....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I suppose the "game" of Elian Gonzalez will be over before this column is ever printed and it will fade from the evening News as quickly as it appeared, as it should. But there will be scar tissue left behind and not all of it is going to be in the mind of a small child.
Al Gore has some scar tissue. He committed the most serious crime a politician can: he didn't know when to keep his mouth shut. There was no drum beat demanding that he speak out when he called for granting the entire Gonzolez family American citizenship. It is supposed that he was trying to put the staunchly Republican Miami-Cuban vote into play, thus making George W. Bush nervous about holding onto Florida come November. But when Al opened his mouth he just made a lot of people who were already going to vote for him nervous about doing so.
His mistake will probably not prove fatal. There is plenty of time before November for folks to forget Elian Gonzalez. And those who won't forget were never going to vote Democratic, anyway. But Al Gore is still a victim of the Elian Gonzalez crises.
The biggest Democratic victim is the man who convinced Al to speak up. Senator Robert Torricelli, D-New Jersey. Senator Torricelli has been fighting diligently for the issues of concern to the Miami-Cuban community long before Elian's mother decided to leave home with her new boyfriend. But at every turn in the Elian affair he has been betrayed by the very people he has been fighting for.
It was Torricelli who painfully negotiated a meeting in Washington between the "Miami family" and the boy's father. And the very next day the "Miami family" reneged on the deal, turning Torricelli's promises and assurances into so much worthless sand. It's going to be awhile before anybody in Washington accepts Torricelli's political advice again.
Which brings us to the biggest political losers in this entire affair, the Miami-Cuban community. Having shown the rest of the nation the way they control local judges, the manner in which their local officials incite violence in the name of political expediency, and having cut the very ground out from under their own political supporters in Washington, they have presented a blurred vision of themselves to the rest of America: wailing fanatics, illogical, unreasonable, and indigestible by American society.
But if they hate Fidel Castro, it is partly because they know him better than most Americans. If they seem at times religious fanatics, it may be because they have risked so much for religious freedom and because they left so much behind that their religion is all that many of them retain of their old lives.
They are a people caught between two worlds, one they left, and one they are in. They do not have new scars from the Elian affair. They have simply re-opened old ones.
Most immigrant communities have made the same journey in America and most have experienced similar episodes. (Usually with braver and wiser political leadership). What has gone on recently in Miami is nothing new. On the large scale it is just part of the unpleasant process of mixing into the melting pot. It's a burp on the socio-political level.
But for one small boy it is a personal tragedy. His mother is dead. His father has been kept far away from him. The adults around him have been using him as a whipping boy, letting him suffer to assuage their own guilt and sense of loss. It has gone on far too long and it has cost everyone far too much. It is time that the boy went home and that Cuban-Americans did too.