The Militant and Elian's Rescue - I
Juan R. Fajardo
fajardos at SPAMix.netcom.com
Mon May 1 00:10:05 MDT 2000
Here's the article from The Militant, which Jose referred to.
Perhaps others will also share the incredulity that I share wiyj Jose on
this one. My mouth just dropped open when I saw it, and kept doing so
as I read it. It is such as stretch that it strains credulity, and
makes me glad that I never joined the party, for if ever I would have to
break ranks it would be on this one. There's no way I could with a
straight face ever put forward this line.
As our friend in New Zealand would say, Oh, those Barnesites, what will
they think of next?
- Juan
[The Militant (logo)]
---------------------------------------------
Vol. 64/No.18 May 8, 2000
---------------------------------------------
INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working
class
In defense of the Cuban revolution, in defense of
the working class!
Since the day last November when then
five-year-old Elian Gonzalez was rescued from the
water off the coast of Florida, the Militant has
campaigned against the Clinton administration's
refusal to immediately return him to Cuba.
We have pointed out that he is one of many
thousands of victims of the decades-long U.S.
government policy codified in the 1966 Cuban
Adjustment Act. That policy is designed to entice
Cubans into the dangerous Florida Straits on
flimsy rafts and rickety skiffs with the knowledge
that if they survive, unlike other immigrants,
they will be welcomed with aid and citizenship
papers in the reputed "land of plenty," the
world's wealthiest capitalist power.
EDITORIAL
The Militant has insisted, moreover, that the top
echelons of the U.S. government, with brutal
indifference to the consequences for an innocent
child, quickly came to see how unanticipated
developments surrounding this case could be played
to advantage. Elian Gonzalez could be used to help
the U.S. ruling class polish the tarnished image
of la migra, its largest and most hated federal
police force, and to strengthen the executive
powers of the imperialist state. These are
strategic goals that rank high with the U.S.
rulers, as they prepare their arsenal for use
against working people at home and abroad.
The April 22 Miami commando-style operation
carried out in the wee hours of the morning by
heavily-armed special forces of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service provides striking new
confirmation of the Militant's assessment. That
raid dealt a stunning blow to the right of every
U.S. resident to be "secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures," as provided by the Fourth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the
Bill of Rights codifying space wrested by the
toilers over more than two centuries of struggle.
Every class-conscious worker is obligated to take
a clear and unambiguous stand against that police
action, which, in addition to all else, was
accompanied by chauvinism and anti-immigrant
prejudice against the population labeled "Miami
Cubans."
That's why the Militant, whose masthead proudly
declares it is "published in the interests of
working people," is campaigning with the headline
this week: "INS assault in Miami strikes blow to
the working class." Condemnation of the raid is
all the more incumbent on those who for more than
40 years have been the most consistent and
intransigent defenders of the Cuban revolution.
Following months of unprecedented publicity, the
police action in Miami removed a Cuban child from
the home of relatives who, with no legal custody
rights, were parading him before the world as a
trophy of the counterrevolution. For that reason,
the operation is being hailed by a layer of
activists in the Cuba solidarity movement as a
"victory," for which U.S. top cop Attorney General
Janet Reno and U.S. president William Clinton
should be sent bouquets of flowers and letters of
commendation.
Nothing could be more dangerously false. What's at
stake is a working-class line of march in defense
of democratic rights and political space won by
working people in the United States through two
revolutions and numberless bloody battles in the
streets. It is along that road that the Cuban
Revolution, the first dictatorship of the
proletariat in our hemisphere, will be effectively
defended as well.
Never was there greater need for clarity that the
government of the most dangerous and brutal
imperialist power in the world does not act for
"us." "We" and "they" are two irreconcilable
classes.
Clinton strengthens police powers
Since taking office more than seven years ago, the
Clinton administration, with bipartisan backing in
Congress, has been steadily pursuing a course to
strengthen police powers while restricting
political space for the exercise of democratic
rights. This is the rulers' considered need, an
anticipation in face of slowly growing political
polarization and intensified resistance by
broadening layers of workers and farmers to the
conditions of their exploitation and oppression.
