By ROGER HERNANDEZ
                     © Latino.com
 
                     I know how it feels to be a little boy looking down the barrel of a
                     machine gun. One day in the summer of 1964, as I played in the
                     front yard of my parents' home in Havana, two jeeploads of armed
                     troopers pulled up and stormed inside. As one soldier guarded me
                     and my family at gunpoint, others went through the house, making
                     an inventory of our personal possessions. My parents had declared
                     their intention to emigrate, and this was the government's way of
                     making sure that everything we owned would stay behind.

                     That memory is one reason I sat in bed watching television
                     Saturday morning with a knot in my throat, fighting back the tears,
                     wanting to pour out for Elián González.

                     In the famous photograph of Elian's screaming terror, I saw my own
                     face, 36 years ago.

                     I am not alone. We all have our stories. Cuban Americans saw our
                     shared grief in the face of that little boy. What most wrenched our
                     hearts Saturday morning was that the U.S. government violated a
                     family's home to bring Elián to a father who apparently intends to
                     take his son back to a totalitarian dictatorship, the one we know
                     so well.

                     That this may well be the end result of the raid did not occur to
                     the Los Angeles Times, which editorialized that the Elian drama
                     "has not ended, but it's taken a positive turn." Nor to child
                     psychologist David Elkind, who wrote in Newsweek that "it is a
                     blessing that Elián is back with his father." Nor to Bill Clinton, who
                     said he was "very pleased."

                     It is not unreasonable for people of good will to believe the son
                     belongs with the father, and then grieve for a boy likely to be
                     carried off to live under a tyranny. But to cheer Saturday's
                     developments in blissful disregard of the life that awaits Elián under
                     communism is unconscionable. Or maybe just ignorant.

                     Is there something Cuban Americans know about Cuba that others
                     don't know? Why the opposition to something apparently
                     commonsensical as giving a child back to his father? What is this
                     "tyranny" about which a distressingly high number of Americans
                     seem utterly clueless?

                     My own story is but a child's anecdote, relatively benign as these
                     things go, in the collective narrative of viciousness Cubans heir. It
                     begins with children. Parents that the government concludes have
                     failed to provide their Elians with a proper Marxist-Leninist
                     formation may lose custody and face charges of "hindering the
                     normal development of the child."

                     Then there are the routine indignities imposed by the Castro
                     government on adults who do not follow the regime's dictatorship
                     with the requisite enthusiasm. Human Rights Watch has catalogued
                     the nastiness: "Short-term arbitrary detentions, official warnings,
                     removal from jobs and housing, surveillance, harassment,
                     intimidation." That's how the merely disaffected are punished. It
                     happens for not showing up at mandatory rallies, or for complaining
                     about the government within earshot of a member of the
                     neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution.

                     The politically outspoken face worse. In Cuba, the basic freedoms
                     Americans take for granted are specifically against the law. Thus
                     Article 53 of the Constitution: "The citizens' freedom of speech and
                     press is recognized so long as it conforms to the ends of socialist
                     society." Thus the penal code, which has it that a person who
                     "incites against the social order, international solidarity, or the
                     socialist State, through oral or written propaganda, or in any other
                     form" faces one-to eight-year prison sentence, according to
                     Amnesty International's 1999 report on Cuba.

                     Such laws were used against Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, René
                     Gómez Manzano, Félix Bonne Carcassés, and Vladimiro Roca
                     Antúnez, the best known of 200 dissidents imprisoned for their
                     non-violent critiques of the dictatorship. In June 1997, the four
                     distributed a pamphlet they had written, "The Homeland Belongs to
                     All," in which they denounced the absence of basic freedoms.
                     Weeks later they were arrested and imprisoned until their trial in
                     March of 1999. They are now serving sentences of between
                     three-and-a-half and five years.

                     But Cuba's government doesn't need to point to its laws to justify
                     repression because political thugs enjoy absolute impunity. Cuba is
                     one of the few countries in the world that incarcerates citizens
                     caught leaving without government permission. On July of 1994, a
                     small boat packed with people fleeing to the United States was
                     assaulted by three Cuban coast guard cutters some seven miles off
                     Havana. The government vessels rammed the refugees' boat and
                     fired high-pressure water cannons at its deck. 35 men, women and
                     children drowned, knocked into the sea or washed overboard.
                     Officials from Cuba have been laughing for six years at international
                     calls for an investigation.

                     The "13 de Marzo" massacre, known by the name of the refugee
                     boat, is an tragedy festering in the soul of Cuban America. Yet few
                     other Americans have ever heard of it. It was barely even reported
                     in the national press. The New York Times didn't mention it until 12
                     days after it happened. Nor has much about human rights violations
                     in Cuba been reported in the five months since Elián arrived.

                     Instead, the most influential dailies, newsweeklies and networks
                     have spent the last few weeks in an frenzy of Cuban American
                     bashing. We have been informed that Cuban American accounts of
                     lacerating wounds to the spirit and the flesh are to be dismissed as
                     the obsessions of a people too irrational, too consumed with hatred
                     of Fidel Castro to be credibile.

                     Cuban American voices have been shouted down. So let me cite
                     what one group of non-Cubans have by the opening paragraph of
                     the 1999 report on Cuba by Human Rights Watch, the international
                     organization that angered Cuban Americans by going against the
                     U.S. embargo:

                     "Over the past forty years, Cuba has developed a highly effective
                     machinery of repression. The denial of basic civil and political rights
                     is written into Cuban law. In the name of legality, armed security
                     forces, aided by state-controlled mass organizations, silence
                     dissent with heavy prison terms, threats of prosecution,
                     harassment, or exile. Cuba uses these tools to restrict severely the
                     exercise of fundamental human rights of expression, association,
                     and assembly. The conditions in Cuba's prisons are inhuman, and
                     political prisoners suffer additional degrading treatment and
                     torture."

                     I do not know whether Elián's father approves of this oppression or
                     whether he is a victim of it, too scared to speak. Only faint hope
                     remains that Juan Miguel will act to save himself, save his son and
                     perhaps even save his own nation from more years of Castro terror.

                     No hope of any kind remains with the Clinton Administration. In its
                     eagerness to deport Elián back to the hell hole his mother tried to
                     save him from, it sent an armed raiding party to pry the boy away
                     from a family that loved him. A day of infamy in the history of the
                     nation Cuban Americans have come to love.

                     Roger Hernández is a nationally syndicated columnist and
                     Writer-in-Residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He can
                     be reached via email at rogereh@prodigy.net.