Here are the pages in THE MILITANT about Elian Gonzalez.
For convenience, they are grouped on a single web-page.

Cuba's media had a completely different attitude:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/elian.html
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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 64/No.18      May 8, 2000

INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class

In defense of the Cuban revolution, in defense of the working class!

Since the day last November when then five-year-old Elian Gonzalez was rescued from the water off the coast of Florida, the Militant has campaigned against the Clinton administration's refusal to immediately return him to Cuba.

We have pointed out that he is one of many thousands of victims of the decades-long U.S. government policy codified in the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. That policy is designed to entice Cubans into the dangerous Florida Straits on flimsy rafts and rickety skiffs with the knowledge that if they survive, unlike other immigrants, they will be welcomed with aid and citizenship papers in the reputed "land of plenty," the world's wealthiest capitalist power.

EDITORIAL


The Militant has insisted, moreover, that the top echelons of the U.S. government, with brutal indifference to the consequences for an innocent child, quickly came to see how unanticipated developments surrounding this case could be played to advantage. Elian Gonzalez could be used to help the U.S. ruling class polish the tarnished image of la migra, its largest and most hated federal police force, and to strengthen the executive powers of the imperialist state. These are strategic goals that rank high with the U.S. rulers, as they prepare their arsenal for use against working people at home and abroad.

The April 22 Miami commando-style operation carried out in the wee hours of the morning by heavily-armed special forces of the Immigration and Naturalization Service provides striking new confirmation of the Militant's assessment. That raid dealt a stunning blow to the right of every U.S. resident to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," as provided by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights codifying space wrested by the toilers over more than two centuries of struggle. Every class-conscious worker is obligated to take a clear and unambiguous stand against that police action, which, in addition to all else, was accompanied by chauvinism and anti-immigrant prejudice against the population labeled "Miami Cubans."

That's why the Militant, whose masthead proudly declares it is "published in the interests of working people," is campaigning with the headline this week: "INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class." Condemnation of the raid is all the more incumbent on those who for more than 40 years have been the most consistent and intransigent defenders of the Cuban revolution.

Following months of unprecedented publicity, the police action in Miami removed a Cuban child from the home of relatives who, with no legal custody rights, were parading him before the world as a trophy of the counterrevolution. For that reason, the operation is being hailed by a layer of activists in the Cuba solidarity movement as a "victory," for which U.S. top cop Attorney General Janet Reno and U.S. president William Clinton should be sent bouquets of flowers and letters of commendation.

Nothing could be more dangerously false. What's at stake is a working-class line of march in defense of democratic rights and political space won by working people in the United States through two revolutions and numberless bloody battles in the streets. It is along that road that the Cuban Revolution, the first dictatorship of the proletariat in our hemisphere, will be effectively defended as well.

Never was there greater need for clarity that the government of the most dangerous and brutal imperialist power in the world does not act for "us." "We" and "they" are two irreconcilable classes.


Clinton strengthens police powers
Since taking office more than seven years ago, the Clinton administration, with bipartisan backing in Congress, has been steadily pursuing a course to strengthen police powers while restricting political space for the exercise of democratic rights. This is the rulers' considered need, an anticipation in face of slowly growing political polarization and intensified resistance by broadening layers of workers and farmers to the conditions of their exploitation and oppression. The following are just a few of the measures taken by the White House, Congress, and the courts:

Under the banner of "the fight against drugs," Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill assaulted Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure in private homes, and the courts have virtually eliminated such rights in automobiles.

Following adoption of the White House-initiated Illegal Immigration Reform Act in 1996, deportations hit a record high over the next two years. La migra's hated powers to seize and deport suspected "illegal aliens" without right to judicial review or appeal have been expanded.

The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act signed into law by Clinton in 1996 permits the INS to jail immigrants using what it calls "secret evidence." It also broadens government powers to use wiretaps and hold individuals without bail in "preventive detention."

The U.S. prison population today is some eight times what it was in 1971, and nearly twice its level when the Great Jailer took up residence in the White House in 1992.

Appeal and parole rights have been further restricted, while mandatory minimum sentences, longer terms, and even prison labor for the "free market" have all become more common.

During the seven-year administration of the Great Executioner, the annual number of state-sponsored electrocutions, hangings, and deaths by lethal injection have tripled, while the number of defendants charged with federal capital offenses has tripled since adoption of the Clinton-initiated Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994.

The White House has stepped up heavier and more deadly arming and equipping of police forces. Between 1995 and 1997 alone, the Clinton administration gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. Use of self-repeating handguns with large clips has been encouraged and expanded.

In the name of preempting "terrorist" attacks, the Clinton Pentagon has established, for the first time in U.S. history, a de facto "homeland defense command," preparing the way for the U.S. armed forces to openly conduct police operations—now prohibited by law—against residents of the United States.

Mailed fist and imperial arrogance
Official sanction by the Clinton administration for escalated police violence has led with increasing frequency, from one end of the country to the other, to cold-blooded murders by cops. The roster of names that have prompted outpourings of anger and demands for justice in recent months alone is long and well-known—Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond in New York City; Willie James Williams in Valdosta, Georgia; Tyisha Miller in Riverside, California; and many others. But we should remind ourselves that the pattern of domestic police violence does not stand in isolation. It goes hand-in-hand with the sharpening interimperialist conflict and U.S. military aggression throughout the world, from Iraq, to Yugoslavia, to the Sudan, to Korea.

They do at home what they do abroad. Foreign policy is always ultimately an expression of the real trajectory of domestic policy. Their course and objectives have nothing to do with the "rule of law." They have everything to do with the mailed fist and imperial arrogance of the world's one "indispensable nation," as William Clinton likes to call the United States.

The INS raid in Miami, as Harvard constitutional law professor and liberal Establishment attorney Laurence Tribe has pointed out, was carried out in violation of the fact that under the U.S. Constitution "it is axiomatic that the executive branch has no unilateral authority to enter people's homes forcibly to remove innocent individuals without taking the time to seek a warrant or other order from a judge or magistrate." No judge or magistrate "had issued the type of warrant or other authority needed for the executive branch to break into the home to seize the child."

The INS, with its enhanced powers under the 1996 Immigration Act, can secure warrants to search workplaces for illegal aliens and "to search, interrogate and arrest people without warrants in order to prevent unlawful entry into the country," Tribe added. "But no one suspects that Elian is here illegally." (To the contrary, we would add: the U.S rulers' Cuban Adjustment Act is designed to entice the maximum number of "Eliáns," all of them "legal.")

