[c. 3,000 words; June 2000]

A Presentation by L. Craig Schoonmaker, Chairman, Expansionist Party of the United States

Elián Sí!, ¡Fidel No!
(Elian Yes, Fidel No)

Elián González is a six-year-old boy whose mother and stepfather died in trying to rescue him from Communist Cuba and bring him to freedom in the United States. Now, the evil Communist beast Fidel Castro demands Elián's return to Communist captivity and, appallingly, a surprising number of Americans support that call, on the preposterous premise that a little boy belongs with his father, no matter where the father may be.

But Juan Miguel González, Elián's father, is in prison, serving a life sentence for the crime of being Cuban. In demanding the return of his son, he is demanding that his son be sent to prison for life too. Since when do we jail children so they can be with their parents?

There are a million people in the jails and prisons of the United States, many of whom are parents. Should we reunite their families by sending their children to prison? In case you have been so brainwashed by Communist propaganda relative to Elián González that you have trouble with that question, the answer is NO!

For a father to want his son to be put in prison with him shows that father to be utterly unfit to be entrusted with the fate of an innocent child. To imprison his son in Communist Cuba when he can be free in the United States would be CHILD ABUSE of the worst sort.

Implicit in the demand from editorial writers and Communist-sympathizing demonstrators in the United States is the idea that life in Communist Cuba is perfectly pleasant, perfectly alright for a child to be subjected to. A little boy doesn't need freedom. He is controlled by adults in any case. Perhaps so. But Elián won't be six years old forever. Were he stupidly and heartlessly returned to Fidelia, he would be thrown into Communist schools immediately upon his return. He would be taught that the United States is the root of all evil, and raised to believe that the individual means nothing, the state is everything, and no person is more than a cog in a great social mechanism or cell in a great social organism. Individuality is evil. Freedom is dangerous. Thinking for oneself is a crime. And one's highest calling is to promote worldwide Communist revolution.

Elián might be trained to be an organizer of Communist guerrilla insurrections in Latin America or Africa. He might be trained in terrorism and sent to the United States to kill anti-Communists, perhaps even assassinate a President of the United States. And why would he not hate the United States to his dying day if the U.S. forces him back to Communist Cuba? Why should he not believe everything Castro says about the evil United States if we turn our backs on him because he wasn't born here? Won't that prove that the U.S. is anti-Latin, hostile to Spanish language and culture, 'racist' (tho Elián is white), xenophobic, bigoted and all the rest?

Elián would also be shown that the United States is a coward that retreats at the smallest challenge. It happened in Somalia. When a few American servicemen were killed and their bodies dragged thru the streets, the U.S. military ran for home with its tail between its legs. Before that, in Lebanon, one barracks was blown up and the U.S. military flew home with its tail between its legs. Now a petty Latin dictator on an insignificant island demands the United States betray every principle it pretends to hold dear to send an impressionable child to be brainwashed into Communism, and millions of Americans who do not value freedom say yes to that outrageous demand. No wonder the United States is held in contempt in much of the world.

The pretense that the people who want to send a little boy back to Communism care deeply about the rights of fathers would be laughable were it not so disgustingly dishonest. Since when do fathers have rights in the United States? For at least 35 years, fathers have, for all practical purposes, had no rights in this country. A father hasn't even the right to defend his son from murder by the mother. A woman can march into an abortion "clinic" right in front of the father and have his child pureed into bloody pulp to be flushed down the toilet, and the father cannot so much as lift a finger to stop her without being arrested and sent to prison!

Over 90% of children of divorce are routinely awarded to the mother, even if the mother is unfit and unable to maintain them in the lifestyle they have become accustomed to. If a father indignant at mistreatment refuses to subsidize the theft of his children from him, he will be called a "deadbeat dad", arrested, and thrown into prison.

Fathers in the United States have only obligations, not rights. If the Elián González case were somehow to give rise to a renewed appreciation for the role and rights of fathers, at least some good might come of returning a child to Communism. But no such thing would happen. No, only fathers in Communist Cuba have any rights in the United States!

Let's make an even trade: Elián González and all freedom-loving Cubans now imprisoned in Castroland for all the Communist sympathizers in the United States, most especially including Janet Reno and our first (and hopefully last) Communist President, Slick Willy. Let's send to their beloved Fidel everyone who advocates that Elián González be imprisoned in Cuba — and then wage a war of extermination against Fidel and all his supporters, old and new, on that tragic island.

Let's not make Elián's father out to be anything but what he is: a Communist — a violent, anti-American Communist at that.

