American conservatives got their values mixed up by opposing the

return of Elian

MY CUBA RIGHT OR WRONG

Gonzalez to his father, says Mark Steyn New Hampshire WITH any luck, by early next week Juan Miguel Gonzalez will have taken custody of his six-year-old son and booked adjoining staterooms on the first raft back to Cuba. Papa Gonzalez can set about rebuilding his relationship with lil' Elian after a five-month rupture, and I can start rebuilding my rela- tionship with my fellow right-wing crazies after a five-month rupture dating from just about the time the kid washed-up on Flori- da's shores, clinging to an inner tube after his mom, her boyfriend and practically everyone else went down with the raft.

I'd assumed the communist cutie would be handed over to dad more or less auto- matically; after all, even O.J. got his kids back. But Miami's Cuban émigré commu- nity began agitating noisily against the child being returned to Castro's ramshack- le dictatorship, and, to my surprise, practi- cally every conservative publication in America decided to go along with them. William F. Buckley's National Review called up and asked if I'd like to weigh in on the subject. Absolutely, I said. The boy should be back with his father, craven commie milksop or not. Er, thanks but no thanks, they said, we're sticking with more of a 'Go ahead, Fidel, make my day' line. Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard now regards the hapless moppet the way we sons of empire regarded India: by God, they've planted the Stars and Stripes in the top of Elian's baseball cap and there it will stay; it's part of their civilising mission to take this poor unfortunate heathen and convert him to Disney, Prozac and non- confiscatory taxation. The conservative commentator George Will says returning Elian is as unthinkable as returning a negro child to slave quarters in the ante- bellum South after he's managed to escape to the North.

Well, Juan Miguel finally showed up, anx- ious to pick up his kid and skedaddle back to the socialist utopia; Juan for my baby and Juan for the road, as he more or less told the US authorities. He now finds himself in a situation familiar to hundreds of thou- sands of dads in American custody suits: it's not enough to prove you're the father, you have to prove you're a non-unfit father. Elian comes from a broken home like mil- lions of North American six-year-olds; but, unlike almost 90 per cent of North Ameri- can divorces, in Cuba Juan Miguel and his ex-wife shared custody of their child. In the US your ex-wife can be a crack whore and the court will still give her sole custody. And 'Trouble at website, lass.' if she flees across the state line from, say, Vermont to Massachusetts, your chances of having any kind of relationship with the kid recede even further. So, once Juan Miguel landed in Washington, little Elian's 'Miami family' began conducting what's essentially a routine custody-case strategy: Trash the Dad. According to their lawyers and sup- porters, Juan was abusive to his late ex-wife; his son is scared of him; they want him examined by psychiatrists.

My conservative confreres instinctively recoil from going down this road, but nonetheless they've managed to come up with their own variation of Trash the Dad. The Weekly Standard was not impressed by Juan Miguel's 'fishy suit'. What's more, his shirt collar was 'two inches too big for his neck'. Clearly, this was some outfit Fidel had provided him with especially for the trip. It's true that, if one were, say, a Weekly Standard columnist doing a spot of talk- show guesting at CNN, Juan Miguel's get- up would give one a deplorably provincial and oafish air that could prove potentially damaging to one's long-term, on-air pun- ditry prospects. But I wonder if the editors are not perhaps reading too much into the suit: sometimes a large Havana is just a large Havana, as someone once said. They were also suspicious of conflicting press accounts of Juan's employment: he's been variously described as a doorman, a cash register operator and a travel agency clerk — the kind of low-grade occupations which, according to the Weekly Standard, provide cover for 'many an Interior Min- istry secret policeman'.

But in essence what the conservative press dislikes about Juan Miguel is this: he has seemingly not the slightest desire to live in America. Offered everything from tem- porary residency to the Congressionally- conferred honorary citizenship hitherto reserved for the likes of Winston Churchill, Juan Miguel has consistently demurred: thanks awfully, but we're perfectly happy in Cuba. This is now the Right's latter-day ver- sion of those colonial witch duckings where the only way you can prove your innocence is by drowning. Juan Miguel's apparent con- tentment with his life is, ipso facto, conclu- sive proof of the brutal intimidation he's being subjected to. The only way he can prove his fitness to take the boy back to Cuba is by agreeing not to take him back to Cuba. The only way he can demonstrate that he's a free agent is by agreeing to be coerced into emigrating to America.

So, for example, the Wall Street Journal has proposed that Juan Miguel agree to spend two weeks in Florida, after which, they're prepared to bet, he'll have no desire whatsoever to return to Cuba. Well, I've spent two weeks in Florida, and I fear my friends at the Journal may be placing too much faith in the state's charms. In my experience, not all Americans are enam- oured of the Sunshine State. A few years back, I happened to be down there with Don Black, the Oscar-winning lyricist of 'Born Free', and Max Weitzenhoffer, who was recently bidding against Andrew Lloyd Webber for control of London's Stoll Moss theatres and is invariably described in the British press as 'billionaire oilman Max Weitzenhoffer'. Being a billionaire oilman doesn't get you far in Miami. On the way back from the theatre, our taxi-driver, who spoke no English, stopped in the middle of a swamp to pick up a girl on a bicycle who climbed into the cab and attempted to shake us down for money she needed for 'medication'. 'Oh, God,' sighed Max, 'take me back to America.'