The following are just a few of the measures taken
by the White House, Congress, and the courts:
Under the banner of "the fight against drugs,"
Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill assaulted Fourth
Amendment protections against illegal search and
seizure in private homes, and the courts have
virtually eliminated such rights in automobiles.
Following adoption of the White House-initiated
Illegal Immigration Reform Act in 1996,
deportations hit a record high over the next two
years. La migra's hated powers to seize and deport
suspected "illegal aliens" without right to
judicial review or appeal have been expanded.
The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
signed into law by Clinton in 1996 permits the INS
to jail immigrants using what it calls "secret
evidence." It also broadens government powers to
use wiretaps and hold individuals without bail in
"preventive detention."
The U.S. prison population today is some eight
times what it was in 1971, and nearly twice its
level when the Great Jailer took up residence in
the White House in 1992.
Appeal and parole rights have been further
restricted, while mandatory minimum sentences,
longer terms, and even prison labor for the "free
market" have all become more common.
During the seven-year administration of the Great
Executioner, the annual number of state-sponsored
electrocutions, hangings, and deaths by lethal
injection have tripled, while the number of
defendants charged with federal capital offenses
has tripled since adoption of the
Clinton-initiated Federal Death Penalty Act of
1994.
The White House has stepped up heavier and more
deadly arming and equipping of police forces.
Between 1995 and 1997 alone, the Clinton
administration gave police departments 1.2 million
pieces of military hardware, including 73 grenade
launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. Use
of self-repeating handguns with large clips has
been encouraged and expanded.
In the name of preempting "terrorist" attacks, the
Clinton Pentagon has established, for the first
time in U.S. history, a de facto "homeland defense
command," preparing the way for the U.S. armed
forces to openly conduct police operations—now
prohibited by law—against residents of the United
States.
Mailed fist and imperial arrogance
Official sanction by the Clinton administration
for escalated police violence has led with
increasing frequency, from one end of the country
to the other, to cold-blooded murders by cops. The
roster of names that have prompted outpourings of
anger and demands for justice in recent months
alone is long and well-known—Amadou Diallo and
Patrick Dorismond in New York City; Willie James
Williams in Valdosta, Georgia; Tyisha Miller in
Riverside, California; and many others. But we
should remind ourselves that the pattern of
domestic police violence does not stand in
isolation. It goes hand-in-hand with the
sharpening interimperialist conflict and U.S.
military aggression throughout the world, from
Iraq, to Yugoslavia, to the Sudan, to Korea.
They do at home what they do abroad. Foreign
policy is always ultimately an expression of the
real trajectory of domestic policy. Their course
and objectives have nothing to do with the "rule
of law." They have everything to do with the
mailed fist and imperial arrogance of the world's
one "indispensable nation," as William Clinton
likes to call the United States.
The INS raid in Miami, as Harvard constitutional
law professor and liberal Establishment attorney
Laurence Tribe has pointed out, was carried out in
violation of the fact that under the U.S.
Constitution "it is axiomatic that the executive
branch has no unilateral authority to enter
people's homes forcibly to remove innocent
individuals without taking the time to seek a
warrant or other order from a judge or
magistrate." No judge or magistrate "had issued
the type of warrant or other authority needed for
the executive branch to break into the home to
seize the child."
The INS, with its enhanced powers under the 1996
Immigration Act, can secure warrants to search
workplaces for illegal aliens and "to search,
interrogate and arrest people without warrants in
order to prevent unlawful entry into the country,"
Tribe added. "But no one suspects that Elian is
here illegally." (To the contrary, we would add:
the U.S rulers' Cuban Adjustment Act is designed
to entice the maximum number of "Eliáns," all of
them "legal.")
La migra's justification for the firepower
deployed in Miami was the all-too-well-known claim
of "intelligence" reports of weapons in the house
or crowd. (How often have workers in the United
States been victims of "secret intelligence,"
offered by the FBI and other police agencies,
informers, and provocateurs to justify murderous
acts?)
