As we go to press on April 13, it appears likely that government authorities will hand over Elián from his great-uncle, to whom he was delivered after his rescue, to his father. Crucial issues that have been raised around the case remain for discussion and clarification for working-class fighters. Several are posed in the letter from Slater.

Chief among these is the need for the labor movement to oppose attempts to bolster the powers of the immigration cops.

The U.S. rulers here are continually probing to try to strengthen the judge-jury-and-executioner powers of the immigration authorities. These are moves aimed at undermining the rights, wages, and working conditions of a whole layer of the working class, with consequences for all working people.

Many tens of thousands of workers in this country feel the impact of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act passed in 1996. The legislation tripled to 15,000 the roll of agents in the Immigration and Naturalization Service, making the INS the largest federal police agency. The annual budget for deportations was boosted to finance an increase in the number of INS detention beds to 17,500. These beds are full. Many people are indefinitely detained while awaiting the outcome of an asylum application.

Under the law, the INS was granted an array of new enforcement tools, including the power to deport people quickly from an airport or some other location upon their arrival. That process, called "expedited removal," denies deportees the right to a lawyer or to any judicial hearing. People who carry allegedly false documents or who seek asylum can be summarily deported. The INS reported last November that 89,000 people--an increase of 16 percent--had been the victims of "expedited removal" in the previous year.

The deportations of working people already living here have also increased. The 1996 legislation expanded the types of crimes that can be used as grounds to deport immigrants, adding offenses such as felony shoplifting. More than 60,000 people were removed under those provisions in the 1999 fiscal year.

The INS lost one challenge to these powers just this month. The federal appeals court covering the nine Western states ruled against the indefinite detention of immigrants from countries with no repatriation agreement with Washington who complete prison sentences. Several hundred people will be affected.

On the other hand, on March 28 the Supreme Court refused to consider a challenge to parts of a welfare law, also passed in 1996, that made legal immigrants ineligible for various kinds of welfare.  
 

Oppose extra powers for the INS

The unity and strength of the entire working class is at stake in this issue. The bosses use the second-class status of immigrant workers--enforced by the lifted ax of their laws--to press down on all our wages, conditions, and democratic rights. The anti-immigrant policies of the ruling class are aimed at reinforcing this situation, and not at bringing a halt to immigration. In fact in the present capitalist boom the laws are enforced even more arbitrarily as the demand for labor heats up.

These facts are important in considering how working people should react to demands for the INS to step in past the legal appeals process and enforce its ruling, announced in January of this year that Elián should be returned to Cuba. In the context of the rulers' drive to boost INS powers and to weaken the rights to legal appeal, it is dangerous to advocate the "simple administrative return" of the child, to use the words in Slater's letter.

The thrust of President William Clinton's approach on the issue has been to polish up the image of the INS, which is justly hated by many working people.  
 

The question of parental rights

Parental rights is another issue that is raised in the context of the debate over the custody of Elián that workers need to discuss and to clarify. The dignified conduct of Elián's father, Juan Miguel González, throughout the controversy has undermined the occasional attempt to question his fitness as a father. No one has successfully questioned his ability to speak for this young boy.

Slater makes a one-sided point in his letter about this question, however, when he correctly opposes the "long history...of the ruling class using various agencies...to interfere in the relations within the family, quite often with racist intent."

Such crimes have often marked capitalist rule, and it is important for the labor movement to oppose them. However, class-conscious workers state clearly that parental rights in the abstract should not be held above the rights of children--the most defenseless members of society.

The abuses that children suffer--including violence, sexual assault, and the opposition on the part of some parents to state-provided education or health care--are manifestations of the brutality and lack of solidarity that characterize the capitalist social order. Working people demand that the state intercede on behalf of children in such cases.  
 

Washington's 'Cold War' against Cuba

These are some of the key questions raised by the struggle over Elián. His fate has become a preoccupation in the media and a cause celébre among politicians in this country--especially those from the right. To discuss and assess this controversy, it is necessary to step back and place it in the context of Cuba-U.S. relations, and of the deepening fault lines that run through capitalist politics in this country.

The U.S. rulers, head of the mightiest imperialist power on earth, have never forgiven the working people of Cuba for the revolution they began more than 40 years ago. Not only did the workers and peasants overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship; they went on to overturn the domination of the foreign and local exploiters in the countryside and the cities. Under revolutionary Marxist leadership, they have extended solidarity to struggles for social justice and independence in other countries.

