Murdoch massacres Elian's story

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    "Citizen Rupert" does it again. His "Fox family" cable channel on Sunday
foisted on an unsuspecting public a right-wing hatchet job against Cuba
called, "The Elian Gonzalez Story."

    The story is appallingly cast, written, and told. The operational theory
of the casting director seems to have been that a "spic" is a "spic," so you
have the weirdest admixture of accents, looks and body language imaginable.
The bulk of the people playing Cubans in the movie don't sound or act like
Cubans. It shows how little has changed since the days of Ricky Ricardo,
when the Cuban band leader would be depicted as leading a band dressed like
Mariachis playing tangos while someone with a Carmen Miranda fruit hat
danced on stage.

    The ONE thing they all were required to do was to mispronounce
Elián's name as "alien"; only the actor playing Juan Miguel succeeded in
being allowed to pronounce Elián's name correctly once in a
while.

    I addition, Spanish words are sprinkled throughout the dialogue in a
totally arbitrary and even offensive manner. For example, various Cubans are
depicted as referring to the United States as "America," pronounced in
Spanish. While the use of "Americanos" to designate people from the U.S. is
fairly widespread, I've never heard anyone in Spanish refer to the United
States as "America." This is strictly a United Statesian usage.

    The central theme is that the poor kidnapping great uncle (which the
film systematically misrepresents as Elián's uncle) was a victim of
circumstances, of mob pressure from all the people in front of his house,
who are depicted as being there from the first day, and then from
Marisleysis's growing infatuation with being the child's new mother.
This leads to the gradual involvement of the right wing Cuban exile groups,
represented by "Ramón" obviously Ramón Saúl Sánchez of the democracy
movement, and family mouthpiece don Armando, played incongruously by a
rather svelte actor.

    The truth, of course, is precisely the opposite. The right-wing exile
groups were brought in by Lázaro within a day or so of the boy having been
found, and upon taking him to their house on Friday (he'd been found on
Thanksgiving Thursday) Lázaro or one of his family told the press coming out
of the hospital that Elián would be staying with them in the U.S. By Sunday,
two days later, posters, a publicity apparatus, a squad of lawyers, press
spokespeople, the works were all in place, despite the Thanksgiving holiday.
This was no "spontaneous movement" but the result of Lázaro offering the
case to the right wing exile groups, who thought they could score a cheap
victory over the revolution by manipulating the tragedy that had befallen a
six-year-old child.

    For Lázaro, who hadn't had a regular job for a long time, Elián was
clearly, among other things, a meal ticket. He was immediately given a
no-show mechanics position by a Cuban American National Foundation director.
Marisleysis is portrayed as a refined and restrained young lady by an
actress who comes across as being, at best, in her early 30's. She had been
employed, but immediately quit her job, something else the film doesn't tell
us.

    Although she does loose her cool after the INS raid --who wouldn't--
none of her previous public rants are depicted in the film, nor is the
makeover she and her father received from PR specialists. Also studiously
ignored were her repeated hospitalizations for up to a week at a time during
the months she was supposedly Elián's primary caregiver, variously described
at the time as resulting from "exhaustion," "stress," and a "nervous
stomach." The famous Elián "hostage video" is depicted as being something
Marisleysis did on her own behind the back of her dad, the lawyers, and the
PR folks, when the record is quite clear that it was otherwise. But on the
whole, Marisleysis's trashy, loud-mouthed style that so endeared her to the
press is entirely absent.

    The media is portrayed as a pack of baying hounds, largely accurately, I
might add, but one wishes Murdoch's minions had had the courage to include
at least a brief snippet of Diane Sawyer's innovative use of child abuse as
a journalistic investigative technique.

    One largely accurate if quite wooden portrayal is that of Donato
Dalrymple, who even in this fictionalized version plays only a secondary
role in Elián's actual rescue. He is presented as an opportunist who tried
to take credit for what his cousin had done before all and sundry, although
his motives are never clear (as indeed they never became clear in real
life). The only criticism one could make here is the producer's failure to
cast Kato Kaelin in the role.

    The sequence of events that is most horribly butchered is what Juan
Miguel, Elián's father, was doing in Cuba. In the real Elián González story,
Juan Miguel finds out his son had been kidnapped on Monday, when he fails to
come home from school, because, due to work schedules, it was Juan Miguel
who looked after Elián after school on weekdays. He makes inquiries, finds
out that Elizabet has taken a boat with her live-in boyfriend to Miami
taking Elián with her. It is Juan Miguel who takes the initiative to contact
Lázaro, who is not Elián's uncle but Juan Miguel's, to ask him to be on the
lookout of the boy. Juan Miguel finds out his son is in a hospital in Ft.
Lauderdale right away, because Elián knows his father name and phone number
and the doctors call Juan Miguel from the hospital to get the boy's medical
history
after Elián is brought in.