La migra's justification for the firepower deployed in Miami was the all-too-well-known claim of "intelligence" reports of weapons in the house or crowd. (How often have workers in the United States been victims of "secret intelligence," offered by the FBI and other police agencies, informers, and provocateurs to justify murderous acts?)

The timing of the predawn raid, prohibited by the terms of most search warrants; the battering down of the front and back door; the refusal to seek or obtain a court order obliging the family to turn over the child (the INS architects of the "dilemma" claim their powers are not subject to judicial review); the wanton "collateral damage" inflicted on the home of the child's relatives, to whom the administration had originally "granted" custody; the pepper gas sprayed on the crowd outside the home; the assault on the NBC camera crew—all are elements of the violation of the constitutional right to safety and security in our own homes that U.S. residents consider among our most precious guarantees under the Bill of Rights. All were intended to teach a class lesson about what "the rule of law" really means to those who would resist the advance of the imperial power that William Clinton and Janet Reno serve.

As if the point needed to be reinforced, two days after the INS raid in Miami, the New York press reported that cops "in battle gear—backed up by search dogs, helicopters and rooftop sharpshooters—blocked off streets" for hours in the Edgemere section of Queens. They were "acting on a tip" that a man wanted in connection with a series of shootings was in an apartment in the area. He was never found, but others in the neighborhood were detained, manhandled, and grilled. Get the message?

Next target: Puerto Rico
Immediately following the Miami raid, the U.S. government announced it would soon begin operations with U.S. marshals and other federal police agencies to clear the Puerto Rican island of Vieques of the protesters permanently camped there to prevent the Pentagon from resuming use of the island as a weapons-testing site.

The chauvinist, anti-Cuban, anti-immigrant and anti-working-class prejudice that has been used to bolster support for the police commando operation in Miami is one of its most pernicious aspects. High levels of support for the INS raid among African-Americans polled in South Florida is one register of the successful attempt to bolster decades of resentment against many in the Cuban community for reactionary ends.

The pen of leading New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman drips with venom as he repeatedly refers to the perfidious role of "the Miami Cubans," as a bloc, undifferentiated by class or other distinction, except to identify some among them as "extremists." As a people they bear a collective guilt. Whether as residents or citizens, they have fewer or lesser rights than "Americans."

In the aftermath of the INS raid he enthusiastically supported, Friedman gloats that one can only hope "the Miami Cubans" have been reminded "that they are not living in their own private country, they cannot do whatever they please and that they may hate Fidel Castro more than they love the U.S. Constitution—but that doesn't apply to the rest of us." This from a near-hysterical advocate of tearing up the Bill of Rights for all of us, so "the Miami Cubans" can be taught a lesson.

Blanket references to Cuban-Americans living in Miami as gusanos, or as the "Miami Mafia" (almost more powerful than the imperialist state)—references that often crop up among supporters of the revolution in the United States (see letters page)—are of a similarly reactionary and petty bourgeois character. Events surrounding the Elián González affair confirm what the Militant has long argued: with every passing year Cubans and Cuban-Americans living in the United States are more and more marked by the same class divisions and political polarization as other residents. The Cuban bourgeois layers who dominate the Dade County political machine are more integrated today, not less, with their class brothers and sisters nationally. The role various of them played in "negotiations" throughout the Elián case bears testimony to this.

Cuban workers in the United States are likewise more homogeneous with their class.

End of an era
Even the relatively small size and elevated average age of the crowds that held vigil in the streets around the González home in Little Havana should be noted. The virtual absence of the armed counterrevolutionary organizations that in earlier years would have furnished a cadre and played a weighty role in events such as those of the last five months is further confirmation that the Elian Gonzalez case will be recognized as the end of an era of reactionary hopes to influence U.S. politics.

Imperialist publicists like Thomas Friedman notwithstanding, it is not "hard-line" Cubans who have "kidnapped U.S. policy on Cuba for all these years," and now must be taught a lesson by the real Americans for whom he speaks. The space enjoyed for many years by forces such as the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) derived from the fact that they served the interests and policies defended by Washington. Even the typically chauvinist image of Cubans as uncontrollable extremists has been useful to the U.S. rulers and continues to play into their hands. As the political advantage of keeping Elián González in the United States diminished in Washington's eyes, however, the reality of CANF's reputed power was exposed.

Beginning from the moment decisive action was taken in February 1996 by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba against the Brothers to the Rescue abortive overflight provocation, and culminating with the frustrating failure of the campaign to "keep Elian Gonzalez in the 'free world,'" any pretense that there is a politically homogeneous Cuban-American organization, let alone an armed group, weighty enough to substantially influence Washington's policy towards Cuba has been shattered. The fiction of a monolithic, non-class-divided Cuban community, kept in line by a powerful rightist cadre, backed and pandered to by Washington, has lost credibility. The self-serving notion that Miami is not subject to the same laws of class struggle as the rest of the United States has been further weakened.

The issues surrounding the INS raid in Miami are of vital importance to the workers movement. Millions of working people feel nothing but outrage at the rulers' trampling on our most basic rights and political space, our livelihoods, our very life and limb. The regressive burden of the bourgeoisie's tax policies; the inevitability of banks and government agencies foreclosing on small farmers squeezed by the ever-increasing weight of giant monopolies; the brutal indifference to human life symbolized by the deadly police assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco—if the only voice working people and worse-off layers of the middle classes hear speaking out against such indignities are those of reaction, if no angry and determined working-class voice is heard pointing a class-struggle way forward, then the radical siren song of fascist demagogues will gain an ever more receptive ear.

Our battle to return Elián González to Cuba is not yet over. It would be futile to predict how much longer it will take. But with each passing day it becomes clearer that the U.S. ruling class in its majority has become convinced that the gains from preventing the boy from going home has been exhausted. His use value to them has been exhausted. The "caring president" has moved on to other priorities.

The people of Cuba have won.

The massive mobilization of ordinary Cubans, day after day, month after month; their determination to prevent the arrogant imperialist power to the north from stealing a child; the spotlight of publicity around the world—that is what finally made it impossible for the U.S. government to sweep the increasingly embarrassing affair (their own creation from the beginning) under a rug. "One day longer"—the battle cry of workers and farmers everywhere—is the banner under which the Cuban people marched.

