By Phil Tajitsu Nash
The saga of 6-year-old Elián Gonzalez dominated an otherwise quiet Earth Day and religious holiday in the nation’s capital last week and weekend.
Around-the-clock negotiations gave way to a pre-dawn raid by federal agents on Saturday morning that resulted in Elián being taken from Miami relatives and returned to his father in the Washington suburbs.
For Asian Americans, the week’s events raise a host of issues:
One, did the racial, ethnic, and national origin of the people involved get them better, worse or comparable treatment to what a white advantaged male would have received from the government and law enforcement authorities?
Two, was the public’s reaction colored by the racial, ethnic, and national origin of the people involved, and if so, how?
Three, how will the incidents of last week shape the racial, ethnic, and national dynamic of this country’s politics, culture, and government?
To answer the first question, the Cuban Americans in Miami definitely got better treatment than the average family in a custody dispute—because they are a powerful political force in south Florida.
Hispanics are an important voting bloc in the upcoming elections, and Attorney General Janet Reno was cognizant of this, being a compassionate and skilled administrator and lawyer from Miami who served as a prosecutor there for many years.
South Florida is also politically sensitive internationally. The Miami relatives, the Cuban relatives, the Cuban American community, Fidel Castro and many Cubans saw Elián and his situation as a microcosm of the difficult choices and tensions that have marked Cuban-American politics since Castro threw out the corrupt Batista regime in 1959.
But politics aside, the Miami relatives legally had a weak case to argue, making their treatment look that much more preferential.
Although there is no consensus on whether Elián’s seizure was a good solution, many law enforcement and child custody experts have said publicly that it was the best solution in an already bad situation.
In particular, Elián’s mother, who was divorced from his father, took the boy from school in Cuba without telling the father (he was the custodial parent), and exposed the child to a life-threatening boat journey that resulted in her own death and his near-death.
Moreover, while everyone has been asserting that their actions were in the “best interests of the child” (a legal standard used in custody cases), Elián’s Miami relatives broke the law by holding onto the child for over a week after their temporary custody was revoked.
But international politics got involved, and the relatives were not seriously reprimanded or hit with legal sanctions. Even their playing out the legal dispute in the media—which would have resulted in severe admonishment and possibly a gag order from the judge in most cases—was condoned by Democrats trying to cool things off and local Cuban American officials who chose to be popular instead of uphold the law.
As for the second question of how people’s background colored their reactions, I have determined that most Americans at this time are seeing this as a boy and family issue, not a race issue. This comes after spending many hours reading bulletin boards at online newspapers around the country.
How they view the raid and the current custody situation breaks down by party lines (Republican leaders want to use this as another excuse to try the Clinton administration, but the majority of Americans thinks that justice was served).
And some African Americans from the Miami area complained in the press about the insensitivity of local Republican elected officials of Cuban origin, but the fact that all players in this drama are of Hispanic origin makes it less of a racially-polarized O.J. Simpson-type case.
Moving to the third question, the incidents of last week will definitely have a major impact on the racial, ethnic, and national dynamic of this country’s politics, culture, and government. There is, to use the phrase of John Hayakawa Torok and other race theorists, too much of a “convergence of interests” between Miami’s Cuban Americans and Republican Clinton-bashers to let this story go quietly into the night.
Hearings will be held, accusations will be made, and—most worrisome of all—Cold War, anti-Castro rhetoric will once more adorn the halls of Congress.
Given the strong anti-capitalist positions of the World Bank demonstrators last week and the corner that Republican gun-supporters will find themselves in when the anti-gun Million Mom March comes to town on Mother’s Day, don’t be surprised if Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., or some other Republican legislator does a reprise of the 1950’s red-baiting of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.
Asian Americans, and especially those of Chinese origin, are already under suspicion from those who cannot distinguish Asians from Asian Americans.
Scientist Wen Ho Lee and his fellow researchers in Los Alamos are bearing the brunt of it now. A little anti-communism mixed with a little anti-Chinese sentiment, however, could exacerbate tensions and take us back to the “bad old days” of half a century ago.