Cuban community vengeful, isolated

WASHINGTON - The rage over Elian Gonzalez will not end - not now, not this year, and not in this lifetime for many Cuban Americans and their supporters.

Their fight to keep the boy in Miami has alienated much of the rest of the United States, and driven a sharp wedge into public opinion. Many Cuban Americans have been left feeling isolated, angry and vengeful. For many on America's libertarian right wing, too, it is further proof that their national Government is the enemy. The Elian saga has left deep and bitter divisions in the US that will not heal.

"If the President believes the thug display by armed federal agents against a horrified 6-year-old child constitutes the right thing to do," wrote Liz Balmaseda, a columnist for the Miami Herald, "then we must ask him this: What country do you govern, sir? Is it the US or is it Cuba?"

Jorge Mas Santos, leader of the Cuban American National Foundation, arrived moments after federal agents had left the small bungalow in Little Havana with the boy. His words, too, were drenched in bitterness. "The Administration never had any intention of reuniting this family. Never."

The loss of Elian is a bitter defeat for him and the leadership of the Cuban American community, yet it is a fight that he would probably have preferred not to pick. The foundation first politicised the boy's plight using pictures of him in leaflets protesting against President Fidel Castro's planned attendance at last year's World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle. But the battle had become increasingly strident while it became increasingly unwinnable.

The foundation once depended on its ability to win battles in Washington and on the streets of Miami. Its credibility is dented in both cities. That does not mean the anger is diluted. It will be expressed in fragmented, uncoordinated ways.

Since the revolution, one segment of the Cuban American community has remained intractably opposed to the regime in Havana, emotionally, politically and culturally dedicated to its overthrow. The US Government has used this bile for its own ends, in the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs and in CIA covert operations.

But the Cuban Americans feel that they have been repeatedly cast aside when larger issues threatened. For them, President Bill Clinton is just another in a line of Democrats that started with John F. Kennedy, the man who would not call in the air support they needed when their comrades in Brigade 2506 were dying on the beach at Playa Giron all those years ago.

The nub of the Miami Cubans' protest was their cast-iron conviction that the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, was not his own man, but the puppet of Castro. Seen through their prism, his reluctance to come to the US, and then Miami, was seen as ordered by Havana. Alternatively, it was seen as a signal from a father who was not free to speak that he really wanted his son to remain in the US.

Members of the crowd outside the house frequently expressed frustration that mainstream America seemed to treat them as ranting extremists and did not understand what to them was blindingly obvious: that no one in his right mind would want to remain in Cuba if he once had a chance to leave, and would not want his son to grow up in America, even if it meant dividing the family. They saw his desire to reclaim his son and keep the family together as a "selfish" attitude that only harmed his son's prospects of happiness and wealth. The reality is that Cuban Americans have lost the argument over Elian, not just with the Government but in America as a whole. While many support them, many more believe that the boy should be with his father. Miami has seemed increasingly detached from the nation during this long saga, defying the Government, but also swimming against a wider sense of what most saw as right.

That divide will make it harder for the Cuban American community to make its case the next time it has to win an argument, over maintaining the embargo, for example. But it has also left the community feeling ignored, flouted, oppressed.

There was no way to end the story of Elian in way that kept both sides happy.

Clinton knows how politically dangerous and incendiary the Cuban problem can be - he blamed his defeat as Governor of Arkansas on the arrival of thousands of Cuban refugees in his state after the Mariel boatlift. Miami knows rage. It has burned before, in a series of riots when the black community's anger spilled on to the streets. And the city knows other kinds of violence, too: the shootings which came with the drug trade, but also the assassinations and car bombings as those within the Cuban American community settled scores.

But the Cuban Americans are by no means alone in their rage. They will have strong support from America's right, which sees the taking of Elian as the latest in a saga of federal outrages by the Clinton Administration: from Waco to Little Havana. There is a potent narrative taking shape here, one that will lead many to conclude that their Government is illegitimate, oppressive and hostile, and that it must be resisted by any means necessary.

Right wing leaders yesterday were quick to draw parallels with Stalin and Hitler: for them, too, this is a day that will live in infamy. "In editorialising on the Elian Gonzalez case, we've asked the question 'Are We Still America?'" wrote National Review magazine on its Website. "It seems that question may have been answered in Miami, just before dawn [local time]."

- INDEPENDENT