In the early hours of Saturday 22 April, federal agents, rescued a terrified Elian Gonzalez from his counter-revolutionary Miami relatives, and a few hours later he was returned to his father. Despite the horrors of his rescue, reunion with his family brought an expression of radiant happiness to Elian’s face a face which says ‘safe at home at last’.
Before the family will actually be allowed by the US authorities to go home together to Cuba, however, there is to be a court hearing in May to decide whether Elian should be granted political asylum and an order prohibiting his removal from the country extended. An excuse for a massive anti-communist propaganda campaign, the publicity surrounding this case ‘debates’ such issues as whether an ardent Castro supporter like Juan Gonzalez, Elian’s father, can be a ‘fit parent’!
And this ‘debate’ is being conducted by people totally indifferent to the suffering and trauma caused to a child, who has already lost his mother and nearly died himself in a storm at sea, by those who have been keeping him apart from his family, trying to make him hate and fear his Cuban home and family, suffocating him with consumerist indulgences, interrupting his education.
Elian’s treatment in America has already proved the hollowness of the American administration’s pretended concern for family values. Clearly, its only values are commercial values. Hence its determination to use any excuse to denigrate communism, which negates all commercial values in favour of human values. Enough is enough. Elian should be allowed home at once, without this farce of a court hearing.
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