Cuba's unforgivable offense
As many times before over the last 40-odd years, the U.S. rulers are arguing among themselves over how to continue punishing the working people of Cuba for the unforgivable affront of creating the first free territory of the Americas. The propertied families are divided, as always, over how best to advance their objective of overturning the revolutionary state power on U.S. imperialism's doorstep. There is no truce, even for a day. But by drawing a line in the sand, the people of Cuba have shown the U.S. rulers they have misjudged the moment in history. Not for the first time.

As we share the sweet taste of victory with our cocombatants in Cuba, however, communists and class-conscious toilers in the United States must be both clear and intransigent about the class political issues involved—the character of the U.S. imperialist government and its armed agencies. Our future—in fact the future of the world—depends on it.

The muddle-headedness—at best—in facing these class questions within what is broadly thought of as the Cuba solidarity movement is a mortal danger, including to the Cuban Revolution itself. Every step taken by the U.S. ruling class to close political space for working people within the United States—to restrict the exercise of democratic rights temporarily wrested through bloody struggles—is a blow against the Cuban Revolution as well.

When the victorious October Revolution was obliged by the unfavorable world relationship of forces in 1918 to sign the rapacious Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with German imperialism in order to buy time to save the state power of the workers and peasants—a very special period in the young Soviet republic—V. I. Lenin led the fight within the Bolshevik leadership to take that necessary step. Parliamentary deputies in Germany calling themselves socialists voted to ratify that same treaty in the German Reichstag, arguing there was no reason not to do so since the Bolsheviks themselves had signed the onerous terms.

The Bolsheviks' unforgettable reply to them—as recorded by Leon Trotsky, organizer of the Red Army and Lenin's chief negotiator at Brest-Litovsk—was: "You swine. We are objectively compelled to negotiate in order not to be annihilated, but as for you—you are politically free to vote for or against, and your vote implies whether or not you place confidence in your own bourgeoisie."

For the working-class movement in the United States today, the same class principles are at stake.
url: http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6418/641801.html 
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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 64/No.18      May 8, 2000

INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class

151 Federal Agents Carry Out Massive Assault at Miami Home

BY MIKE ITALIE, ARGIRIS MALAPANIS, and GREG McCARTAN

MIAMI—In a brutal attack on democratic rights and in an assault on working people, 151 federal agents, many of them heavily armed, carried out a raid under authority of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove six-year-old Elian Gonzalez from the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, in the early morning hours of April 22.

A force of 131 INS agents and 20 U.S. marshals were involved. Some 53 INS agents surrounded the two-bedroom house, threatening a crowd there and roughing up a number of people. The cops used battering rams to knock down the door. An eight-member Border Patrol Tactical Unit, wearing goggles and bullet-proof vests, and carrying automatic rifles, led the charge inside.

An AP photographer inside the house caught the now-famous scene of an agent with the barrel of an automatic weapon in the face of Donato Dalrymple, one of the fishermen who rescued the boy, holding Elian Gonzalez in his arms in a bedroom. Outside, the cops ordered bystanders to the ground, told reporters to stay where they were, and doused protesters with pepper spray, both as they launched the raid and before they sped off in their vans.

NBC has filed a complaint with INS commissioner Doris Meissner for federal agents roughing up a cameraman and sound man to prevent them from shooting footage of the assault.

Earlier in the day, Miami police and federal agents arrested two men who lived in a house behind the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, claiming there had been reports of weapons being stockpiled. Lacking evidence, they arrested both men on immigration charges.

The raid was organized by attorney General Janet Reno, who briefed President William Clinton in advance of the assault. In the days since, they have won substantial backing within U.S. ruling circles for the attack.

Gonzalez is a Cuban-American worker and U.S. citizen. He was given custody of the boy by the INS last November after the six-year-old was found at sea, one of the few survivors of the collapse of a flimsy boat carrying him, his mother, and 12 others who had left Cuba. The INS revoked Gonzalez's custody rights April 13 and had been involved in negotiations about turning over the boy to his father up until the moment the raid began.

Lazaro Gonzalez is an opponent of the Cuban revolution and became a temporary front man for the U.S. government as he used his possession of the boy to provide a platform from which to denounce Cuban president Fidel Castro, smear the Cuban revolution, and attempt to gain custody of the child.

Reno ordered the invasion of Gonzalez's home three days after the 11th Circuit Court of appeals dealt a blow to the Justice Department when it barred anyone from taking the boy from the United States until a court hearing on what is purported to be a request for asylum by the six-year-old. The document was filed by the distant relatives. After the raid, a judge on the appeals Court added further conditions to his stay and indicated he may seek to secure "a special guardian" to "report to the Court directly on the Plaintiff's [Elian Gonzalez's] condition and care as well as the circumstances of his present custody."

'A textbook police operation'
"A textbook police tactical operation," boasted Janet Reno and echoed by other U.S. officials and pro-police "experts." Clinton praised Reno, stating: "When all efforts failed, there was no alternative but to enforce the decision of the INS.... The law has been upheld, and that was the right thing to do."

Presidential candidates George W. Bush and Albert Gore blamed the Cuban government for the conflict, opposing administration statements that Elian and his father should be reunited. Bush denounced the raid, claiming, "The chilling picture of a little boy being removed from his home at gunpoint defies the values of America."

New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani took the opportunity to accuse the Clinton administration of police brutality, comparing the federal agents in the raid to "storm troopers." On April 24, Giuliani held a news conference denouncing "Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, and Janet Reno"—repeating the three names three times—and the INS agents' use of force. "The action was unprecedented and unconscionable," he said.

Hillary Clinton, the main Democratic contender for U.S. Senate in New York state, who is running against Giuliani, condemned her opponent and praised Reno. She argued that the INS action "was accomplished rapidly and without injury." In a campaign appearance, she urged Juan Miguel Gonzalez to defect with Elian and the rest of his family, declaring, "I don't have any liking for Fidel Castro and the Cuban government."

'What happens if you defy the law'
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that it "warmed his heart" to see "a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez." Friedman said the picture should be put "in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: 'America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it. Come all ye who understand that."

Friedman, in a front-cover feature in the March 28, 1999, New York Times magazine, advocated similar course in U.S. foreign policy. "The hidden hand of the market will never work," he stated, "without a hidden fist—McDonalds cannot flourish with McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

The recent column, titled, "Reno for President," ran April 25 after two Times editorials opposed the raid. "The Justice Department acted rashly and unwisely in ordering the raid, and its decisions now require the most careful evaluation by Congress and the American people," an April 24 Times editorial said. The government "must exhaust other remedies first and insure that it obtains the unambiguous authorization of a court to take action." Noting that "these steps may not be required by law in an immigration case," the paper cautioned that "they are necessary to reassure the public that the government is not acting arbitrarily or using excessive force—even if it has a search warrant—when it invades someone's home in the middle of the night."