    Juan Miguel also talked to his uncle Lázaro at the hospital, according
to Lázaro's own account-- and immediately began discussing Elián's return to
Cuba. Lázaro blew him off saying the boy had barely survived by a miracle
and we should just see how he is before making plans.

    Juan Miguel then went and petitioned the Cuban government to get
involved, and arrange for the boy's repatriation, which is, of course, the
normal, logical thing anyone would do. Cuba's diplomatic requests went
unanswered except by a stream of vicious right-wing gusano propaganda that
filled Miami newspapers and radio stations. As the confrontation built up,
Juan Miguel gave a telephone interview to a Miami radio station demanding
the return of his son, which, normal as it may sound for any loving parent
of a six year old stranded in a strange country, made the right-wing gusanos
in Miami go ballistic with rage. Seeing the kind of political confrontation
that was building up, Fidel arranged to meet with Juan Miguel privately. He
has since explained that he wanted to take the measure of the man, and make
sure Juan Miguel understood this was likely to be a protracted political
struggle over several months. That took place Thursday, a week after Elián
was found, and Fidel made his first public statements about the case
Saturday night, two days later, warning the U.S. Government that if it did
not begin taking steps to handle the case in a normal, civilized manner
within 72 hours, Cuba would launch a campaign to scandalize it from one end
of the globe to the other.

    In the event, the Cuban people, who had been enraged by what they'd been
hearing on their radios from the right-wing AM stations in Miami, would not
wait, and the very next day, a group of technical school students meeting in
Havana launched the protest campaign by marching on the interests section.

    In the Murdochized version, Juan Miguel is one of those
every-other-weekend-and-alternate holidays divorced fathers. He's got no
clue his son has been missing for five or six days until some goons
(presumably from state security) wearing --of all things-- suit coats and
ties roust him from bed and tell him "your son has been kidnapped." They
take him to a place that's been obviously turned upside down and ransacked,
presumably Elizabet's house, where they tell him ominously that Elián is in
the hands of the Cuban Mafia in Miami. The goons exchange alarmed looks when
Juan Miguel exclaims something like "Thank God" and Juan Miguel is forced to
explain "that he's alive." Also, the goons respond to Elizabet's mom, who is
saying that his daughter was the victim of an abusive boyfriend who beat
her, upbraiding the grieving mother, "Your daughter is dead because of
America's inhumane policies towards the Cuban people."

    Some time later Juan Miguel is taken to meet with an elderly, rabbinical
looking man in a large office who is guarded by tons of olive-green clad
troops with rifles (in an office!) and who speaks with a vague East European
accent. Turns out this is supposed to be Fidel, but I wouldn't blame anyone
familiar with Cuba for being confused. All the supposedly revolutionary
Cubans in this film look and act like the Miami ones, addressing each other
as "Mister" or "señor" (interchangeably and quite annoyingly). Juan Miguel
is presented as addressing Fidel as "Sir." As several menacing looking types
with rifles stand at the ready, Murdoch's ersatz "Fidel" pops the question,
you wanna stay or you wanna go, we'll respect your decision either way. The
literal words are true to what actually happened, but the way the whole
scene is set up, with Juan Miguel basically alone in the lion's den, gives
precisely the opposite impression of a literal reading of Fidel's words.

    Every five or ten minutes, for two hours, and sometimes more frequently
than that, we are subjected to rabid anti-Cuba diatribes or cheap attempts
to manipulate people's sentiments (Marisleysis, tearfully, "His mother died
so he could live in freedom." Ramón, defiantly, "Fidel Castro marched into
Havana and one month later all our rights were gone." Elizabet, earnestly,
"I want him to have choices, I want him to grow up free to make mistakes"
(this last one is a complete fabrication: no one knows what was in
Elizabet's mind and heart. She did not confide to her mother, nor her
ex-husband, nor her friends).

    To create the illusion of balance, Juan Miguel is allowed a couple of
times to express that he's a patriot, and even, responding to his lawyer,
Craig, is allowed to suggest to him that Craig ask the people who lived
under the Batista dictatorship whether they thought the revolutionary
government was so bad.

