In Castro's Corner - African Americans' alleged affinity for Cuba

National Review, March 6, 2000 by Jay Nordlinger

A story of black and red

EVEN as Castro's rule lingers on in Cuba, so does the romance of the American Left with that rule. It has been rekindled by the case of Elian Gonzalez, the plucky survivor of a tragic crossing who is now at the center of a custody battle with Cold War overtones. Among Castro's most ardent admirers, right from the beginning, forty years ago, have been black political elites. He has always stroked them; they have always stroked back. It is perhaps the least surprising aspect of the present controversy that they are playing a prominent role in it.

In January, Rep. Maxine Waters led another of her delegations to Havana, to attend a "U.S. Healthcare Exhibition." While there, she and Rep. Barbara Lee met with Elian's father, who, Waters later said, "has a wonderful reputation." She also expressed confidence that she had "heard firsthand how the people of Cuba feel about the case." Lee, for her part, made the following statement: "As a trained social worker, I can unequivocally say that Elian's father is totally fit and equipped to raise his son in a loving environment."

When the boy's grandmothers traveled to the U.S.--resulting in a spectacle that was less Grandma than Granma--it was Waters who hosted them on Capitol Hill. She said to the grandmothers, "If you do not fight for Elian, they win. You fight, and you win." The Cuban ladies then went to Florida, to be reunited with Elian at the home of Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, an educator and longtime friend of attorney general Janet Reno. After the visit, O'Laughlin announced that she had come to believe that the boy should not be returned to Cuba. She cited, among other factors, an "atmosphere of fear" created by the grandmothers' KGB-style minder. Maxine Waters was not pleased. "I am bewildered," she said. "Never in my wildest imagination would I think that a nun who was supposed to be a neutral party would undermine that neutrality."

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee--no relation to Barbara Lee--is another congresswoman in the Waters mold, and she, too, has been all over the case, making TV appearance after TV appearance to urge Elian's return to Cuba, and to cast aspersions on the motives of those who hold another view. On one program, she was asked, gently, why the boy's father did not come to the U.S., to speak freely and reclaim his son. The father, she answered, had a newborn child at home and, besides, was afraid that "he would be entangled in legal procedures and proceedings" in the United States. He was "fearful of not being able to return, and not being able to return with Elian"--no more than that.

And, if the subject is Cuba, never far away is Rep. Charles Rangel--good ol' "Chollie": so affable, so quippy, so beloved by the Washington media. And so stubborn in his fondness for the dictator in Cuba. One of the lowest moments in his career occurred in 1995, when he greeted Castro in Harlem with a bear hug. In January, after Republicans proposed legislation that would make Elian a "permanent resident" of the U.S., Rangel was quick to introduce a "sense of the Congress" resolution that Elian should be returned. He is unsparing in his criticism of anyone with reservations about sending the boy back. Why should he stay here, Rangel asks, just because "we have some Cuban-American congressmen from Miami who are up for reelection"? Of any other argument, he evinces no understanding: "It is hard for me to see how people can hate Communist Cubans so much that they will hold this kid hostage."

Needless to say, it is not only black congressmen who take this sort of line. Sen. Christopher Dodd, for example, attributes any hesitation about returning Elian to Cuba to "hatred of an old man." The black Left is merely a subset of a national Left that is, to varying degrees, Castro-mad. But black leaders defend Castro, and pummel his opponents, with particular ardor, hard not to notice. They often plead his case in the major media; he, in turn, enjoys glowing treatment in the black-oriented press. To Havana, there is a steady parade of black visitors: politicians, activists, musicians, writers, actors. Usually they are wined and dined by the dictator himself. He listens to their grievances and theories. He shows them his capital's Martin Luther King Jr. Center. He proclaims, to their delight, that Cuba is a "Latin-African country" (although, to be sure, he does not talk this way to Cubans themselves). And he uses them as a kind of club against his democratic critics, in the time-honored Communist tradition of, "What about the Negroes in the South?" Knowing that blacks are the moral arbiters of American society, Castro has worked hard to woo them--and they are good and wooed.

It all began in 1960, during Castro's triumphal visit to New York City. He decamped from a plush Midtown hotel to the Hotel Theresa up in Harlem. Roger Wilkins, the civil-rights veteran, remembers the "dramatic impact" that gesture made: "I don't think there was a politically alive black person who wasn't aware of what Castro had done." The critic Shelby Steele notes that many black Americans saw the Cuban revolution as a "liberation struggle, with the masses and the dark people rising up." Castro has always been "very savvy about playing that theme with American blacks, and it has given him a little wedge into American life. There has been this flirtation back and forth." Also, says Steele, black politicians, by associating with Castro, are able to present to their constituencies "the look of internationalism, the feeling of being part of something much larger than American racial protest. Blackness automatically makes you a member of a large, worldwide oppressed proletarian class. That is attractive in [for example] South Central Los Angeles, where Maxine Waters holds forth."