Harvard constitutional law professor and Democratic Party stalwart Laurence Tribe asks in a guest column in the New York Times, "Where did the attorney general derive the legal authority to invade that Miami home in order to seize the child?" The "government's actions," he wrote, "appear to have violated a basic principle of our society, a principle whose preservation lies at the core of ordered liberty under the rule of law."

Tribe points out that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the executive branch from entering "people's homes forcibly to remove innocent individuals without taking the time to seek a warrant or other order from a judge or magistrate." Reno's decision, he says, "to take the law as well as the child into her own hands seems worse than a political blunder. Even if well intended, her decision strikes at the heart of constitutional government and shakes the safeguards of liberty."


Record of Clinton administration
Under the guise of fighting terrorism, drugs, and crime, the Clinton administration has overseen sweeping attacks on democratic rights and the beefing up of police forces across the country. These measures include:

The actions of the Clinton administration since November when Elian Gonzalez was rescued at sea through the brutal and unconstitutional April 22 raid, were all aimed at reinforcing and advancing this course upon which the capitalist rulers have been propelled for several decades. The forced entry into the home of a U.S. citizen, without an adequate warrant, in the dark, with a massive police mobilization is another watermark in this drive.

Small turnout at protests
After failing to stop the seizure of the boy, or to mount any effective resistance to the INS raid, a few thousand opponents of the return of Elian Gonzalez to Cuba gathered on the streets of Miami the day after the INS assault, in crowds of up to a few hundred at a time, shouting and burning tires and trash bins.

The protests were called by rightist Cuban-American organizations and were given some support by Democrat Alex Penelas, mayor of Miami-Dade County, and Joseph Carollo, Republican mayor of the city of Miami, and many other local politicians.

The police, however, didn't hesitate in quickly breaking up the protests and keeping roads clear. Seven hundred Miami police, 650 Miami-Dade County cops, highway patrol officers, and a SWAT team from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were on the streets, pumping tear gas canisters into crowds and taking away dozens in handcuffs. In the first 24 hours after the INS raid, the police reported 303 arrests, including a few journalists, and 304 fires, mostly trash fires in the streets.

Small actions took place in a few other cities that day, including one of a couple of hundred who briefly slowed traffic into New York's Lincoln Tunnel from the New Jersey side.

Leaders of 21 rightist Cuban-American organizations, including the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) and the Democracy Movement, denounced the INS raid, calling the federal agents "shock troops, reminiscent of the Gestapo." They issued a statement calling for a "general strike" for April 25. The call, directed mainly at the 800,000 people of Cuban origin in the area, asked that people stay home from work and for businesses to shut down, to make Miami a "dead city" for the day. The CANF is run by millionaire Cuban-American businessmen and has enjoyed U.S. government support and financing over the years.

Weak response to strike call
Large numbers of Cuban-owned retail businesses, mainly in Little Havana and Hialeah, where the large majority of the population is Cuban-American, shut down april 25. In these areas, many gas stations, coffee shops, and other stores were locked that day. But the work stoppage had little impact in the rest of Miami, or at area factories.

For example, at Aerothrust, an aircraft engine repair plant of 200 workers where a two-week-strong strike recently ended, one Cuban-American mechanic was considering joining the work stoppage, saying, "The kid belongs with his father, but they never should have done it the way they did at gunpoint in the middle of the night." Later in the day, a worker holding right-wing views brought in flyers with the photo of the gun-wielding Border Patrol cop in front of the frightened six-year-old, with the caption, "Elian's first interview with the INS." But only a handful of workers heeded the call to stay home.

On the other hand, one of many garment shops in Hialeah was closed by the owner. The big majority of some 70 workers planned to go to work on April 25, but supervisors told them Cuban-American office workers were not going to show up and that because the plant is located in Hialeah the company would close for the day for workers' "security."

At another garment cutting plant of about 40 employees located in Opa Locka, an area with a largely African-American population north of Hialeah, not a single worker missed work to heed the strike call. at that factory, one employee who supports reunifying Elian with his father condemned the way the raid was carried out, a worker at the plant, Eric Simpson, reported.

Addressing some Cuban fellow workers, a worker originally from Haiti stated, "You finally got a whiff of the tear gas we Haitians have been smelling for years."

Prejudice against Cuban-Americans
This comment reflected to a degree a widespread prejudice that the big-business media and politicians have worked overtime to foster against Cuban-Americans by lumping them together as a monolithic "ethnic group" made up almost entirely of rightists. They obscure the real class differences and political divisions among Cuban-Americans here. These big-business forces promote anti-Cuban chauvinism among non-Spanish-speaking workers and resentment among other workers of oppressed nationalities—both Blacks and Latinos—by portraying all Cuban immigrants as privileged, thus letting the capitalist families of Florida off the hook.

One illustration of this myth promoted by the big-business press was an article in the April 25 issue of the New York Daily News titled "Huge ethnic rift in Miami."

"The uneasy peace that has long existed among Miami's ethnic groups has been shattered by the battle over Elian Gonzalez," the reporter said. "The problems could intensify today, when Cuban-American leaders try to bring the city to a standstill by urging supporters to stay home from work and businesses to close."

The article quoted local businessman Dan Ricker saying, "You have 450,000 anglos who are really disgusted with this whole thing, and the African-Americans are saying, 'You've been ignoring us for 20 years. You break down our doors all the time.'"

This was reflected to a degree in recent discussions among rail workers at the CSX freight yard and adjacent Amtrak coach yard in Hialeah. "SWAT teams knock down doors in the Black neighborhoods every day," said Joe Higgins, a CSX road conductor who is Black. "Why should the Cubans be treated any different?" a number of workers at these yards defended the INS raid.

Government effort to prettify INS image
Discussions among industrial workers here reflected some of the success of the Clinton administration in using this case to prettify the image of the INS among working people. Maria, a knitting department worker in one of the largest clothing factories here, who asked that only her first name be used, believes that Elian Gonzalez should return to Cuba because that is where his immediate family wants to live. She also stated her view that both the Miami relatives of the boy and the Cuban government were to blame for "making this political."

Maria had been expressing her anger for weeks at la migra (INS) for the way they have treated her and her family in their effort to gain residency status. But after the INS and Justice Department announced their decision to reunite Elian with his father, Maria said, "The INS and Janet Reno have the best position in the case."

