case and say, "yes, Castro's Cuba is a terrible place." I don't think most Americans, in these same polls, if you asked "what do you think of Cuba as a regime?" Americans would overwhelmingly say it's a bad regime, it's a dictatorship regime. They have weighed these factors and say that under these circumstances the child's mother died-- and I disagree with Bob. I don't think you can say it was reckless. It was courageous. It was a mistake for her and it could have been a mistake for her son, which is what a lot of other people did-- but I think they weigh these values and they end up on the family values side. The problem here -- everybody has been guilty of some inconsistency on this. Sometimes progressives sound like they were Gary Bauer when talked about the sacredness of the family. And you've heard arguments on the anti Castro side that said that courts should interview that sounded like Hillary Rodham Clinton's essay that was condemned in the republican platform. MARGARET WARNER: Richard, how do you answer your own question that you put on the table: Why do you think a majority of Americans want... Want to see this boy return to his father, even if it means going back to Cuba? RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I think America is growing middle-aged in. We're also embarrassed by the people we've become, I think. I think in some startling way we think that Elian would be better off as a boy being raised in Cuba than in Miami, that there is a sense... here locally, there is a cartoonist in the morning paper, mediocre talent, who every time he had a chance to draw Elian, would put him in sunglasses with his Nike shoes, you know, the consumerist nightmare child. And I think that, if you really were to ask a lot of American parents, would this kid be better off in Havana or would he be better off in South Beach on roller-blades with sunglasses, a lot of Americans in our middle-aged caution, would say we would not want Elian to end up like our own children? MARGARET WARNER: So you say that it is a in a way it is a revulsion to our own culture? RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: It is about America that Americans are preoccupied. It is not about Cuba. The Cuban Americans embarrass us. They keep telling us what a wonderful country this is and their praise, as it gross more garish and loud, makes us only embarrassed by the reality of what we see. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you so much, all four of you. |
