"No one has the right to make him an American citizen," Quintana, the boy's paternal grandmother, told reporters upon arrival at JFK International airport. "He was born in Cuba. He lives in Cuba. He's a Cuban." She was referring to plans by an array of congressmen to introduce legislation granting González U.S. citizenship. The move could block the January 4 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) ruling that the boy should be returned to his father's custody in Cuba.

González's mother drowned when the flimsy boat in which she was traveling from Cuba sank in November. Ten others also died. They were trying to come to the United States in a trip organized by a smuggler who had extracted steep payments from them.

The U.S. government has systematically limited the numbers of entry visas it issues Cubans, while enforcing a policy that encourages people to make risky raft trips outside legal channels in order to bolster Washington's false allegations that they are forced to "escape." Under the 1994 U.S.-Cuban immigration accords, U.S. authorities are supposed to return to Cuba those intercepted at sea. At the same time, however, under the Cuban Adjustment Act anyone from Cuba landing on U.S. shores is granted residency within a year.

Three survived the trip, including the six-year-old boy who was found clinging to an inner tube off the Florida coast November 25. The boy's father, Juan González, immediately asked for his son's return to Cuba, as did all his grandparents. Lázaro González, a great uncle in Miami, has kept the boy at his home there. Scores of bourgeois politicians and pundits around the country are using these distant relatives in Miami to press for keeping the boy in the United States. Ever since, hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated throughout Cuba, often daily, to back Havana's demand for the boy's immediate repatriation.  
 

Washington's record of hostility

The case has spotlighted once again the 40-year-old unremitting hostility by Washington against revolutionary Cuba. Democratic and Republican presidential contenders have used it to varying degrees to paint Cuba as a "totalitarian state" and justify the U.S. rulers' economic war on its people. Above all, however, the evolution of the case highlights another instance, among mounting evidence, of the breakup of bipartisanship in U.S. foreign policy.

The INS ruled that the boy should return to his father in Cuba by January 14. U.S. president William Clinton and other top administration officials, including Attorney General Janet Reno, backed this position. It appeared they had some broader backing among ruling circles for a deal to return the boy to Cuba. That scenario came apart quickly, though.

The Clinton administration was not inclined to send U.S. marshals to remove the boy by force from where he is staying in Little Havana, given expected physical opposition by right-wingers there. The Justice Department lifted the January 14 deadline once the INS ruling was vigorously challenged by scores of conservative and right-wing politicians and others.

The Justice Department did brush aside a decision by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge giving temporary custody of Elián González to his great uncle, an indication that the campaign by rightist Cuban Americans in Miami is a sideshow to the policy debate among the U.S. rulers around this case. Reno said the INS decision could be appealed in federal court. A suit filed by the boy's Miami relatives to block the INS ruling is now assigned to William Hoeveler, a federal judge in Florida, with no deadline for resolution. The suit claims that sending the boy back to Cuba amounts to child abuse.

Many capitalist politicians—not caring much about repeated opinion polls indicating a majority of those asked back returning the boy to his immediate family—seized on this to press a policy course differing from that of the Clinton administration. When Congress reconvened January 24, U.S. Sen. Connie Mack, Republican of Florida, introduced a bill to grant Elián citizenship—a first for a six-year-old. The legislation is cosponsored by Senate majority leader Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, the right-wing Republican from North Carolina who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee.

Similar bills were introduced in the House of Representatives, backed not only by Republicans but a number of Democrats. Other Democrats presented counter resolutions to block these moves. A day earlier, Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush said granting the boy citizenship "would be a wonderful gesture." John McCain, the second main contender for the Republican presidential nomination, has backed this from the beginning, claiming Elián and his mother "escaped" a "communist government."

In a parallel move aimed at undercutting efforts by the boy's immediate relatives in Cuba and the Cuban government to win sympathy for the demand of Elián's repatriation, the big-business press began to publicize the request by Arianne Horta, one of the other two Cubans who survived along with Elián, that her five-year-old daughter she left behind in Cuba be reunited with her in Miami. An op-ed column in the January 24 Wall Street Journal featured this case as part of a supposed mass desire of Cubans to flee "totalitarianism."  
 

Divisions on U.S. foreign policy

What has developed around the Elián González case is similar to other examples of unanticipated initiatives by right-wing politicians or wings of the ruling class to openly challenge and undercut the foreign policy course of the White House. These examples include the recent appearance by Jesse Helms at the UN Security Council, the voting down by the U.S. Senate of the nuclear test ban treaty that Clinton had signed in 1996, and the debacles over the Clinton administration's policy regarding the World Trade Organization and its decision to free 11 Puerto Rican political prisoners. These are signs of weakness, of a declining ruling class, not of strength. They were brought to the surface graphically more than a year ago around the failed attempt to impeach Clinton.

Meanwhile, massive demonstrations continued in Cuba demanding the boy's return, including one of nearly 150,000 people in Santa Clara this past week. In Havana, workers are building a new plaza in front of the U.S. Interests Section where many of the protest actions have been held. Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba's National Assembly, called on the U.S. government to enforce the earlier INS ruling, during a January 22 interview in Havana. He stated that the U.S. trip by the two grandmothers of Elián González may help speed such a course.

When Janet Reno and INS commissioner Doris Meissner met the grandmothers in Washington, D.C., January 22, they told Quintana and Rodríguez that the White House will simply press for litigation of the case in federal courts along the lines of the INS ruling. No other assurances were offered.

On January 24, the two grandmothers, hoping for a private meeting with their grandson, flew to Miami along with federal officials and representatives of the National Council of Churches, which sponsored their U.S. trip. Hundreds of Cuban-American rightists filled the streets around the house where Elián is staying. His great uncle, backed by his lawyers and right-wing politicians, refused to hold the meeting any other place. Rodríguez and Quintana did not agree to walk into that hostile setting in Little Havana. After several hours of waiting at a nearby airport they returned to Washington, where they met with U.S. congressmen.

The INS subsequently threatened to lift the temporary permission for Elián González to remain in the United States if the boy's Miami relatives continued to refuse letting the grandmothers meet their grandson privately at a place of their choice.

On January 25, the boy's great uncle agreed to the conditions. U.S. government officials went out of their way to give assurances that federal agents would not use the occasion to turn Elián over to his grandmothers. "We have reiterated that the grandmothers will not be able to take him with them at this time," stated Carole Florman, a Justice Department spokeswoman.  
 
 
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