At that same plant, where the majority of the workforce are Cuban-Americans, about 15 employees among 150 missed work on April 25 in response to the call for the "work stoppage." Most of the Cuban workers interviewed there supported reuniting Elian with his father. Several, who asked that their names not be used, expressed disagreement with the rightist protests and said they disliked the INS raid.

Mike Italie and Argiris Malapanis are garment workers in Miami; Greg McCartan contributed from New York. Bill Kalman, a member of the United Transportation Union; Eric Simpson, a member of Local 415 of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees; and Rachele Fruit, a member of the International Association of Machinists, contributed to this article.

url: http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6418/641802.html 

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The Militant (logo)

Vol. 64/No.18      May 8, 2000

Call for federal troops to enforce civil rights is a world apart from INS assault in Miami

By Steve Clark
"We should not get caught up in the debate of whether too much force was used," writes Les Slater in one of the letters on page 15 of this week's issue of the Militant. Slater is referring to the April 22 SWAT-style raid in Miami during which eight members of a 130-strong Border Patrol special forces task force of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—wearing riot gear and armed with MP-5 submachine guns—broke down the front door with a battering ram and smashed their way into a private home.

In another letter printed in this issue, Joe Callahan also welcomes this assault by la migra, comparing it "to the use of U.S. troops to enforce desegregation in the South in the 1950s and 60s, something that socialists staunchly supported."

The Militant editorial, "In Defense of the Cuban Revolution, In Defense of the Working Class," featured on the front page, presents the communist viewpoint on the brutal and unconstitutional INS asault in Miami. In addition, however, an explicit answer is called for to the misrepresentation in the letter by Joe Callahan of the Socialist Workers Party's political course as part of the fight against Jim Crow segregation and for Black civil rights.

That mass proletarian movement swept not only the U.S. South but the United States as a whole for well more than a decade. It had deep roots in the battles that forged the industrial unions in the 1930s and in struggles by sharecroppers and tenant farmers during those same years. Many of its most self-sacrificing cadres gained initial experience in the mobilizations by Black workers, rural toilers, and youth during World War II against the color bar in wartime industries and lynch-mob terror and cop violence—as well as statutory segregation of units inside the U.S. armed forces itself, segregation that included the assignment of the all-Black units both to the filthiest and to the most dangerous tasks.

Struggles against colonialism
The struggle paused for a number of years following the war. But the embers were fanned by victorious struggles for colonial independence and national liberation across much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. By 1954 that shifting postwar balance of international class forces brought about the conditions in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education, decided there was little choice but to declare school segregation to be contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

Over the following decade, a veritable social war was fought across the U.S. South. Segregationist forces used both official police power and stepped-up lynch mob terror in an effort to deny voting rights to Blacks and bar them from equal access to schools, transportation, restaurants, hotels, and public facilities of all varieties. (It was during this period that the Confederate battle flag was once again raised as a banner of racism, reaction, and secession over state capitols in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and elsewhere.) Blacks combated the racist violence, including by organized armed self-defense in many cases, and reached out to supporters of all skin colors across the United States to mobilize for freedom rides, sit-ins, marches, and mass demonstrations and rallies.

Federal troops, armed self-defense
White-supremacist governors such as Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Ross Barnett of Mississippi, George Wallace of Alabama, and others initially called out the National Guard in those states to block the desegregation of elementary schools, high schools, and universities by Black students, and to maintain institutionalized inequality in all aspects of life and work. In response, working people and youth who were Black, not only in the South but across the United States, began to demand that Washington enforce the equal rights it now claimed before world opinion to guarantee—including, if necessary, by federalizing the National Guard or sending in the U.S. armed forces.

The communist movement in the United States began raising this demand as early as 1955. "How many more lynchings, beatings, floggings, and kidnappings must we have before the federal government acts to protect the Negro people of Mississippi?" opened a Militant editorial in October of that year. Just a few days earlier, the lynchers of a young Black man named Emmett Till had been acquitted in a Mississippi Delta town through the connivance of the all-white judge, jury, and prosecution.

During a Socialist Workers Party leadership discussion the following year, national secretary Farrell Dobbs reported that during a recent trip to Chicago he had found "a big response to the demand for federal troops" among Black workers he had met there in the packing and farm equipment industries. Dobbs added that "this is a big demand which must be fought for through mass action. To demonstrate their seriousness, the Negro leaders should organize a March on Washington. This course...would help give weight to the whole struggle of the Negro people."

Dobbs also pointed "to the accumulated evidence that the Negro people themselves have been showing initiative in moving toward self-defense," and that defense against reactionary forces is "a problem which confronts unionists, Negro and white alike, as well as the Negroes as a people.

"I think the troop slogan," Dobbs said, "will help to push the defense guard slogan as a propaganda point. Failure of the government to protect the Negro people against terror leads to the conclusion that they must find a way to defend themselves as best they can, in other words, defense guards organized in association with their white allies."

Desegregating 'Ole Miss'
Over this period, both the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower and the Democratic administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson resisted at every step along the way dispatching federal troops to enforce Black rights. But the growing mass movement demanding that Washington take action against the weakening but still violent segregationist bunker in the South forced the White House to send in federal marshals and military units at several turning points.

As schools opened in the fall of 1962, for example, Mississippi governor Barnett deployed state troopers and local sheriffs to rebuff three straight efforts to enforce a federal order to admit a young Black man named James Meredith to the University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss") in the town of Oxford. Finally, on October 2, the Kennedy administration agreed to dispatch the forces necessary to ensure Meredith was registered and allowed onto campus. Accompanied by federal marshals, the Black student was met by a racist mob, some shouting "Go to Cuba, nigger lovers, go to Cuba!" and lobbing stones. By the end of that day, the segregationist thugs had injured 160 federal marshals—28 of them with bullet wounds—and killed a local worker and British reporter. Over the weeks to come, some 23,000 U.S. Army, Marine, and Air Force troops were stationed on the campus.

A year and a half later, in March 1965, when mass civil rights demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, were putting a spotlight on the refusal of state authorities to guarantee voting rights to Blacks, the Militant called on the federal government to send troops to Alabama to arrest Wallace "and all other state and local officials guilty of denying Negroes their rights. Moreover, the federal government should arm and deputize Alabama Negroes so that they can protect their own communities from racist violence."