But no doubt Juan Miguel would find ways to amuse himself. He might cruise the South Dixie Highway, a concrete cor- nucopia of strip malls whose ugliness is impressive even by Miami standards. He might wind up in Lipstik, the same 'adult' establishment where Bill Clinton's South Florida federal prosecutor, Kendall Cof- fey, wound up one night in February 1996 after losing a high-profile drug case. Mr Coffey blew 900 bucks on a magnum of Dom Perignon and, during a private ses- sion with nude dancer Tamara 'Tiffany' Gutierrez, ended up biting her. After she complained, he resigned as US attorney. He's now one of the lawyers retained by Elian's Miami relatives.

Since his altercation with the South Dixie stripper, Mr Coffey has successfully brought an election fraud suit on behalf of Joe Carob, who lost the 1997 Miami may- oral election to Xavier Suarez, after Mr Suarez was found to have won the votes of 5,000 deceased persons and mental incom- petents. The first thing new Mayor Carobo did was sack the dismal city manager, Jose Garcia-Pedrosa. It was also the second and third things he did since Garcia-Pedrosa managed to keep getting himself reinstat- ed. Senor Garcia-Pedrosa is also on Elian's Miami legal team. Meanwhile, Mayor Car- ollo has thrown in his two bits: he announced last week that his police department would not be available to pro- tect federal marshals should they attempt to brave the mob and retrieve the kid from his great-uncle's home. Nothing personal, you understand, but unfortunately they'll be on traffic duty on the other side of 'Phone the council — noisy neighbours.'

town. It is not necessary to be an apologist for communism to recognise that the world in which Elian has been immersed since Thanksgiving — a world of ever- swelling legal teams, opportunist shrinks, pandering pols, hovering showbiz agents, TV grotesques, dysfunctional cousins and all the Disney merchandising the kid can stand up in — does not show America at its best. Indeed, I've no doubt that the South Florida freak show would seem even more repellent and foreign to those Pil- grims at that very first Thanksgiving.

Now, I've no time for Castro. Cuba's a dictatorship and a dump — though, to be fair, the statistics are open to interpreta- tion. According to the World Health Organisation, for example, Cuba has an infant mortality rate lower than Chicago and half that of American blacks. Which suggests that had Elian had the good for- tune to be born in the land of the free, in, say, Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing pro- jects, he wouldn't be in this mess right now, since there's a sporting chance he'd already be dead. Who knows? Personally, I don't set much store by United Nations statistics — nor do most people.

But the idea of American exceptionalism is central to this nation's sense of itself. Under EU law, the entire population of Greece is entitled to move to Scotland. But Scots don't take it as a personal insult that not every Greek wants to. In America, Emma Lazarus's great poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty — 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free' — is an article of faith, and conservatives are affronted that even a small one-man mass like Juan Miguel refuses to huddle. If you're an Englishman in search of a green card, you may be interested to know that Cubans are easily the most favoured group with US Immigration these days, with the possible and enduring exception of the Irish. But, just as some Irishmen would rather stay in Ireland, America has now come across the first (and maybe only) Cuban who'd rather stay in Cuba.

And what's wrong with that? Let's take George Will's fleeing negro slave to the end of his journey. He's on the so-called 'under- ground railroad', being smuggled to Canada. Is Will saying a black slave should be denied the right not to go to Canada? That looked like a smart move 150 years ago. But, according to the most recent statistics, the approximately 30 million blacks in the Unit- ed States now have a combined income nearly 50 per cent higher than the approxi- mately 30 million Canadians in Canada. Things change. Let's imagine George Will himself in colonial Massachusetts. Someone says to him, 'Look, you're living under the oppressive regime of George HI. All taxa- tion, no representation. I can get you into the Netherlands.' Is it so unreasonable to decline? To say, 'No, this is my country. It won't always be like this. And, when it changes, I want to be here.' Castro is old. When he's gone, who knows what will hap- pen? All we can say for certain is that those noisy Cuban-Americans in Miami will be as irrelevant to the island's future as London's Polish and Romanian émigré communities have proved in post-Warsaw Pact Europe.

But maybe Juan Miguel doesn't care about politics. Maybe he just wants to stay in Cuba because he has family and friends, because he's culturally at-ease, because it's his country — right or wrong. That's some- thing conservatives should recognise, too.

Or maybe he only wants to stay in Cuba because — perish the thought — he just doesn't like America. And, given what they've done to his son, who can blame him? The two-thirds of Americans who favour Elian's return to his surviving par- ent see Juan Miguel as a father first, and a Cuban and communist a distant second and third. Common humanity behoves us to look at the situation that way. And, any- way, isn't it supposed to be the Right that's opposed to identity politics?