The confrontation between the United States government and the Miami family of Elian Gonzalez was as avoidable as it was predictable. And let no one doubt that, for all the second-guessing of the government's decision to take the child by force, that decision was nevertheless the correct one. Indeed, the only one left the government by a family whose high-handed intransigence and willingness to flout federal deadlines effectively closed the door on peaceful resolution of this standoff.
In concert with the more vociferous protesters, they presented a picture of damn-you arrogance that virtually forced the government's hand and said, in effect, to the watching nation, ``We could not care less what you think.''
It's a message heard loud and clear by people like those I had dinner with a few weeks back in Milwaukee, the ones who asked me to explain Cuban Miami, to make them understand the strident, irrational image they've been seeing nightly on the evening news. And though that picture surely does not represent the whole of Cuban Miami, here's the point: To those people, it does.
Take it as further proof -- not that any is needed -- that the community has done a less than stellar job of explaining itself to the outside world. Maybe it never saw the need before. Maybe that will now change.
I'm encouraged to hope so by a thoughtful e-mail I received a few days ago from Bill Gato, a Cuban-American writer from Miami. Bill sees a parallel between the behavior of the exile community and that of Malcolm X, initially an angry firebrand who felt that black people ``didn't need the support of nonblacks to further their cause.'' Eventually, writes Bill, Malcolm realized his error, realized that black people needed to care what other people thought. The implication being that the more strident members of the exile community will someday come to the same conclusion.
WALK THEIR PATH
So it troubles Bill that, in the criticism of black pundits like yours truly, he finds ``perfectly logical arguments'' but also what he calls ``a certain void of sympathy'' for the overarching struggle of the exile community. ``It's hard to understand their passion and anger,'' he says, ``unless you've been in their shoes.''
An interesting argument. But here's the thing: Malcolm's change came amid moral pressure from other prominent black leaders who condemned his separatist approach. There has been no corresponding pressure on the loud voices of Cuban protest.
It's also important to remember that neither Malcolm nor, for that matter, any other angry voice of black militancy ever brought about systemic change. Yes, they offered a necessary jolt of defiance and pride, but the folks who opened the voting booths, the job market, the schools, the people who changed things, were those who, like Martin Luther King, reached out to the wider world and made it feel their suffering.
POLITICAL PRESSURE
Granted, the analogy is imperfect. The Cuban-American issue is less about gaining entry into a closed system than it is about influencing the U.S. government and the people on the question of how and whether to maintain pressure on communist Cuba. Every flash point of Cuban discontent -- Elian, Los Van Van, whatever -- comes down to that larger issue. But if the ends are dissimilar, the choice of means is not: Martin and Malcolm, after all, offered the nation the option of carrot or stick. The more strident voices of Cuban America, by contrast, offer only the stick or the other stick.
So what Bill senses is not a ``void of sympathy.'' It's an impatience for that element of the exile community to understand that hatred of Fidel Castro does not justify doing whatever whenever to whomever. Moreover, to understand the value of managing public image so that what you're trying to say does not get drowned out by the way you choose to say it.
For whatever it's worth, I've made the exact same point in this exact same space on those occasions when I've felt that some faction of the black community was guilty of that same mistake. I won't hold Bill's folks to a lesser standard than I hold my own.
Because the frustrating part is that Bill is exactly right. The rest of us have not walked in the shoes of his community. But tell me: Whose fault is that?
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald