Because You Never Asked

     (For those who might need a refresher course after almost a decade, Elian is the name of the little Cuban boy who washed up alive in south Florida after his mother had perished at sea in an attempt to flee Cuba. This led to a desperate struggle by his biological father in Cuba to regain his son. As a resident of south Florida, I had to suffer in the vortex of this pathetic story.)

     "Elian". This name has now become so well known in the United States, it is beginning to compete with the common place Anglo sounds of Bob, Joe or Henry.

     Perhaps one of the saddest, most insensitive spectacles I have ever seen was the sight of little Elian crudely filmed by his Miami "family" in an attempt to convince the rest of us that he doesn't want to go back to Cuba. When I first saw the film, I was immediately reminded of the prisoner of war kind of footage --- a la Jon McCain --- where the prisoner defends his captors and renounces his original allegiances. After 5 months of gilded cage captivity, both physically and emotionally, it's not hard imagining a 6 year old boy saying anything. Perhaps the Cuban-American community is feverishly putting together a new tape of Elian, one where he claims to have woken up every morning in Cuba and felt the existential void of not living in a democracy. He could then go on to explain how he would hide under his bed every time he heard a knock at the door, fearing the arrival of Fidel and his brain washing brigades. Perhaps the Republican National Committee could film Elian's endorsement of George W.? The possibilities are endless.

     It is difficult to talk about the Elian saga without talking about the media. Like any news story which only effects our lives peripherally, the journalistic coverage of an event sets the tone and provides our outlook. On one level, our means of communication have been fair (notwithstanding the Neanderthal intransigence of the Fox-Murdoch organization), generally being sympathetic to the reunion of father and son. This seems to reflect American public opinion, thus showing we have still not lost our basic concepts of humanity, political and ideological differences aside.

     But on another level, our supposedly objective press has continued to function no differently than Pravda would have done in the Soviet era (see essay "The Seattle Riots"), or how Granma, the official organ of the Cuban state, functions now. It has used this incident to further propagate a "Party line" image of Cuba which is thoroughly unconcerned with reality.

     Perhaps the most hypocritical entity representing a point of view in the United States is the Cuban exile community based in south Florida. Our news media and this community have lived a 40 year honeymoon that has still not ended. The benevolence with which the gringo news industry has treated these ex-oligarchs of pre-revolutionary Cuba, corroborates the Pravda-like character of mainstream American news. An exaggerated myth of emotional and material Cuban misery, complete with a fire breathing dictator who eats the limbs of young children just for the fun of it, is the result of this kind of "journalism". The Cuban-American community is the loudest mouthpiece for this rhetoric, and our news outlets conspire with these people by allowing this garbage to go unchallenged. The Elian saga has given them the opportunity to let this rabid dog off its leash.

     I've lived in south Florida for more than a quarter century. I know these people. They can't fool me.

     There is no group of people that pays more lip service to the words "democracy", "liberty", "freedom", and other such romantic flights of socio-political being, than the Cuban exile community in America. To be more specific, we are talking about the original wave of refugees which arrived here by the thousands in the early 60's, right after the revolution's triumph. The astute viewer of the Elian saga will note that they are very white, which is not a very accurate representation of the Cuban population, though it is an accurate representation of wealth and privilege in pre-Revolutionary Cuba. (Some evidence of this hierarchy still seems to exist in Cuba's Communist leadership, but there can be no doubt that people of color in Cuba have a more dignified existence today than in the days of Gloria Estefan's ancestors.) These original refugees, now heard primarily through the voices of their children, who arrived here at a very young age, don't just control the message in south Florida, they monopolize it.

     What do they really stand for?

     The saga of Elian Gonzalez really began in the Cuba of the 1950's. At that time, the Cuban reality was not much different from the rest of the gringo satellite states in Latin America: a prototypical dictator named Fulgencio Batista, in concert with the usual security apparatus of thugs and goons, unilaterally set the rules in a quintessential "banana republic" (although in Cuba's case, sugar is the banana). His job was to protect the interests of the Americans (mainly sugar and mafia gaming) and the then privileged classes of the island, now seen most frequently congregating outside the Gonzalez house in Miami's Little Havana. In exchange for these services, Batista and his gorillas were allowed to bite off a substantial part of the pie for themselves. (Being that I've already mentioned her name, and being that she has taken a prominent role in all this, perhaps it's relevant to say that Gloria Estefan's father was a Batistan policeman.)

     As we all know, in 1959, along came Fidel and all bets were off. In other words, the people we now see on "Action News" congregating in front of the Gonzalez house, blew it. They fled Cuba not because they lost their "democracy", or their "freedom", or their enlightened, civil institutions . no. They left because they lost their privileged position in Cuban society.

     So here we are, more than 40 years later, and the Miami of Gloria Estefan wallows in its tear jerking devotion to "democracy". But if we peel away just the top layer of the onion, we find their concept of democracy in Miami is not much different than their "democracy" was in Cuba.

     The current Mayor of Miami, the semi-honorable Joe Carollo, is seen quite frequently these days (mostly on Fox News) speaking in "support" of Elian. (Does this mean that Elian's father opposes him?) The election which put Carollo in City Hall was a close one in which he was originally declared the loser. His opponent, a cliché-like political crony (like Joe) named Xavier Suarez, actually took control of the city's governmental apparatus for awhile --- occupying the office space, etc. --- before the Federal Government stepped in and declared the election so fraudulent (the usual dead people voting, etc.) it ordered the results turned around. I ask anyone who might be reading these lines to try and remember the last time an election of any reasonable magnitude in the United States has been snatched from local jurisdiction and declared fraudulent?

     And these are the people who demand a democratic Cuba.

     But there's more.

     A few years before the election just referred to, the City of Miami found its financial affairs in a state of such indecipherable chaos that an inability to pay its bills was imminent. (This, in an area of overwhelming prosperity.) The hopelessness of the situation was such that the dissolution of Miami as a municipal entity was seriously considered. Once again, a more omnipotent authority had to step in and rectify the unscrupulous nature of Cuban-American politics. The then Governor of Florida, Lawton Chiles, suspended local control of the city's finances, which were immediately assumed by the State and its taxpayers.

     This almost unprecedented situation was less the result of poor management, and more of personal graft and corruption. Translation: the local honchos were pocketing the money. Cesar Odio, the then City Manager, might still be vacationing in our penal system (I wonder if this is the same Cesar Odio who was a star basketball player at Columbus High?), along with a varying array of underlings.

     Although the 2 events mentioned above are high profile examples of the Cuban-American political personality, they are hardly the exceptions. The more peripheral municipalities in the Greater Miami solar system, such as Hialeah, Opa Locka, etc., are routinely subject to such shenanigans.

     In the end, for the politicians who ran Cuba before Fidel, the Revolution turned out to be little more than an inconvenience. It  forced them 100 miles to the north, where their idea of government has remained pretty much intact.

     Ain't democracy great? (Which brings me too . see essay "Elian: Odds and Ends")