Untold stories in Elian case expose media bias
June 29, 2000
By Henry Payne
Copyright 2000 The Detroit News

Elian Gonzalez is returning to Cuba with his father, Juan Miguel. But before this epic tale ends, there is a final chapter in the Elian saga that needs to be written.

Absent compelling evidence to the contrary, public sympathies will favor family reunification in child custody cases. Understandably, public opinion polls consistently supported Elian's return to his father in Cuba.

But compelling evidence did exist - of Cuba's oppressive hold on children, of government coercion of Elian's father, of back-room deals between the U.S. and Cuban governments - that the return of Elian to Cuba might be a mistake. The American people, however, never had the opportunity to weigh the importance of these circumstances because they were never reported in the mainstream press.

The Cuban boy's story is a case study in how the lack of ideological diversity in the Washington press corps has seriously damaged its ability to report a major story. As a respected Los Angeles Times poll recently found, 90 percent of Washington news reporters voted for Democrat Bill Clinton for president - in contrast to an electorate that never gave him more than 49 percent of the vote. Monolithically left-wing in their views, Washington's news reporters ignored key developments in the Elian story and presented an insulting stereotype of the Cuban-American minority. So biased was the coverage that only readers of Washington's small circulation conservative publications and the nation's largest conservative editorial page would have received a complete picture of developments in the case.

On Jan. 31, the conservative Weekly Standard magazine broke news that Elian's father had initially expressed an interest in his son's staying in the United States, calling his Gonzalez relatives in Miami to alert them that Elian and his mother were on the way. On Thanksgiving Day, the boy's uncle, Lazaro, then called Juan Miguel to report the boy was safe, and the father asked that he take good care of his son. Phone records confirmed the calls.

Not until after Cuban dictator Fidel Castro demanded the boy's return - and a full five days after his son's whereabouts were known - did Elian's father step forward to ask for his son's return. This key fact was ignored by the mainstream press. But it demanded answers: Why would a father wait five days to demand his son's return? Why had he changed his mind? Why did Castro speak for the child first?

A curious reporter for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (not its news section), James Taranto, traveled to Miami to talk to Cuban-American immigrants about the mental stresses of living in Cuba. What he found raised serious doubts about Juan Miguel's state of mind. Taranto logged case after case of fear and intimidation at the hands of Castro. Refugees told of family members in Cuba who were punished, sexually molested or held hostage by government officials because their relatives had committed the crime of fleeing the island.

Ominously, the Journal editorial page also learned that Juan Miguel's new wife had left behind another child when they left to pick up Elian. Was that child a hostage?

"The image of a mental prison recurs often in conversations with Cuban immigrants here," wrote Taranto. "They talk about wearing la mascara - the mask - to hide their true feelings. They describe a process of self-censorship in which they don't allow themselves even to think certain things, lest a counterrevolutionary sentiment slip out in an unguarded moment." Taranto found Cuban Americans who would still not condemn Castro out of fear of what he would do to family members still on the island nation.

On April 10, the Weekly Standard gave a disturbing look at the family climate to which Elian would return. Reported the Standard: "It's the Cuban constitution of 1976 (article 38, Clause C) that requires Communist indoctrination and military training for grammar-school children. The Cuban school system keeps a permanent file shared with the secret police (the expediente acumulativo del ascolar) on ideologically suspect children and requires faculty to interrogate children concerning the ideological integration of their parents. The Cuban regime dragoons 98 percent of school children into the paramilitary 'Union of Communist Pioneers' and that requires children, starting at age 10, to attend summer indoctrination camps (escuelas al campo). Constitutionally, parental rights obtain "only as long as their influence does not go against the political objectives of the state."

Clearly, Toto, we are a long way from Kansas.

But America's newspaper and television readers read or heard none of this in news reports. The Washington press corps continued to cover the Elian story as if it were merely a custody fight to return Elian to Kansas, not to what Freedom House calls one of the most repressive regimes on earth.

Worse, many reporters portrayed the United States as the more dysfunctional society.

"Elian might expect a nurturing life in Cuba, sheltered from the crime and social breakdown that might be a part of his upbringing in Miami," read an April 17 Newsweek cover story.

