>
>May 1, 2000
>Speech by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba, at the
>mass rally called by the Cuban youths, students and workers on the occasion
>of the International Labor Day at the Revolution Square. May Day, 2000.
> Compatriots:
>We extend our gratitude to the admirable personalities accompanying us
>today, and our recognition to the workers, students and all of the people
>filling this square.
>We are living through days of intense and crucial battle. For five months
>we have been fighting restlessly. Millions of our compatriots, almost
>without exception, have participated in this fight. Our consciousness and
>the ideas sown by the Revolution throughout more than four decades have
>been our weapons.
>Revolution means to have a sense of history; it is changing everything that
>must be changed; it is full equality and freedom; it is being treated and
>treating others like human beings; it is achieving emancipation by
>ourselves and through our own efforts; it is challenging powerful dominant
>forces from within and without the social and national milieu; it is
>defending the values in which we believe at the cost of any sacrifice; it
>is modesty, selflessness, altruism, solidarity and heroism; it is fighting
>with courage, intelligence and realism; it is never lying or violating
>ethical principles; it is a profound conviction that there is no power in
>the world that can crush the power of truth and ideas. Revolution means
>unity; it is independence, it is fighting for our dreams of justice for
>Cuba and for the world, which is the foundation of our patriotism, our
>socialism and our internationalism.
>In real and concrete terms, for 41 years now we have confronted a neighbor
>located just 90 miles away, the most formidable power that has ever existed
>in a world that has become unipolar and hegemonic.
>This time the struggle has taken on a particularly critical character, as a
>consequence of the kidnapping of a child. Has he by chance been the only
>one? No! Many Cuban children have been separated from one of their parents
>and illegally taken to the United States without the slightest possibility
>to recover them by turning to the U.S. authorities.
>In just the first two and a half years of the Revolution, some 14,000
>children were taken out of the country clandestinely, in this case with the
>consent of their fathers, mothers, or both. These parents were victims of
>deceit, taken in by a carefully crafted and deliberately fabricated rumor
>based on a fictitious law spread by the U.S. intelligence services and
>their agents in Cuba leading these parents to believe that they would be
>deprived of their paternal rights over their children. The subsequent
>abrupt suspension by the U.S. government of regular flights between Cuba
>and the United States left these parents separated from their children,
>many of whom suffered terribly feeling helpless and uprooted.
>On this most recent occasion, a humble father turned to our government for
>help: his son, who had not even turned six, had suffered a horrible
>tragedy. Without the father's knowledge or consent, the child had been
>taken out of the country illegally as part of an irresponsible and
>hazardous misadventure organized by an aggressive and violent criminal. As
>Eli�n's maternal grandmother Raquel stated upon arrival in New York on
>January 21 seeking her grandson's liberation, that abusive individual had
>dragged her daughter into this tragedy.
>The boat sank and the boy watched his mother drown. She was an excellent
>worker, a member of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party, and
>all those who knew her thought highly of her. She was one of the victims
>among the 11 Cubans who lost their lives that day. Like many others
>throughout the last 34 years, they were led to their deaths by a monstrous
>and bloody aberration known as the Cuban Adjustment Act, which promotes
>illegal migration and the smuggling of humans. Like millions of people from
>poor countries on this and other continents, they travel to the United
>States lured by the ostentatious luxury and extravagant displays of
>consumer societies.
>In the particular case of Cuba, these attractions are enhanced by the
>tremendous privileges granted by the aforementioned legislation exclusively
>to the Cubans traveling illegally to the United States from Cuba, which
>come on top of four decades of a blockade and an economic war as abhorrent
>as this law. Thus, in spite of the migratory agreements signed by the two
>countries, Florida is being filled with criminals who arrive by illegal
>means. Five out of every ten individuals who reach the United States in
>this way have criminal records that include burglary and other similar
>crimes.
>As it is known, this child managed to survive by remaining adrift on an
>inner tube for more than 30 hours. The Cuban-American terrorist mob,
>created by irresponsible U.S. administrations after their own image and
>likeness, took control of the child as an invaluable poster boy. A corrupt
>and sinister individual --simply a distant relative who had only seen the
>child once in his life-- was given temporary custody. Completely under the
>mob's control, he refused to surrender Eli�n when his father claimed the
>boy after he was released from hospital.
>Consequently, with their usual tenacity our people immediately began the
>fight to demand that the child be returned to his father and the close
>relatives with whom he had always lived.
> According to international law and the legal standards prevailing both in
>the United States and Cuba, the proper procedure would have been to
>immediately return the child to his country of origin and to resolve any
>dispute in a Cuban court of law. However, almost 10 days would pass before
>a response was given to the diplomatic note presented by the Ministry of
>Foreign Relations demanding the return of the child as requested by the
>father from the very beginning. By that time, the first public protests had
>taken place in Cuba, and they have continued up until today.
>It is obvious that they underestimated our people, who have not rested a
>single day in fighting for something absolutely just, and who have conveyed
>to the American people and the rest of the world their message of pain and
>indignation over the injustice committed against a humble Cuban family and
>the terrible crime perpetrated against this child. Eli�n has endured almost
>five months of mental torture, psychological pressure and political
>manipulation. Not even Dante could have described the hell he has been
>through!
>These events aroused the sympathies of tens of millions of American
>families with children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces and
>nephews of Elian's age. For them, as for the rest of the world, it became
>increasingly clear that there could be no political or ideological
>justification for such a barbaric and harsh crime against a child and his
>father, regardless of their nationality.