When several thousand civil rights fighters refused to be turned back by a bloody assault by state troopers on their first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, the Johnson administration was forced two weeks later not only to call Alabama National Guardsmen into federal service to ensure the safety of the marchers, but to introduce legislation that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Gains in democratic and social rights
By the latter half of the 1960s, the mass civil rights movement had sounded the death knell for the system of state-sanctioned segregation and discrimination across the U.S. South known as Jim Crow.

Not only was equality codified in federal civil rights legislation, but a major extension of Social Security protection for all working people had been won as well—Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and cost-of-living protections. These were the first significant new conquests in working people's social wage since the massive labor battles of the 1930s.

These victories provided a vital impulse to struggles against national oppression by Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other oppressed layers of the population; set a powerful example for the movement for women's rights that exploded at the end of the 1960s; and gave momentum to the emerging movement to stop U.S. imperialism's war against the people of Vietnam.

The working class and labor unions in the United States had been immeasurably strengthened.

The use of federal troops to enforce Black rights, moreover, had not helped the capitalist rulers morally justify or politically reinforce their various apparatuses of repression against working people, as the Clinton administration is seeking to use this week's lightning predawn INS assault in Miami.

To the contrary, as the Black rights movement gained power, expanding from the South throughout all parts of the country, among the consequences was a parallel expansion of political rights and constitutional protections for all working people. Fourth Amendment rights against "unreasonable search and seizure" were strengthened by the Supreme Court in 1961, including the exclusion of evidence illegally obtained by the cops. Sixth Amendment rights of all to an attorney were extended in 1964. Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination and forced confessions were codified in 1966, the so-called "Miranda" ruling. And the death penalty—a barbaric class weapon of the bosses—was struck down in 1972.

As U.S. and world capitalism entered a long-term crisis by the mid-1970s, each of these conquests has come under increasing pressure, as the courts and politicians in both capitalist parties have sought to chip away at or reverse them. The biggest attacks on these gains have been pushed through by the Clinton administration, with bipartisan backing in Congress.

So, it's true that "the use of troops to enforce desegregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s [is] something that socialists strongly supported." Contrary to the assertion of Joe Callahan, however, this bloody and proud chapter in the struggle of U.S. working people provides convincing evidence of why labor and the oppressed must intransigently condemn the anti-working-class and unconstitutional commando operation by the executive branch of the federal government in Miami. That Easter weekend raid is part of the frontal assault on the constitutional rights conquered by a mass working-class vanguard in these battles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Every class-conscious worker should not only "get caught up" in this debate but help lead it—and act on its conclusions.

Readers interested in learning more about the politics and history discussed here are encourage to pick up the Education for Socialists bulletin entitled, From Mississippi to Boston: The Demand for Troops to Enforce Civil Rights, available from Pathfinder Press.
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Vol.64/No.19            May 15, 2000

Debate in Miami over INS raid
BY BILL KALMAN and ARGIRIS MALAPANIS

MIAMI — In the aftermath of the commando-style raid by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents and U.S. marshals to remove six-year-old Elián González from the home of his great-uncle here, there is broader backing among the U.S. rulers for the operation ordered by U.S. attorney general Janet Reno.

Leaders of the Republican Party who condemned the assault on the home of Lázaro González have backed away from earlier calls to launch Congressional hearings on the matter. U.S. senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who had scheduled a hearing for May 3, postponed it. Hatch indicated his committee might not hold hearings at all if the U.S. Justice Department provides an adequate explanation about the raid in writing.

Different rallies in response to INS raid
Tens of thousands turned out for a rally in Little Havana here April 25. Rightist Cuban-American groups, including the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) and the Democracy Movement, had called the action to denounce the INS raid and get a wider hearing for their demand to keep Elián González in the United States and for slanders against the Cuban Revolution.

The majority at the rally, though not all, were Cuban-Americans. Many backed the right-wing, anticommunist slogans of the rally organizers.

A certain number of people who support returning Elián to Cuba, however, came to the action because organizers had built it as a protest against the INS raid, but did not share the reactionary outlook of the organizers. Two garment workers at a plant in Miami Lakes, for example, said they favored the return of the six-year-old boy to Cuba but went to the rally to show their anger at la migra. The two, one originally from Ecuador and other from Peru, asked that their names not be used.

Protesters carried U.S. and Cuban flags. Later during the action, some burned the U.S. flag. A few protesters carried signs saying, "Say no to police donations" and "Please don't hurt me: I'm peacefully protesting."

Others came to show their opposition to the widespread prejudice against the Cuban-American community spread by the media and most capitalist politicians. "The Cuban people have been presented as boorish, dumb, and reactionary, and that's just so unfair," Nieves López, an English teacher, told the Miami Herald. "Some people complain that they have given Cubans everything. My father was not given anything. My parents came to this country poor. They worked at very menial jobs and saved to send me to college."

The big-business media and politicians here portray Cuban-Americans as a single, reactionary "ethnic" bloc that is privileged. In this way they promote chauvinism against them among sections of the population who are not Cuban--including workers who are white, U.S.-born Blacks, Haitians, and other Spanish-speaking workers.

At the same time, small reactionary demonstrations backed Reno's action. About 2,500 turned out for one such rally in South Dade County on the sidewalks of U.S. Highway 1. Organized by small businessman Rick Hartwell and others, it had a pro-U.S. government, "America First," anti-immigrant character. Organizers said they opposed the burning of U.S. flags by Cuban-Americans and castigated Miami mayor Joseph Carollo and Miami-Dade County mayor Alex Penelas for supporting defiance of Reno's edicts. Signs at this rally included: "Thanks Reno," "Proud to be American," "Stop the Banana Republic," and "This is America: Speak English." Many in the rally carried U.S. flags. Several in the crowd flew the Confederate flag.

Protesters at the U.S. Highway 1 demonstration included a noticeable number of African-Americans. The Miami Times, a weekly oriented to the Black community here, featured a front-page article in its April 26-May 2 issue with the headline "Elian is gone: 'Thank God' say most in the Black community." The editorial in that issue stated, "It is sickening to hear some of our respected community leaders blaming Attorney General Janet Reno for being too hasty. Many people feel she leaned over far too backward in trying to make a deal with a family that is clearly dysfunctional.... We commend Janet Reno for orchestrating a well-planned and bloodless rescue of Elián."

After the April 29 demonstrations, a few Blacks and others could be seen driving their cars with U.S. flags hanging from their windows in majority-Black neighborhoods.

