The WSWS received the following letter in response to our December 14 article “US spurns father's appeal for return of Elian Gonzalez: Cuban child sacrificed to right-wing political agenda”
This is an excellent article eloquently making some very good points about US child snatching. Apparently, the freedom from being politically exploited is another of the rights of children that the US government would be unwilling to sign.
I would like to add that this event is nothing new in the history of US-Cuba relations. US authorities and Cuban exiled fanatics have demonstrated, throughout the entire 40 years of the Cuban revolution, that they are not willing to stop at anything in order to overthrow the Cuban government. They've been willing not only to place the world on the brink of nuclear disaster, but also undermine the most sacred and fundamental aspects of Cuban society, the family.
In the early sixties, the CIA and Cuban counterrevolutionaries cooked up a plot that resulted in a massive and illegal transfer of children from Cuba to the US, as was said then, "to save them from communism". The CIA scheme was called Operation Peter Pan and was concocted in cooperation with US Catholic Social Services. It consisted of publishing a falsified Cuban government document that was "leaked" among the Cuban population stating that Cuban children were to be rounded up and be sent to the Soviet Union to be indoctrinated. Thousands of panicked parents arranged the massive smuggling of their children to the US where they were scattered throughout Catholic orphanages all over the country.
Throughout the entire history of US-Cuba relations that followed, the Cuban family has been systematically dismembered by a US immigration policy that rewards illegal immigration with economic and political benefits never made available to any other group of immigrants arriving on US soil.
As a result, the Cuban family has sustained the most savage destabilizing attacks known. Today, it is the only family on the planet forbidden and limited by law—i.e. US law—from maintaining normal contacts among its closest members across the Florida Straits.
LM
A reader commented on our December 13 article “Clinton lectures the world on labor standards—but what is the state of workers' rights in America?”
Thank you for the article examining the rights of American workers, and thank you for bringing out the point of American hypocrisy. It is nice to know that I am not the only one who feels the way I do. Weren't the WTO protests wonderful? Thanks again.
AJ