The timing of the predawn raid, prohibited by the
terms of most search warrants; the battering down
of the front and back door; the refusal to seek or
obtain a court order obliging the family to turn
over the child (the INS architects of the
"dilemma" claim their powers are not subject to
judicial review); the wanton "collateral damage"
inflicted on the home of the child's relatives, to
whom the administration had originally "granted"
custody; the pepper gas sprayed on the crowd
outside the home; the assault on the NBC camera
crew—all are elements of the violation of the
constitutional right to safety and security in our
own homes that U.S. residents consider among our
most precious guarantees under the Bill of Rights.
All were intended to teach a class lesson about
what "the rule of law" really means to those who
would resist the advance of the imperial power
that William Clinton and Janet Reno serve.
As if the point needed to be reinforced, two days
after the INS raid in Miami, the New York press
reported that cops "in battle gear—backed up by
search dogs, helicopters and rooftop
sharpshooters—blocked off streets" for hours in
the Edgemere section of Queens. They were "acting
on a tip" that a man wanted in connection with a
series of shootings was in an apartment in the
area. He was never found, but others in the
neighborhood were detained, manhandled, and
grilled. Get the message?
Next target: Puerto Rico
Immediately following the Miami raid, the U.S.
government announced it would soon begin
operations with U.S. marshals and other federal
police agencies to clear the Puerto Rican island
of Vieques of the protesters permanently camped
there to prevent the Pentagon from resuming use of
the island as a weapons-testing site.
The chauvinist, anti-Cuban, anti-immigrant and
anti-working-class prejudice that has been used to
bolster support for the police commando operation
in Miami is one of its most pernicious aspects.
High levels of support for the INS raid among
African-Americans polled in South Florida is one
register of the successful attempt to bolster
decades of resentment against many in the Cuban
community for reactionary ends.
The pen of leading New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman drips with venom as he repeatedly refers
to the perfidious role of "the Miami Cubans," as a
bloc, undifferentiated by class or other
distinction, except to identify some among them as
"extremists." As a people they bear a collective
guilt. Whether as residents or citizens, they have
fewer or lesser rights than "Americans."
In the aftermath of the INS raid he
enthusiastically supported, Friedman gloats that
one can only hope "the Miami Cubans" have been
reminded "that they are not living in their own
private country, they cannot do whatever they
please and that they may hate Fidel Castro more
than they love the U.S. Constitution—but that
doesn't apply to the rest of us." This from a
near-hysterical advocate of tearing up the Bill of
Rights for all of us, so "the Miami Cubans" can be
taught a lesson.
Blanket references to Cuban-Americans living in
Miami as gusanos, or as the "Miami Mafia" (almost
more powerful than the imperialist
state)—references that often crop up among
supporters of the revolution in the United States
(see letters page)—are of a similarly reactionary
and petty bourgeois character. Events surrounding
the Elián González affair confirm what the
Militant has long argued: with every passing year
Cubans and Cuban-Americans living in the United
States are more and more marked by the same class
divisions and political polarization as other
residents. The Cuban bourgeois layers who dominate
the Dade County political machine are more
integrated today, not less, with their class
brothers and sisters nationally. The role various
of them played in "negotiations" throughout the
Elián case bears testimony to this.
Cuban workers in the United States are likewise
more homogeneous with their class.
End of an era
Even the relatively small size and elevated
average age of the crowds that held vigil in the
streets around the González home in Little Havana
should be noted. The virtual absence of the armed
counterrevolutionary organizations that in earlier
years would have furnished a cadre and played a
weighty role in events such as those of the last
five months is further confirmation that the Elian
Gonzalez case will be recognized as the end of an
era of reactionary hopes to influence U.S.
politics.
Imperialist publicists like Thomas Friedman
notwithstanding, it is not "hard-line" Cubans who
have "kidnapped U.S. policy on Cuba for all these
years," and now must be taught a lesson by the
real Americans for whom he speaks. The space
enjoyed for many years by forces such as the
Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) derived
from the fact that they served the interests and
policies defended by Washington. Even the
typically chauvinist image of Cubans as
uncontrollable extremists has been useful to the
U.S. rulers and continues to play into their
hands. As the political advantage of keeping Elián
González in the United States diminished in
Washington's eyes, however, the reality of CANF's
reputed power was exposed.