Crisis in Miami city government
As the Clinton administration maintains the offensive, the mayor of Miami has become increasingly isolated since the INS assault, which he vocally opposed. A week after the raid Carollo fired city manager Donald Warshaw after he refused the mayor's demand to fire police chief William O'Brien. Under the city charter, only the city manager has the authority to hire or fire police officials.

Carollo had condemned O'Brien for not informing him ahead of time of the INS raid. The police chief had been informed by federal authorities and cooperated with Reno's assault, an action he defended publicly. After the announcement of Warshaw's firing, O'Brien resigned, calling Carollo "divisive and destructive." The city manager then appointed a new police chief, Raúl Martínez.

Carollo called Warshaw an "extortionist" and appointed two lawyers to investigate allegations that the city manager has misused his office. On May 2, Warshaw filed a suit against Carollo, charging him with corruption, and said he would stay on the job until the case is settled. A local judge backed Warshaw's stance.

These events continue to be a hot topic of discussion among workers. At AeroThrust, a jet engine overhaul facility next to Miami International Airport, some Cuban workers who oppose U.S. policy toward Cuba did not support the INS raid. "One young Cuban mechanic there who is Black had been listening to Cuban president Fidel Castro's May Day speech on the radio before work," reported Rachele Fruit, who works there. He said he had attended a protest in Hialeah against the INS raid "because I didn't like the way they did it. Those people weren't armed."

Differing views on INS raid
Most workers at this factory, where about half the workforce are Cuban-Americans, opposed the INS raid, for a variety of reasons. Some identified with the effort to keep the six-year-old boy in Miami and attended the April 29 rally in Little Havana for those reasons.

A minority among them, however, especially those who favor normalization of relations with Cuba, backed the April 22 government raid. A Cuban-American worker at that plant who opposes the U.S. embargo of Cuba expressed sympathy toward the pro-"American" demonstration. "We need a strong city government and police chief without the Cubans who came here 40 years ago," he said.

Few workers saw through the reactionary character of both rallies. Julio, a knitting machine operator at a garment plant on the outskirts of Miami, condemned both April 29 demonstrations as reactionary. "Those right-wing Cubans who called the rally on Saturday cynically used a child for their own anticommunist interests," he said. "They now want to fool us as being against la migra. What does it matter if his father may be a communist? Elián belongs in Cuba." Julio, who asked that only his first name be used, also said the U.S. Highway 1 demonstration was racist. "How can people support a rally with Confederate flags and English-only signs?"

The majority at this plant opposed the assault ordered by Reno. Some workers who backed the INS raid pointed out how the Clinton administration was using it to help gain acceptance for its impending assault in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Paulette, a sewing machine operator at the same clothing plant, said sending U.S. Marines to Vieques "is wrong. And saying they may do it at 'Elian time' makes me pause to consider what I thought of the raid before."

Bill Kalman is a member of the United Transportation Union. Argiris Malapanis is a garment worker. Rachele Fruit, a member of International Association of Machinists Local 1162, contributed to this article.

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THE MILITANT
Vol.64/No.19            May 15, 2000


Cuba's sovereignty is the issue
BY STEVE CLARK
When five-year-old Elián González was found adrift on an inner tube off Florida last November 25, "the proper procedure would have been to immediately return the child to his country of origin," Cuban president Fidel Castro told participants in a mass rally in Havana on May Day.

That, in fact, is how Washington would have proceeded had the child been from anywhere in the world but Cuba. The Immigration and Naturalization Service would not have set off on its own to find the parents, let alone determine their "fitness." It would not have fabricated a child custody case or pretended this was an immigration matter. U.S. officials would have put the child on the next available plane and returned him or her to the appropriate government agency in the country of origin.

That's what Washington should have done in the case of Elián González last November. That has been the opinion of class-conscious workers and farmers and millions of democratic-minded individuals in the United States — as well as the demand of the Militant — from day one. And that's what we must continue to demand that U.S. government authorities do now.

But Elián González was not from anywhere else in the world; he was from Cuba. The central issue involved is Cuban sovereignty. The U.S. government for 10 days refused even to respond "to the diplomatic note presented by the Ministry of Foreign Relations demanding the return of the child as requested by the father from the very beginning," the Cuban president said at the May Day rally. "By that time, the first public protests had taken place in Cuba, and they have continued up until today."

Once Washington finally responded to Cuban government officials on December 8, U.S authorities began issuing demands completely beyond the bounds of any normal handling of such matters. The Immigration and Naturalization Service demanded to travel to Cuba on December 13 to meet with Juan Miguel González in his hometown of Cárdenas to determine his fitness as a father. What imperial arrogance! Even had there been a legitimate basis for a custody dispute — and there was none—the place to resolve it, as Castro said May 1, would have been "in a Cuban court of law." After Washington had returned the child.

When four months had passed and Elián González was still not back in Cuba, his father Juan Miguel finally decided in early April to come to the United States, having received assurances from the U.S. government that his son would be returned to his custody within one week of his arrival.

Such encroachments on Cuba's national sovereignty are part of the unrelenting efforts by the U.S. imperialist rulers to punish the working people of Cuba for establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat in this hemisphere — "the first free territory of the Americas," as revolutionists in that country proudly and defiantly point out. Washington's course after rescuing Elián González was aimed, among other things, at bolstering the reactionary 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which seeks to entice Cubans to leave the country for the United States by offering them expedited citizenship papers and assistance not granted by the U.S. government to immigrants from anywhere else in the world.

As Fidel Castro once again emphasized before hundreds of thousands who turned out for the May Day demonstration in Havana, the rescue of Elián González "would have been a simple migratory case if it had not involved a Cuban child."

Cuban sovereignty, the Cuban revolution, U.S. capital's economic depredations and aggression against Cuba, the U.S. government's refusal for 40 years to establish normal diplomatic relations — these have been the issues underlying Washington's use and abuse of a six-year-old.

Miami politics transformed
The Elián González case registers the end of an era in South Florida. No longer can an organized counterrevolutionary cadre among Cuban emigrés, whose quasimilitary formations at one time acted with relative impunity, dominate politics there.

Among the some 800,000 residents of Cuban origin in the Miami area, social differentiation, political heterogeneity, and integration into U.S. politics and the class struggle are more advanced than at any time over the past four decades.

Prominent bourgeois figures within the Cuban-American community, for example, including the chairman of the University of Miami board of trustees, were deeply involved with U.S. government officials in the negotiations with attorneys for Lázaro González.

Attitudes toward normalizing relations with Cuba are more differentiated among workers of Cuban origin. Tens of thousands of Cuban-Americans travel to the island each year to visit family members. The ideological homogeneity among middle-class and professional layers is coming unstuck.

