These roundtable discussions often take up aspects of the history and culture of Cuba and the United States, including the long struggle for independence from U.S. imperialism. Washington's arrogant refusal to return the boy to Cuba since November 25 of last year, when he was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida, is placed in this broader perspective.

Among other questions the interviewer, Miguel Angel Masjuan, asked Waters were her views on the June 1 ruling by a federal appellate court in Atlanta. The court denied a political asylum hearing for Elián González that would have further delayed his return--a victory for his supporters. But the ruling dealt a blow to working people in the United States by strongly reinforcing the broad discretionary powers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the narrow scope of permissible judicial review.

The following notes were written by Waters in preparation for the interview, based on questions Masjuan had given her a few days earlier. An abbreviated version was used for the program.  
 

But Washington's calculated offensive has never been concerned with Elián. A child of any other nationality rescued from the sea as he was would have been repatriated to his own country in a matter of days.

What is at stake here is the battle for Cuban sovereignty. It is Washington's determination to crush the revolutionary power of the Cuban people, to punish them for the affront of establishing the first free territory of the Americas some 40 years ago. That has been the goal since 1959. So in the context of Cuba's battle for independence from U.S. imperialism, six months is really not so long.

The important question, I think, is how to explain that the Cuban people, despite the enormous arrogance and power of the U.S. rulers, are going to win this battle. Because the truth is that Elián would not be coming home at all were it not for some very significant things happening in Cuba and in the world:

• if the Cuban people, through their enormous efforts and discipline, had not emerged from the worst years of the Special Period stronger rather than weaker;
• if the revolutionary government of Cuba had not given the order in February 1996 to end the provocations carried out by Brothers to the Rescue, which had repeatedly violated Cuban air space after many warnings and with the full knowledge of U.S. government authorities;
• if the Cuban people had not sustained months and months of massive mobilizations since November of last year in their determination to win the battle for world public opinion against Washington's refusal to return Elián;
• if the resistance of working people within the United States to the conditions of exploitation and oppression they face on the land and in the factories were not slowly but steadily mounting, and sometimes spurting ahead;
• if immigrant workers did not constitute a growing percentage of the U.S. workforce and an even greater proportion of the vanguard of the resistance developing within the working class and labor movement.

If these things had not happened, or were not happening, then Washington would feel substantially less pressure to modify its arrogant refusal to respect Cuba's independence and sovereignty.

Just last week a struggle broke out in a meatpacking plant in the city of St. Paul in the Midwestern state of Minnesota. Some 170 workers, both men and women, in an unorganized factory where cattle are slaughtered and cut into huge slabs of meat for marketing, staged a sit-down strike to protest the increasingly dangerous and brutal speed of the production line, and the high rate of injuries suffered by workers as a result. Another of their demands was that they not be forced to work the line when injured. This is a plant where the workforce is overwhelmingly immigrant workers, mostly from Mexico. They are constant targets of the hated Immigration and Naturalization Service, la migra, as it is generally known here.

For seven hours, in a powerful display of unity and determination, the workers refused to work or to leave the plant as management demanded. They won significant concessions from the bosses and are now involved in the struggle to organize themselves into the UFCW, the meat packers union.

Many other recent examples of this kind of resistance by working people in the United States could be cited--successful strikes by janitors and cleaning personnel in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities. Strikes by coal miners in New Mexico and Wyoming. Demonstrations by small farmers. Twenty thousand workers in Los Angeles rallying in defense of immigrants rights. Statewide actions in defense of affirmative action in Florida. Sustained, large-scale mobilizations against brutal police murders in city after city.  
 
 
What do these events have to do with Elián's return to Cuba?
It is not only the people of Cuba who have emerged from the worst days of the Special Period more confident, more political, more united. Tremors of heightened combativity are giving the U.S. rulers pause for reflection here too. And the meaning of events such as the popular insurrection that occurred in Ecuador in January of this year are not lost on them either.

In that context, the sustained effort Cuba has organized to win the battle of world public opinion, the massive political mobilizations of the Cuban people week after week, month after month, have made the U.S. rulers decide that they have achieved their primary objective in this case and have nothing further to gain from their blatant and arrogant denial of Cuban sovereignty.

The reason Elián will soon be returning to Cuba has nothing to do with the supposed humanitarianism of Janet Reno, William Clinton, or any other U.S. government figure. It has to do with these kinds of political developments happening in Cuba, in the United States, and around the world.