That is why Washington's "Cold War" against Cuba has not ended. The thrusts of the U.S. rulers against the revolution have included the attempt to overthrow the Cuban government with the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The following year, the government of President John Kennedy threatened Cuba with nuclear weapons and prepared to invade, reversing course only when the Pentagon predicted that 18,000 U.S. soldiers would die in the first 10 days of such an assault. A sweeping set of economic sanctions has been in place since 1960. Measures passed in 1992 and 1996 tightened and extended the embargo. Alongside this, the U.S. rulers have waged an unremitting propaganda offensive against the Cuban government led by President Fidel Castro, misrepresenting it as a brutal dictatorship.  
 

Breakup of bipartisan foreign policy

The storm around the Elián case is also a byproduct of the breakup of the bipartisan consensus in U.S. foreign policy that prevailed for most of the last several decades. For that period, however much the representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties might disagree--at least in public--over domestic issues, they united behind the policies of U.S. imperialism abroad. This is less and less true today. In general, coarseness and acrimony increasingly fill relations between and within the major capitalist parties and institutions of government.

These divisions have affected the course of the Elián case. A ruling by the INS that the boy should return to Cuba by January 14 received the backing of U.S. President William Clinton and other top administration officials, and clearly still enjoys the support of a majority in the ruling class.

The ruling immediately came under fire, however, from right-wing politicians who cared little for the opinion polls that indicated a majority wanted to see Elián returned. Sen. Connie Mack, a Republican congressman from Florida, introduced a bill to grant Elián and his family in Cuba permanent residency--a measure cosponsored by the right-wing Republican Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader.

Meanwhile, opponents of the revolution filled the newspaper columns and the airwaves with vitriol aimed at Havana. In an editorial entitled "Elián and His Many Uses," the Washington Post wrote on March 31, "If Cuba were not ruled by a Communist dictator, the Elián case would be sad, but not difficult. The father could speak freely; if he wanted custody, the boy would be returned.... But Elián's father, Juan Miguel González, lives on an island where people who speak freely go to jail."

The return of Elián to Cuba will not bring this kind of poison to an end. The U.S. rulers will continue to set their sights on Cuba, restrained only by the revolutionary intransigence of the working people of that country, and by the opposition among workers and farmers here and around the world to a bloody military intervention. Defending the Cuban revolution fits into building our own struggles against capitalist injustice. Similarly, to strengthen our organization and increase political clarity among fighters, we need to identify and oppose attempts by the rulers to bolster their powers for use against all working people.  
 

Opinion of a reader

I think the ruling class and the government representatives have been intelligent with respect to their current escalating attacks on the Cuban revolution. I think we have been less so.

They have taken the formal position that it is the father of Elián González who is the only one who has the legal right to speak for him. This is an important position that is truly in the interest of class conscious workers to support. We should not let the fact that it is being set forth by the government cloud this.

There is a long history, which continues to this day, of the ruling class using various agencies of local, state, and federal governments to interfere in the relations within the family, quite often with racist intent. Laws, treaties, and covenants against such practices are hard-won conquests of the working class and its allies. In this case the intent of the use of interference within this Cuban family is political.

There are no particulars in this case that would give cause to find any exception to agreeing with the idea that the government has no right to interfere with this Cuban family. The government's legal claims, likewise, do not find reason for exception.

What the government is doing, in reality, is using the courts to delay this simple administrative return of Elián. While delivering Elián into the captivity of the Cuban National Foundation, they play out their real intents--that is, to flood the stage with vile anti-Cuba revolution propaganda and further provocations. The government, on the one hand (INS ruling), is saying it has no basis for interfering with this family, but on the other hand is doing just that. We should make a distinction between the different aspects of which side of the mouth the government speaks.

It is not the position of the INS in this case that we should be aiming our fire at. It is the using of this case in the political manner that it is. The government's position that this issue should be decided in the courts is the means by which the kidnapping is extended. We should not be a part of this.

We cannot, however true, just point to any government agency, and say that they are justly hated and therefore any action or position taken by them should be opposed.

We hold no faith in the government upholding any aspect of the codification of gains by the working class and its allies but cannot just oppose, or ignore the government. We are not yet in a position to replace it.

The pressures at this time are enormous. I do not agree with the view expressed by some that we need to "defend the integrity of the INS from the Miami Mafia." But it doesn't mean that we should be obliged to find the exact polar opposite.

We need to know where the class line is, but also be intelligent, honest, and explain the whole complexity of bourgeois reality.

Les Slater 
Brookline, Massachusetts  
 
 
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