An inner tube, floating in the ocean off Pompano Beach, was picked up early Thanksgiving morning in 1999 by two cousins out for a day’s fishing. Inside the tube was what they first thought was a doll.
It turned out to be six-year-old Elian Gonzalez of Cardenas, Cuba, whose mother and step-father had drowned in stormy weather the previous night in a desperate attempt to establish a new life in the land of the free.
Elian’s arrival set off a seven-month battle of words between Fidel Castro and the child’s father and grandmothers in Cuba and the uncles and cousins who had started a new life in the United States.
Elian’s father, who did not know that his former wife had planned to flee Cuba with their only child, demanded his son’s return. His uncles in the US unsuccessfully tried to convince him that Elian would have a better life in the US away from Castro’s oppression. The boy’s father was not convinced.
Eventually the American side of the family took Elian’s case to the US courts, asking that the child be given asylum. His father, backed by Castro, fought as hard for the little boy’s return to Cuba.
Castro’s position was that the family unit was sacred and the child should not he separated from his father who was in Cuba. Despite the appeals from the US family, the American authorities recognised the natural rights of the Cuban father. It was ruled that the child had to be returned to his surviving parent.
As former Attorney General Janet Reno explained to Florida’s Cuban community, the rule of law in the United States, as in most countries, is that the surviving parent has custody of, and speaks for, a young child unless the parent is unfit. And no one could say that Elian’s father was an unfit parent.
It was recognised that it would be better for a child to live in a hovel with loving parents, than in a palace with strangers. And so in the Elian Gonzalez case Castro rightfully won the day. It would have been unfair, and unnatural for it to have been otherwise.
Today we have the case of two dentists – a man and a woman. This time Castro is threateningly standing in the way of their escape from Cuba. Again it is a question of the unnatural separation of families. But in this case the husband and wife of these two dentists are waiting for them in Florida. Already the dentists have wasted 10 months of their lives in Nassau’s Carmichael Road Detention Centre. They, like Elian, are also the centre of controversy.
Castro wants the dentists returned to Cuba because their medical expertise is valuable to the Cuban state. Standing in the way of the release of the dentists to their families in the US is a treaty signed between the Bahamas and Cuban governments, agreeing that the Bahamas will return to Cuba all of its escaping citizens. Under the treaty, the Bahamas is obliged to return the dentists to Cuba.
However, to do so would be to fly in the face of the natural law, a law far superior to the law of man – a law that says that no man, not even Fidel Castro, can put asunder the union of man and wife. Also no human should be a slave to a state, even Fidel Castro’s state. Rather the state is man’s creation for his own security, and he can opt out of it whenever he chooses.
That Treaty reminds us of the trials after the Second World War. The defence relied on by the accused at Nuremberg in 1946 and again years later in the Adolph Eichmann trial in Israel was the argument that the accused bore no guilt because each of them was just following superior orders. The argument was that they all had to obey Hitler’s commands, which had the force of law in the German state: As US Justice Robert Jackson, in his summation in Nuremberg pointed out, this oath of party loyalty to Hitler “in effect amounted to an abdication of personal intelligence and moral responsibility” on the part of the accused. In this way, said Justice Jackson, “it is explained that while there have been wholesale killings, there have been no murderers.”
Needless to say most of the devils hanged for their crimes. They hanged because they chose to blindly honour their oath to Hitler, shutting out their individual consciences, which if allowed to function would have alerted them that what they were doing was both morally and legally wrong.
This Treaty with Cuba is like that oath to Hitler. Today it must be measured against each case that it governs. If to enforce it would produce a moral evil – as it would in the case of these dentists, who would not only be unnaturally separated from their spouses, but also would be enslaved to a state because of their profession – then it has to be rejected.
These two Cubans have the right to political asylum. A return to Cuba would be a return to slavery. No treaty is moral if this is the end result.
The Bahamas government is being threatened from both sides. It is now time for these Bahamian men and women to sit down around the Cabinet table and make a decision that is morally right and fair. Again in the words of Mr Justice Jackson: Are we going to strip these two dentists – as Hitler did the Germans more than half a century ago – of “all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being”?
It is incredible that it has taken the Christie government 10 months to understand that this treaty in this particular case would work an evil, and unlike the Elian Gonzalez case where Castro had right on his side – right in this case is not with him.
Editorial from The Tribune – Nassau, Bahamas
