Why was Elian less worthy than Giselle?  

By Scott Holleran

Fidel Castro's recent collapse was caught on television, where the 74-year-old dictator's security guards could be heard exclaiming: "Aguantalo, rapido!" The phrase, which means "Hold him up, quickly!" captures the essence of the dictator's numbered days -- a 42-year-old communist regime reduced to a frantic scramble. Castro, like communism, is fading with the grace of a Soviet tank.

Before Castro's last gasp, however, he has unwittingly revealed his most ardent defenders -- American intellectuals -- as mere apologists. The catalyst is a girl named Giselle Cordova.

Giselle's father, Dr. Leonel Cordova, defected to the United States last year after escaping from a Cuban medical mission in Africa. Tragically, on June 17, 4-year-old Giselle's mother was killed in a motorcycle crash in Cuba.

Like Elian Gonzalez, Giselle's father demanded that his child be sent to live with him.

But, unlike Elian in America, Giselle was at the mercy of a dictator. Castro refused to release the girl. Giselle was marooned on the totalitarian-ruled island without parents.

Last week, the conservative Wall Street Journal published an editorial, "Elian II," denouncing Castro's refusal.

Suddenly, Castro granted Giselle and her 11-year-old half-brother, Yusniel, whom Leonel Cordova had also demanded be sent to America, permission to leave the communist state.

Clearly, Castro feared that, as Giselle's story became widely known, so would the truth that children in Cuba are refused milk after age 6, subjected to forced labor at age 11, and, later, forced into military service until age 27. In Cuba, no one has rights -- speech, travel, association and property ownership are either restricted or forbidden.

Giselle's obscurity exposes those who insisted that Juan Miguel Gonzalez's right to raise his child was more important than Elian's freedom.

There were many who placed a child's need for a father above a child's need for freedom, including members of every branch of government -- from the president, who sent armed troops to force Elian's return to Cuba, to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear Elian's asylum plea. Many in the media chided the pleas for Elian's asylum.

As one woman wrote to a Florida newspaper during the Elian saga: "If the situation were reversed, Americans would be having a mass coronary."

One wonders whether she observed that -- besides a conservative editorial board -- practically no one noticed Giselle's plight.

Writing last year to an online journal, another writer defended Elian's seizure and vowed: "If the situation were reversed, and Cuba was holding a small child whose American father wanted him back, why, all hell would break loose."

All hell did not break loose over Elian in reverse -- neither on the editorial pages of The New York Times nor among the send-Elian-back mob. That's because Giselle, like Elian, is an individual -- not a collective like Vietnam's Boat People, Cuba's Mariel flotilla, or generations of Mexicans, groups for which America made exceptions to its arbitrary immigration laws.

Among today's intellectuals -- in academia, in government, in the media -- the rights of the individual are meaningless; in other words, Giselle Cordova does not matter.

Of course, today's intellectuals are wrong. Giselle's right to come to America -- like Elian's right to stay in America -- is based upon the concept of individual rights, the core principle of the United States. There is no better test of the nation based on individualism -- or of any nation that claims to be civilized -- than how it treats the individual, particularly when the individual is a child. Because individual rights are supreme, Giselle Cordova, like Elian, does matter -- deeply.

Elian's return to slavery, which happened just over one year ago, is among this nation's darkest days; Americans failed to rally around the liberation of a child refugee from communism and proved that today's America is less the land of the free than the home of those who no longer grasp what it means to be free.

Giselle's unknown story reveals Castro as a dying dictator unable to withstand one newspaper editorial. Dr. Cordova's struggle for his daughter to break free unmasks those who fought thunderously to force a child to live in a communist state -- on the grounds that his father lived there. There was no outcry against injustice for Giselle -- the chorus of those eager to kick Elian out of America, never to be independently examined again, did not call for Giselle's liberation -- they did not protest that children, like all humans, must be free.

Not that such a protest could have mattered to Giselle Cordova; her life, unlike Elian's in America, is ruled by a dictator -- which is precisely why Elian should have stayed in America.

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Scott Holleran is a free-lance writer living in Southern California. He covered the Elian Gonzalez saga from Miami, Fla., including from inside the Gonzalez family home. Write to him by e-mail at sholleran@earthlink.net.  

Los Angeles Daily News. July 8, 2001 on Sunday.

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