>The Miami terrorist mob and its allies from the extreme right in the United
>States have accused us of politicizing the case, when we have actually been
>fighting against this crime through peaceful means. Not a single window has
>been broken at the U.S. Interests Section, not a single stone has been
>thrown at that building, not a single American official or visitor has been
>harassed, not a single U.S. flag has been trampled on or burned in our
>streets.
> I wonder what the U.S. government would have done if a similar situation
>had been created with a barely six years old American child kidnapped in
>Cuba and subjected to the appalling treatment this child has sustained in
>that country.
>Throughout almost five months --from the time the child was found off the
>Florida coast-- inconceivable things have happened and all kinds of abuses
>and mistakes have been made. Despite their knowledge of the situation,
>until very shortly before the boy was rescued, the various branches of the
>U.S. administration showed little concern over his mental health and the
>scandalous public exhibition and manipulation of which he was a victim, or
>something even more reprehensible: the physical dangers he was facing.
>The chief of the commando force involved in the rescue operation recently
>stated that the resistance to the raid was perfectly organized and that
>there were numerous armed men around the house where the child was being
>held captive, just as the Cuban government had warned the State Department
>and publicly denounced between March 22 and April 22.
>The last seven-point proposal sent by the Attorney General to the child's
>father, at close to 10:00 p.m. on Friday, April 21 --approximately seven
>hours before Eli�n was freed from his kidnappers at 5:00 a.m. the following
>day-- contained three points that I did not want to read at the mass rally
>in Jag�ey Grande where we commemorated the painful episode of the Bay of
>Pigs mercenary invasion. I felt they were simply too grotesque and so I
>opted for the 24 four-hour truce of which I spoke, in recognition of the
>decision finally adopted by the Attorney General, although we remained
>profoundly concerned about future events. Those points were:
>"2. Saturday morning Eli�n and L�zaro's family will fly to Washington on a
>USMS (United States Marshall Service) plane under the supervision of the
>USMS. DOJ (Department of Justice) will transport them directly to Airlie
>House. The child will be guarded by USMS.
>"3. During the residence at Airlie, Eli�n will live with Juan Miguel, who
>will have full authority over Eli�n except for any condition of parole or
>other limitations imposed by the INS such as departure control. Upon Juan's
>arrival at Airlie House, the AG (Attorney General) will parole Eli�n into
>Juan Miguel's care. L�zaro's family will reside at Airlie House in separate
>quarters.
>"4. The parties will remain in residence at the site while the CA (Court of
>Appeals) 11 injunction remains in effect, or until the AG in consultation
>with experts determines it is appropriate to change the arrangements.
> Nothing could be more humiliating, or more closely resemble the
>imprisonment or kidnapping of Juan Miguel with his wife and two sons. It
>was the beginning of a new stage in the psychological torture of the whole
>family, even worse than that sustained by the boy in Miami.
>Those who have seen Marisleysis' hysteria on television and know who the
>sinister L�zaro really is, and also all the honest psychiatrists, fully
>understand what this absurd and impossible cohabitation would have meant
>for Eli�n and his family. This is precisely what the Cuban American
>National Foundation (CANF) was demanding. It was such a proposal that led
>to Juan Miguel's almost suicidal decision to immediately leave for Miami
>with his wife and son to personally rescue Eli�n.
>But, those crazed counterrevolutionary ringleaders were so stupid that they
>opposed this proposal, even though it was exactly what they themselves had
>been demanding, except that they wanted it to take place in Miami, and not
>in Washington.
>The well-known Congressman Bob Men�ndez, a lobbyist and close ally of the
>Miami mob, together with an assistant under-Secretary of State spent
>Friday, April 21, desperately searching for a place similar to Airlie House
>in the Miami area.
>These facts I have related to demonstrate the shameful lengths reached by
>the Attorney General to avoid the use of force. Nobody in our country
>ignores the potential dangers lying on the twisted path taken by the U.S.
>authorities --under pressure from the CANF-- to resolve what would have
>been a simple migratory case if it had not involved a Cuban child.
>Here are a few facts that support this statement:
>First: The three judges on the panel responsible for ruling on the mob's
>appeal are not trustworthy. The response to the Attorney General's request
>for them to legally direct L�zaro Gonz�lez to surrender the child, after
>his obvious failure to abide by the INS order, will go down in history as a
>prime example of outrageous, biased and overbearing conduct. On that day,
>they decreed that a child of any age and nationality could apply for asylum
>in the United States against his or her parents' will. On the other hand,
>the martyred child has been forced to remain in the United States until the
>legal proceedings have concluded. Nothing was said, however, about the
>failure to abide by the order issued to the kidnapper to surrender the
>child. The Attorney General had no choice. She was forced to either make
>shameless concessions or to use force. She did both. Only fate and the
>skill of the marshals prevented the worst from happening, and the child was
>rescued safe and sound.
>What guarantee does the father now have that the reunion with his son will
>be final? None!
>Second: The Nuevo Herald reported on April 26 that on the previous day,
>Tuesday, April 26, a group of 11 senators had called a meeting with
>Attorney General Janet Reno in order to "discuss concerns." When she was
>asked, "what would happen if the Atlanta Court of Appeals or any other
>court decided that the child should be granted asylum," the Attorney
>
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