Conservatives Make Cuban Boy Political Pawn

by Mark Scheinbaum

Ironically, this incident has occured just weeks after Floridians said they wanted to keep foreigners away. As reported in the MONITOR last month, Florida has recently shown a strong anti-immigrant bias, A newspaper poll found statewide support of 58 percent for curbs on legal immigration and even greater support for the federal government to do more to stop illegal immigration. ]

An evening tour of Miami revealed a massive police presence that left the impression that although Elian's support in the Cuban community may have been miles wide the anti-Castro activists were just a foot deep.

By the end of the NBA Miami Heat-Houston Rockets game at the new American Airlines Arena on Biscayne Boulevard, just six protestors holding a "Clinton Coward" sign remained. Earlier in the day the very game was threatened with cancellation as more than 80 protestors were arrested and hundreds tried to stop traffic in or out the busy nearby Port of Miami.

The quiet, friendly child, with dark eyes and a confident, easy-going manner, was found clinging to an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day after his mother drowned in a bid for a new life in the United States. He has been the center of a storm of international publicity that's pitted the strong anti-Castro community in Miami against the compassion of those who want the boy returned to his only surviving parent.

The latest round of demonstrations came 48 hours after the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) declared that Elian could be repatriated within eight days. INS said interviews with his natural father in Cuba indicated that there was no overriding reason (such as child abuse, emotional stress, etc.) why he should be denied custody of his son.

Elian's father contends that his estranged wife had kidnapped the boy after they were awarded joint custody, and did not inform him of her dangerous trip with Elian to escape the Fidel Castro regime.

Critics of the INS, including GOP presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), have called Elian's possible return to Cuba a disgrace to America's history of freedom. They also emphasized the need to enforce what was literally his mother's dying wish -- to bring her son to Florida.

Miami might indeed have been close to that fire, but for Metro Miami-Dade sheriff's deputies and Miami police. Caravans of police cars swept through neighborhoods where small protests erupted, quickly reopening clogged intersections. Though many city officials agree with their cause, few apparently support the protests.

Some non-Cuban American residents blamed City Councilman Tomas Regalado for fanning the potential flames at the busy corner of West Flagler Street and 57th Avenue. "These people are exercising their rights to sit down in the street and block traffic," the politician told a tv reporter. He then argued with a local radio reporter that in American everyone has "the constitutional right to sit down and block traffic" at rush hour.

Dozens of his constituents were handcuffed and arrested, and the intersection was re-opened, blocked, and re-opened again.

Tolls were lifted on the Airport Expressway and the Golden Glades Interchange of the Florida Turnpike, opening lanes for emergency vehicles and speeding the ride for some motorists who had been caught in traffic jams earlier in the week. At least three people reported traffic-related injuries.

Along busy LeJeune Road, adjacent to Miami-Dade International Airport, police made sure there was no repeat of Wednesday evening's effort by angry Cuban-Americans to bring traffic in and out of one of the world's busiest airports to a halt.

Police arrived in a gigantic show of force, with patrol cars flanking three gigantic tow truck-wreckers -- the kind that lift 18-wheelers -- in the center median of LeJeune Road. The message was clear: stop your car or truck to chant anti-Castro slogans, and you will instantly be surrounded by police and towed away.

In the predominantly Hispanic Miami suburb of Hialeah, police used historic Hialeah Park racetrack as a staging area to monitor local anti-Clinton protests. Unlike Miami, most of the Hialeah demonstrators followed police orders to keep protests on the sidewalks.

Two counties north, in West Palm Beach, Fla., members of a smaller Cuban-American enclave called for a rally at a local park named for Cuban poet and political philosopher Jose Marti to keep Elian here.

On one talk radio program, international lawyer, and former Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez agreed with callers who speculated that the possible imminent return of Elian to Cuba was the quid pro quo of the sudden end to a week-long prison riot in Louisiana.

In a complete reversal of previous Cuban policy, the Castro government agreed to take rioting inmates (convicted Cuban exile criminals) back to Cuba. Criminal charges surrounding the prison takeover were dropped and a volatile situation involving inmates who had served their terms but had no country that wanted them was temporarily diffused. Suarez said it appeared that the return of Elian to Cuba, assuaging Castro and thousands of protestors in Havana streets, was just America's part of the deal.

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said in her weekly news conference Thursday that she had not yet reviewed written appeals from Elian's Miami relatives, but thus far did not see any reason why the INS decision should be overturned.

Members of the child's Miami legal team indicated that part of any request for emergency court relief might involve insistence that the child's future come under Florida family court rules, rather than immigration laws.

Suarez and others have charged that what they view as a sudden acceleration in the INS move to deport Elian is an attempt to beat the new session of Congress in two weeks, which could react to public sentiment and confer U.S. citizenship on Elian.