American wealth can't buy paternity

For Elian Gonzalez, however, the international custody battle swirling around him is not about the Cold War (which officially ended before he was even born) at all. It is certainly not about the merits of a democracy versus the evils of a dictatorship (what does a kindergartener know about such abstract philosophical concepts?). And, much to the horror of psychologists, right now it does not appear to be about his dead mother either.

For Elian, it is about Nintendo. It is about black Labrador puppies, and fancy computer games, and Tommy Hilfiger clothing, and personal cell phones that he can use to talk to his 250 million new friends. Elian doesn't care about free market capitalism, but, like any normal six-year-old living in America, he does care about toys. And if there's one thing America has lots of, it's toys. No wonder he hasn't expressed any public desire to go home to Daddy. He'd need his own private ocean liner just to transport all of his new stuff back to Cuba.

This is not to say that Elian is selfish, or shallow, or cold-hearted. Certainly he must miss his mother, and think sometimes about his father. But when Americans are faced with a heart-warming tragedy, they tend to bury it in material possessions. And when a small child who, before November, had probably never even heard of half the things he now owns, is faced with such an onslaught, how could he be expected to carefully consider his own best interests?

Elian has become a poster boy for American capitalism: happy, smiling, and rolling in a sea of playthings. And America has fallen for it. "Look at how happy he is," we say. "How could we send him back to Cuba to be with his father when he has all the video games he could ever want, right here in America?"

This polarized view of good and evil is even easier to fall back on in light of the tragic, seemingly heroic death of Elian's mother, Elizabet. Elizabet, many say, risked her life and that of her son to escape the oppressive Communist regime of Fidel Castro; therefore, Elian should stay in America and fulfill her dream of freedom. However, no one really knows why Elizabet fled with her son to America, and the reason could very well be more prosaic than a race to freedom.

"She had a person living with her that was very violent, sometimes very harsh, and he pushed her to be in that situation," Raquel Rodriguez, Elian's maternal grandmother, said of her daughter during her visit to the U.S. on Sat., Jan. 22. Pressure from an abusive companion may seem like an extreme reason to travel 90 miles on a raft, but there is no reason to assume that it could not happen. Oppressed by Castro or not, Elizabet's mother knew her daughter better than a bunch of bureaucrats in Miami and Washington ever will—and she has a much better basis on which to judge her own daughter's intentions. And this country has certainly seen plenty of other cases of immigrants fleeing to America for reasons much less romantic than a fervor for democracy. Let us not forget that more immigrants have come here searching for streets paved with gold than have come searching for a democra-tic legislature.

For Elian, the streets are paved with gold. But that's not a good enough reason for those streets to steal him. For a country so self-righteous as to assume that it always does things better and more justly than anyone else, the U.S. is being surprisingly unjust to both Elian and his father. Juan Miguel Gonzalez did not give up his rights to his own son when he divorced Elian's mother, and he certainly did not give up such rights by declining to emigrate to the U.S. America knows nothing about the relationship between Elian and his father, but no one involved in the case has been given reason to believe that Juan Miguel has ever done anything so horrible that it would merit the seizure of his son into the custody of any state, let alone one that is not his own. Nor has evidence emerged that Fidel Castro's regime committed any atrocities that personally targeted Elian or his family.

We may believe that capitalism is a better system than communism, that Castro is a bad ruler, and that Elian would be happier in the company of Pokémon than in the company of his father. But to assume that we have the right to take a little boy away from his family just because we think one economic system is better than another is presumptuous at best and evil at worst.

I don't pretend to know what's actually best for Elian Gonzalez, a small boy from a culture not my own, with a particular family situation that I know nothing about. But neither should the U.S. Congress, or the Miami judicial system. And neither should you.

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