Beginning from the moment decisive action was
taken in February 1996 by the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Cuba against the Brothers to the Rescue
abortive overflight provocation, and culminating
with the frustrating failure of the campaign to
"keep Elian Gonzalez in the 'free world,'" any
pretense that there is a politically homogeneous
Cuban-American organization, let alone an armed
group, weighty enough to substantially influence
Washington's policy towards Cuba has been
shattered. The fiction of a monolithic,
non-class-divided Cuban community, kept in line by
a powerful rightist cadre, backed and pandered to
by Washington, has lost credibility. The
self-serving notion that Miami is not subject to
the same laws of class struggle as the rest of the
United States has been further weakened.
The issues surrounding the INS raid in Miami are
of vital importance to the workers movement.
Millions of working people feel nothing but
outrage at the rulers' trampling on our most basic
rights and political space, our livelihoods, our
very life and limb. The regressive burden of the
bourgeoisie's tax policies; the inevitability of
banks and government agencies foreclosing on small
farmers squeezed by the ever-increasing weight of
giant monopolies; the brutal indifference to human
life symbolized by the deadly police assault on
the Branch Davidian compound in Waco—if the only
voice working people and worse-off layers of the
middle classes hear speaking out against such
indignities are those of reaction, if no angry and
determined working-class voice is heard pointing a
class-struggle way forward, then the radical siren
song of fascist demagogues will gain an ever more
receptive ear.
Our battle to return Elián González to Cuba is not
yet over. It would be futile to predict how much
longer it will take. But with each passing day it
becomes clearer that the U.S. ruling class in its
majority has become convinced that the gains from
preventing the boy from going home has been
exhausted. His use value to them has been
exhausted. The "caring president" has moved on to
other priorities.
The people of Cuba have won.
The massive mobilization of ordinary Cubans, day
after day, month after month; their determination
to prevent the arrogant imperialist power to the
north from stealing a child; the spotlight of
publicity around the world—that is what finally
made it impossible for the U.S. government to
sweep the increasingly embarrassing affair (their
own creation from the beginning) under a rug. "One
day longer"—the battle cry of workers and farmers
everywhere—is the banner under which the Cuban
people marched.
Cuba's unforgivable offense
As many times before over the last 40-odd years,
the U.S. rulers are arguing among themselves over
how to continue punishing the working people of
Cuba for the unforgivable affront of creating the
first free territory of the Americas. The
propertied families are divided, as always, over
how best to advance their objective of overturning
the revolutionary state power on U.S.
imperialism's doorstep. There is no truce, even
for a day. But by drawing a line in the sand, the
people of Cuba have shown the U.S. rulers they
have misjudged the moment in history. Not for the
first time.
As we share the sweet taste of victory with our
cocombatants in Cuba, however, communists and
class-conscious toilers in the United States must
be both clear and intransigent about the class
political issues involved—the character of the
U.S. imperialist government and its armed
agencies. Our future—in fact the future of the
world—depends on it.
The muddle-headedness—at best—in facing these
class questions within what is broadly thought of
as the Cuba solidarity movement is a mortal
danger, including to the Cuban Revolution itself.
Every step taken by the U.S. ruling class to close
political space for working people within the
United States—to restrict the exercise of
democratic rights temporarily wrested through
bloody struggles—is a blow against the Cuban
Revolution as well.
When the victorious October Revolution was obliged
by the unfavorable world relationship of forces in
1918 to sign the rapacious Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
with German imperialism in order to buy time to
save the state power of the workers and peasants—a
very special period in the young Soviet
republic—V. I. Lenin led the fight within the
Bolshevik leadership to take that necessary step.
Parliamentary deputies in Germany calling
themselves socialists voted to ratify that same
treaty in the German Reichstag, arguing there was
no reason not to do so since the Bolsheviks
themselves had signed the onerous terms.
The Bolsheviks' unforgettable reply to them—as
recorded by Leon Trotsky, organizer of the Red
Army and Lenin's chief negotiator at
Brest-Litovsk—was: "You swine. We are objectively
compelled to negotiate in order not to be
annihilated, but as for you—you are politically
free to vote for or against, and your vote implies
whether or not you place confidence in your own
bourgeoisie."
For the working-class movement in the United
States today, the same class principles are at
stake.
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