NBC reporter Jim Avila was positively perplexed as to why Elian's mother would have wanted to come here. "Why did she do it?" he openly wondered in an April 8 broadcast. "What was she escaping? By all accounts, this quiet, serious young woman was living the good life, as good as it gets for a citizen in Cuba."

Reporters seemed uninterested in the Miami relatives' point of view. Newsweek's April 17 coverage, for example, relied on sources within the Clinton administration and Juan Miguel's legal team to tell its cover story of "Elian's Ordeal." Most disturbing of all, the reporters' ignorance of Cuban politics manifested itself in crude caricatures of the Cuban-American minority.

Republican-leaning and hostile to communism, Cuban-American views are alien to reporters. The coverage reflected the lack of empathy. The New York Times described the Latin minority as "haters." Newsweek called them "hotheads" (talk about racial profiling!). The Chicago Tribune referred to them as "crazies," and NBC's Today show described them as "an out of control banana republic." Pat Oliphant, America's most widely syndicated editorial cartoonist, drew an ape-like Lazaro Gonzalez thumping his chest.

Dan Fiske, a Cuba analyst for the Heritage Foundation, says Cuban Americans are the one minority approved for press ridicule. He says the Washington press views them as "the closest thing to ethnic rednecks," an attitude he argues has roots in reporters' "romantic notions of guerrilla warfare in Central America."

Indeed, were Elian a 1980s black refugee from apartheid South Africa, it is hard to believe reporters would have been so eager to see him return home. If African Americans had protested South Africa's oppressive political climate, would they have been called "haters" and depicted as apes? If Atty. Gen. Janet Reno had ordered a SWAT team into a black family's home to take away a young child, would Time magazine have applauded her as it did this May? One remarkable New York Times headline on April 11 summed up the press' view of the Cuban minority: "Hatred of Castro Feeds Outrage Among Exiles; Communism Still Looms as Evil to Miami Cubans." Still. Imagine that headline applied to any other minority - "Segregation Still Looms as Evil to American Blacks."

Monolithic in its beliefs, insulated from other points of view and boxed in by their few sources in the Clinton administration, Washington's press corps - and by extension, the millions of readers dependent on it - missed story after story as the Elian case rushed to conclusion.

In May, Elian was paraded by the Clinton administration before Democratic contributors at a Washington dinner party. The press, which had once scolded the Miami relatives for exploiting Elian, ignored the story. In fact, the media didn't even complain about its lack of access to Elian, who has not been available since his abduction by federal officials in late April.

On April 17, the Weekly Standard alone reported that the Clinton administration had struck an unprecedented deal with Castro in December - shortly after Elian's arrival - to send 10 unruly Cuban prison inmates back to Cuba. In return for what? And on June 4, a federal court exploded the Clinton administration's lie - a lie repeated unquestioningly in the press - that the case was about enforcing "the law." As the court pointed out, there is no U.S. law that applied to the case - it was entirely in the hands of immigration officials.

In the end, reasonable individuals can disagree on whether a boy belongs with his father, even in the most adverse environment. But they can only disagree if they have all the facts. For as powerful as the parent-child bond is, there is U.S. legal precedent for keeping a boy from a communist country against his parents' wishes.

The most famous example is Walter Polovchak, the 12-year-old Ukrainian who refused to return to the Soviet Union with his parents in 1980. During his successful court fight, reports California free-lance writer Scott Holleran, Polovchak was moved among numerous foster homes and lived under the constant threat of a KGB kidnapping. Now a 32-year-old office manager in Chicago, Polovchak visited and spoke with Elian Gonzalez in Miami before his abduction. He argues that freedom is more important than family. "It will be devastating if this kid is sent back to Cuba," he told Holleran. "He will be brainwashed."

In 1968, in a less-celebrated case, two Czechoslovakian children fled to the United States with their father, only to have him die of cancer weeks later. When the children's mother demanded their return, a California court in 1971 ruled the children should stay given the inhumanity of the communist Czech regime.

But the American people wouldn't know about that. The media never reported it.