    He is also allowed to express his rage at the INS inquisitors who say
they've come to determine whether he's a fit father, at which Juan Miguel
explodes, how dare you who have been trying to strangle us economically for
40 years. To which the INS guy responds, is that you speaking Mister
González or your government, to which Juan Miguel responds in probably the
most unintentionally insightful bit of the film, "Is there a difference?" or
words to that effect.

    I say unintentionally insightful because, of course, Cuba has a
worker's government and it is precisely people like Juan Miguel, working
people, who call the shots.

    Overall, the only actors who seemed really credible in their roles are
those who play Craig and especially the one who played Juan Miguel, who is
quite effective in communicating both Juan Miguel's love for his son and his
intransigence in demanding his rights and responsibilities as Elián's father
be respected. Unfortunately, they give the actor very little to work with in
terms of dialogue, and having already painted a picture of Cuba as a
totalitarian hell run by soulless goons from states security, I suspect to
the average person in the U.S. Juan Miguel will simply comes across as
inexplicably blind inn scenes like the ones where he tells the rabbi
pretending to be Fidel Castro "I love my country and I love my son, sir."

    The actor playing Reno is passable --she does a good job letting her
hands tremble with Parkinson's-- but the screenwriters give her absolutely
nothing useful. They don't recount the time when she went down to Miami to
personally plead with Lázaro to give Elián back, and Lázaro stomped out of
the meeting telling the press the only way the feds would get the child back
was by force.

    Nor do they present the dilemma she and her boss faced on the eve of the
raid: on the one hand they wanted to minimize the damage being done to the
counterrevolutionary Cuban groups which have been a central weapon in
Washington's war against the Cuban revolution ... on the other hand Juan
Miguel was threatening that if his son wasn't in his arms on Saturday, on
Easter Sunday he'd be on a plane to Miami and would go to his Great Uncle's
house with whoever might be willing to accompany him to take back his child.

    Nor is there even a hint that, to begin with, the Feds gave a green
light to the kidnapping, said it was a local family court matter, nothing
they could do, and it was only after ordinary Cubans exploded in rage in
street protests in Havana did the administration discover that this was
really an issue for the immigration service after all.

    The underlying idea of all this is that just about everyone
involved --Lázaro's family in Miami, their lawyers, Reno and the U.S.
government, Juan Miguel and his lawyer-- are victims of forces greater than
they who they cannot control, on the one side the freedom loving Miami
Cubans, on the other the "communist dictatorship" a couple of hundred miles
to the South.

    The film also makes a total muddle of all the legal issues involved. A
lot of the "legal" dialogue centers on whether Elián had "wet feet" or "dry
feet,"  i.e., whether Elián was technically eligible for "parole" and then
the benefits of the Cuban Adjustment Act. This was a red herring raised
several times by the gusano Mafia, to make it seem as if what was going on
was a drive by the INS to deport a six year old. That is not the case. The
INS never instituted ANY kind of proceeding to REMOVE  or DEPORT Elián, this
case had absolutely nothing to do with the typical immigration cases you
hear about from Latin America. Moreover, the administration's brain-dead and
inhuman "wet feet/dry feet" policy is a totally arbitrary construct, adopted
as a typical Clintonite "compromise" to welch on the U.S. commitment to Cuba
to allow much greater LEGAL immigration and return those who come ILLEGALLY,
which is the obvious measure one would take if one wants to stop these
insanely dangerous crossings which have cost thousands of lives, including
Elián's mother.

    In Elian's case, the fundamental underlying issue involved was the right
of his father to raise Elián where and how he saw fit; and connected to
that, the right of Cuba to handle under its own laws and system any
challenge to Juan Miguel's fitness as a father, under the internationally
recognized legal principle that the courts with jurisdiction in such cases
are those of the child's habitual place of residence. And despite all their
best efforts to the contrary, in the end, there was no way of keeping out of
the film that what this case was about was the right of Juan Miguel to raise
his son, and Elián's right to be raised by those who brought him into this
world. The opening scene of the movie is Juan Miguel picking up Elián from a
soccer game and taking him to Elizabet, who is about to spirit him out of
the country. The closing scene is Juan Miguel picking him up from the same
spot, after having returned to Cuba. The bond between father and son the
film portrays in this last scene is an indication that, however much the
producers may have wanted to present it otherwise, they thought better of
bucking the huge majority of the American people who saw through the
arguments of the right-wing Miami Mafia and supported the return of Elián to
his father.

José