There they go again! The Militant on Elián, one year later

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

    We are fast approaching the first-year anniversary of the kidnapping of
Elián González.

    And as if to show that they've learned nothing in the past year, the
very latest issue of the Militant, in its lead article, contains a
reiteration of they hyper-sectarian line on Cuba's struggle to free the boy,
complete with yet another assertion that the raid that rescued Elián from
his captors was a violation of the constitutional rights of American working
people.

    Following is the relevant excerpt from the article:

*   *   *

These attacks on Cuba are intertwined with the assault on working people in
the United States.

When Elián González was found off the Florida coast last year, for example,
the U.S. government attacked Cuba's sovereignty by refusing to return the
child to Cuba. At the same time, the Clinton administration used the case as
a rationale to advance the U.S. rulers' efforts to refurbish the image of
the hated migra and to win federal court rulings that would establish legal
precedents upholding the authority of the INS to carry out policies exempt
from normal judicial appeal and review--one of their central policy
objectives.

The U.S. government used the April 22 commando-style raid by heavily armed
INS cops on a home in Miami, where they seized the Cuban six-year-old, to
deal a stunning blow to the Fourth Amendment right of all U.S. residents to
be safe from unreasonable searches and seizures.

What led to the eventual return of the child to his home in Cuba was not
goodwill by Washington but the uncompromising stand taken by the
revolutionary government of Cuba and the mobilizations of millions of Cuban
working people who took the moral high ground worldwide.

*   *   *

I'll have more to say about this in a couple of days.

José