If it weren't for the strength of the Cuban revolution and the intensifying class struggle inside the United States, Elián would not be coming home at all.
 
 
Why are all these legal procedures delaying justice?
Justice is of no concern to Washington. Nor is justice something working people in the United States expect from the judicial arm of the imperialist state.

The U.S. court system is theirs, not ours. It is part of their system of checks and balances, one of the mechanisms the rising, and at that time progressive, bourgeoisie established more than 200 years ago to enable that class to resolve factional differences within its ranks and maintain class stability. It is a system that has served them well for most of that period--save for the small matter of a Civil War to settle the question of property rights in other human beings.

Working people caught in the coils of the U.S. judicial system know we are on enemy ground. We fight to delay injustice, to buy time to mobilize broad popular support that can protect us from being railroaded for "crimes" we did not commit. A degree of justice is something workers sometimes win despite the legal system, not because of it. The prison population in the United States has doubled since William Clinton took office and the number of yearly executions has tripled. The horrible injustice of the death penalty in the United States is anti-working-class and racist to its core. One of the great scandals emerging in the United States today is the growing evidence, partly due to advances in DNA technology, and mostly due to heightened working-class resistance, that a high percentage of prisoners on death row have been wrongly convicted, even in the bourgeoisie's terms.

Late last year, when Elián was rescued off the Florida coast, the U.S. government soon realized what an unexpected opportunity that event created to advance one of the rulers' central policy objectives.

Two bills signed into law by William Clinton in 1996--the Illegal Immigration Reform Act and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (even the names of the laws speak volumes)--conferred draconian new powers on the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to seize and deport suspected "illegal aliens" without right to judicial review or appeal, and to jail immigrants using "secret evidence." These and similar provisions are a flagrant negation of the Bill of Rights working people won as amendments to the U.S. Constitution in the aftermath of their victory in the first American Revolution--the war of independence from British colonial rule.

Workers, farmers, and all defenders of democratic rights have been challenging the constitutionality of these new immigration and "antiterrorism" laws, seeking to mobilize public opinion against them and expose their utterly reactionary character.

The Elián González case--precisely because the majority of people in the United States thought the child should be returned to his family, and thus to Cuba--provided the Clinton administration an unusually good rationale to refurbish the hated image of the INS and win a federal court ruling that would establish a legal precedent upholding these newly expanded powers of the INS to implement policies and procedures exempt from normal judicial appeal and review.

They could deal blows to working people and other opponents of la migra's greatly enhanced extrajudicial administrative prerogatives. They could strengthen the powers of the executive branch of government, strengthen the imperial presidency--a course central to ruling-class objectives for more than half a century.

The ruling handed down June 1 by the Federal Court of Appeals in Atlanta did exactly that. Its opening paragraph states:

This case, at first sight, seems to be about little more than a child and his father. But, for this Court, the case is mainly about the separation of powers under our constitutional system of government: a statute enacted by Congress, the permissible scope of executive discretion under that statute, and the limits on judicial review of the exercise of that executive discretion.

The court refused to overturn the INS's decision that the asylum applications filed on behalf of Elián González were invalid. The court ruled that "we cannot say that the foundation of the policy--the INS determination that six-year-old children necessarily lack sufficient capacity to assert, on their own, an asylum claim--is unreasonable." It affirmed that "the INS did not abuse its discretion or act arbitrarily in applying the policy and rejecting Plaintiff's purported asylum applications." And it upheld the INS ruling that only the child's father could speak for him.

But the political heart of the decision lies elsewhere. The ruling affirmed that "the authority of the executive branch to fill gaps [where legislation adopted by Congress is silent] is especially great in the context of immigration policy." This is due to the substantial "international-relations implications" of the executive's immigration policies.

After contemptuously and slanderously asserting, "as a widely-accepted truth, that Cuba does violate human rights and fundamental freedoms and does not guarantee the rule of law to people living in Cuba," the federal appeals court affirmed:

[I]n no context is the executive branch entitled to more deference than in the context of foreign affairs. This aspect of the INS policy seems to implicate the conduct of foreign affairs more than any other. [A ruling] that, for immigration purposes, no parent living in a totalitarian state has sufficient liberty to represent and to serve the true, best interests of his own child in the United States--likely would have significant consequences for the President's conduct of our Nation's international affairs: such a rule would focus not on the qualities of the particular parent, but on the qualities of the government of the parent's country. As we understand the legal precedents, they, in effect, direct that a court of law defer especially to this international-relations aspect of the INS policy.