"In an exclusive interview with ABCNEWS broadcast on Nightline [January 13th], a desperate Juan Miguel Gonzalez referred to the anti-Castro groups in Florida as the 'Miami mafia' and said he felt like 'breaking the neck of all of those SOBs, starting with all of those politicians in Miami.'

"'Sometimes, what I would like to do is go down there with a rifle,' he said. — CubaNet News, January 14, 2000

Passing over his geographical confusion (north is generally regarded as "up" there), Juan Miguel González has shown a violent hatred of democratic leaders concerned about personal freedom that should absolutely rule him out of consideration as guardian of an impressionable child. Never, apparently, has he even entertained the idea of himself moving to the United States so that both he and his son could live in freedom. No, he wants to live under Castroist Communism, and wants to force his child to share that misery. Misery may love company, but it is child abuse to want to subject a child to Communist dictation and material deprivation. Juan Miguel González is unfit to be near any child, much less a child who escaped his clutches at the cost of nearly drowning.

Quite the contrary of caving in to Communism (via its faithful servant, Juan Miguel González), the United States should seize upon the González case as a provocation that demands war, a war to kill Fidel and all the Fidelistas created by 40 years of endless propaganda and brainwashing of impressionable children — children like Elián González, whom so many traitorous Americans want to send to Communism class in Cuba.

Castro's Cuba and all other enemies of the United States should be terrified of us, scared for their very lives. They should be more afraid of the United States than the neighbors of the Mongols were afraid of Genghis Khan, because we have something Genghis Khan never had: nuclear weapons. We may even have the neutron bomb (also called an "enhanced radiation, reduced blast device"), a weapon that creates a relatively small physical blast but irradiates a wide area, killing every living thing. How wonderful it would be to drop one such device over Havana when Castro has called in tens of thousands of Fidelistas to demonstrate for the return of Elián González. With one blast we could kill off the bulk of the Communist ruling class and its staunchest supporters, but leave much of the city available for reoccupation by decent people after the last Communist is hunted down and killed once we have softened up the country with smart bombs, saturation bombing, napalm, artillery bombardment and everything else necessary to make our soldiers as safe as can be when they finally land to finish off the enemy.

Once Cuba is conquered, it should never be sent off into instability and dictatorship again but annexed permanently by the United States, something we should have done in 1898, when we had a perfect opportunity to do so with our triumph in the Spanish-American War.

Spain, which was Cuba's colonial overlord at the time, wanted very much to cede Cuba to us (so we might assume Cuba's national debt). But, as part of its declaration of war, Congress had passed the most astoundingly stupid piece of legislation ever approved by any government in the history of the world: the infamous "self-denying Teller Amendment", which proclaimed that no matter what, the U.S. would not annex Cuba.

The New York Sun of March 25, 1898 spoke for the true believers in this astounding idiocy:

"No annexation talk, so far as Cuba is concerned! If the United States government undertakes this high enterprise [war], there must be no taint of ulterior self-interest in its motives.

"For human lives and the liberty of human beings, for Cuba Libre; not for an extension of United States territory!"

So, out of idiotic naivete and a desire to show up Europeans for the imperialist scum they were (Europe's more vigorous empires were carving up the bulk of the planet around then) and show ourselves to be nobly unselfish by contrast, the U.S., which had long wanted Cuba to enter the Union, forswore even an attempt to persuade Cubans to join our federation voluntarily. We settled instead for the notorious "Platt Amendment", which gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba's internal affairs to preserve (our version) of democracy.

The result of our pure-minded devotion to the people of Cuba was to grant them a "freedom" they could not possibly secure. It was to be eroded by petty tyrants before the U.S. gave up even the Platt Amendment in 1934 — and that paved the way for the rise of Fulgencio Batista, a major tyrant whose excesses gave a devious lawyer from Oriente province a chance to pose as champion of the oppressed masses and win a guerrilla war to "free" Cuba. Alas, Fidel Castro Ruz was later to admit, "I have been a Marxist-Leninist all along, and will remain one until I die." Challenged by reporters to explain why he hadn't let his Communist leanings be known from the outset, Fidel proclaimed (approximate quote),

"If I had told them where I was leading them, they wouldn't have gone."

We must never make a mistake like that again. "Freedom" is not the same as "independence". Quite the contrary, independence may be bought at the price of personal freedom. What sane person wants that?

Once we conquer Cuba, we must incorporate it permanently into our Union, first as a territory and then, after a period of adjustment and education, as a state equal to any other under the Constitution.

If the war cry of the Spanish-American War was "Remember the Maine!", let us now take up a new motto, something like "Freedom for Elián, and for all the people of Cuba! ¡Arriba Cuba Libre! ¡A bajo Fidelismo!"

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