The precedent established in the case of Elián González strengthens the "international relations"--i.e., "national security"--foundations to exempt INS policy decisions from normal judicial review and reinforce the powers of the executive branch. This judicial rationale will be used by the U.S. rulers as they attempt to deal with their real concern--the growing resistance, confidence, and combativity of larger and larger numbers of immigrant workers in the United States, such as those who carried out the successful sit-down strike two weeks ago at Dakota Premium Foods in south St. Paul, Minnesota, or rallied 20,000-strong in Los Angeles.

How far the rulers will get on this course, however, is not predetermined. It will be settled in struggle.
 
 
What role does the "Miami Mafia" play in all this?
The only accurate answer is less and less.

Some 800,000 Cubans and U.S. citizens of Cuban origin now live in Dade County, in south Florida. Every year that goes by, they are more and more differentiated by class, age, race, ties to family members living in revolutionary Cuba, years they themselves lived in Cuba after the triumph of the revolution, and attitudes toward the revolution.

The real bourgeois figures in the Cuban community in Miami, of whom there are a growing number, are more integrated than ever on a national level with their class brothers and sisters of non-Cuban origin in the two imperialist political parties and all their institutions. This could be seen in the role they played in the political battle around the Elián case--publishers, businessmen, religious figures, top-level academic administrators, and more.

At the same time, the majority of Cubans living in the United States have discovered that, for them, there is no pot of gold. Life may have some more material comforts than in Cuba, but with it come all the uncertainties, anxieties, racism, brutality, and alienation of human relations under capitalism.

Especially among the newer immigrants, the comparison with the life they left behind in Cuba--the social relations of a society in which working-class solidarity rules--is at best a very contradictory one. They are far from a counterrevolutionary "mafia." They are more and more like other immigrant workers.

The Socialist Workers Party for a quarter century has had an open public headquarters and bookstore in Miami, has carried out communist political work in the factories and on the streets there, and has presented candidates for public office. We know the realities of the class struggle in Miami well. And our public existence there has long put the lie to myths about the counterrevolution's dominance of all political life in the city.

One of the most telling things about the fight this year to defend the Cuban Revolution around the Elián González case is what it registers about the decline of armed Cuban counterrevolutionary organizations in Florida. They played virtually no role, in marked contrast to what would have been the case even a decade ago.

The turning point came with the decisive action taken by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba in 1996 when Cuban pilots brought down the Brothers to the Rescue provocateurs. The contrast between the crowd of 60,000 who filled the Orange Bowl stadium then and the pitiful showing of the aging right wing around the Elián González case speaks volumes about the real political evolution.

Following the INS raid at the end of April, members of the SWP and Young Socialists went door-to-door in a predominantly Cuban area of the city called Hialeah selling copies of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. Without incident. With much political discussion and numerous papers sold.

The reputed power of the counterrevolutionary forces in the Cuban community of Miami has always been largely derivative. So long as they served as foot soldiers for policies decided by the U.S. rulers, these forces could pretend to be calling the shots. That fiction was useful to all concerned. As soon as they got crosswise with Washington's course, however, as they eventually did around the Elián González case, their marginal role was impossible to camouflage.

In February of this year, at the same time that the battle around the Elián case was unfolding, truck drivers virtually shut down the port of Miami in protest over rising fuel costs and the squeeze being put on them by the big shipping companies.

In March, thousands of Florida residents and supporters from throughout the Southeast mobilized in the state capital against the racist anti-affirmative action policies of the state government headed by John Ellis Bush, brother of the Republican presidential candidate.

A delegation of small farmers, primarily from south Georgia and northern Florida, visited Cuba in February to learn for themselves firsthand the truth about the Cuban Revolution's land policies.

Tens of thousands, including many from Florida, rallied in Columbia, South Carolina, in January to demand that the Confederate battle flag flying over the state capitol building be removed. A few days later dockworkers in Charleston, South Carolina, many of whom had marched in Columbia, fought a pitched battle with strikebreaking cops trying to protect scab labor gangs on the waterfront.

Events such as these fill out the real picture of South Florida and the region it is part of. And they tell us even more about the class stakes surrounding the battle all of us have waged to return Elián to his homeland.  
 
 
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