As a result, the openings for class-conscious working people and revolutionary-minded youth — including communist workers — to carry out organized political activity in Miami around a broad range of questions are greater than ever before. Intimidation from the ultraright is less and less effective.

These shifts are a combined product of the broader sea change in working-class politics across the United States and much of the imperialist and semicolonial world, as well as the intransigence of the working people and communist leadership in Cuba in defending their national sovereignty and integrity, the socialist character of their revolution.

A turning point came in 1996, when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, after repeated warnings, shot down two planes from a Miami-based outfit called Brothers to the Rescue that were attempting to overfly Cuban territory. Some 60,000 people filled Miami's Orange Bowl for a tribute to the four downed pilots at the time. But in fact it was a requiem for the declining paramilitary groups, and their counterrevolutionary illusions. They had sustained a blow from which they have not recovered — and never can.

That downward political trajectory has been accelerated over the past five months by the sustained mobilization of Cuban working people and youth demanding that Elián González be returned to Cuba--and by the increasingly broad popular assent that demand has received among working people in the United States.

What's more, the refusal once again of the Cuban government and people to bend in face of Washington's pressure is precipitating a further shift in bourgeois public opinion in the United States. In recent weeks, more and more voices within U.S. big business and among their paid propagandists have been saying that it is simply no longer productive for Washington to maintain its bar on all trade and diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Irreconcilable classes
The Militant received a good many letters about last week's editorial and the article by this writer condemning the INS assault in Miami as "a blow to the working class" — more than the editor has room to print even in an expanded, full-page letters column. The Militant also received reports from discussions at Militant Labor Forums in cities and towns across the United States, as well as on conversations with working people and youth during sales of the paper on street corners, on the job, and elsewhere.

To clarify the issues at stake, it's useful to respond to arguments raised in a letter in sharp disagreement with the Militant. In a letter e-mailed around the world, and printed here in the letters column, Karen Wald writes that the SWAT-style assault by special forces of la migra's Border Patrol "was simply the only way to rescue a small child being illegally held."

From the standpoint of the exploited and oppressed, however, a question posed this way can never produce an answer in the interests of the working class. Because it proposes that those of us in the workers movement share responsibility with the capitalist rulers and imperialist state — whose interests are irreconcilable with ours —in solving their problems and resolving their dilemmas.

Malcolm X used to say that in the days before the U.S. Civil War, when the slavemaster got sick, the house slave would say, "'What's the matter boss, we sick?' When the master's house caught afire, he'd try and put the fire out." But the field slave would "pray that the master died. If the master's house caught afire, they'd pray for a strong wind."

The latter is what marks the course of class-conscious workers today toward "our own" bourgeoisie, the masters of modern finance capital. Our starting point is not winning concessions from the exploiters, but how to educate and mobilize working people along a line of march that can culminate in getting rid of the exploiters. Along that road, the toilers will win the maximum concessions. But above all, through revolutionary class independence we will prepare the ground to overthrow the imperialist rulers whose march toward fascism and war poses historic dangers to working people, the Cuban revolution, and all humanity.

It's only among those who share this class objective and standpoint, of course, that there is common ground for discussion.

In an earlier e-mail, Wald wrote that she thought "sending roses to Janet Reno was going overboard in one direction," but that "the Militant's editorial position is going overboard in the other." Wald's reference was to an exchange in last week's Militant letters column headlined "Flowers for Reno?"

But Wald's own April 22 letter reprinted in last week's letters column issued a call to write individual letters of "congratulations" to Reno, Clinton, Gore, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, Hillary Clinton, and Tipper Gore.

Crowd control advice
Wald may not have sent flowers to Janet Reno. But in an April 13 letter also printed in the letters column, Wald did send the attorney general something else that had a different fragrance: advice on police crowd control methods.

"The solution is really simple," Wald wrote to Reno. "As a journalist I've seen it done on dozens of occasions in various cities and states around the country: Send in officers to clear away the crowd, declaring it an illegal gathering and giving them five minutes to disperse; arresting those who fail to obey the law. Including all the reporters and cameras. [The INS SWAT squad did deck an NBC camera crew and smash their equipment, but not even Clinton, Reno, and Meissner thought they could jail the entire press corps and blindfold the entire world! — SC] Remove everyone from a five block radius."

We don't know for sure the various places in the United States Wald has been favorably impressed as she has "seen it done on dozens of occasions." But cop action of the kind she urges on Janet Reno has been carried out on thousands of occasions against striking workers, civil rights demonstrators, anti-Vietnam War activists, and many others in the United States and throughout the capitalist world. And the further away the cops or paramilitary commanders can keep the press or photographers, the better they like it — for reasons those of us who have been on the receiving end know all too well.

Of course, neither Janet Reno's "Justice Department" nor any other section of the U.S. government police apparatus needs "advice" on repression. But Wald's casualness, even pride, in proffering such advice to U.S. imperialism's top police official sheds additional light on another aspect of her other letter run in this week's issue.

"Just as you would not condemn the police force in a capitalist city for any number of proper actions they take on behalf of the citizenry — against murders and rapists, for instance — simply on the basis that at other times the police force acts in unacceptable ways. Criticize what they do wrong, and commend what they do right."

But from the standpoint of any class-conscious working person — let alone communists — the "police force in a capitalist city" never acts on behalf of the so-called citizenry. The police always act to defend the class interests of the exploiting class whose interests it is their job, their only job, to serve and protect. The "citizenry," stripped of all class distinctions, is — and can only be — the exploiters' obfuscatory fiction and self-serving justification, not ours.

In the centers of imperialism in particular, Lenin taught us more than 80 years ago in his as-necessary-as-ever booklet State and Revolution, there is "an unprecedented strengthening of the 'state machinery' and an unprecedented growth of its bureaucratic and military apparatus, side by side with the increase of repressive measures against the proletariat," including in "the freest republican countries."

Can anyone imagine combing all 45 volumes of Lenin's Collected Works and finding even one word of advice to the police of tsarist Russia or anywhere else in the capitalist world?


Capitalist 'justice'
Does this mean communists never call on the capitalist state to enforce democratic rights and protections won by working people through bloody struggle? Of course not.

An aspect of the Militant's long record on this question was reviewed in last week's issue, in an article on the powerful proletarian social movement responsible for the destruction of Jim Crow segregation across the U.S. South.

But class-conscious fighters for Black rights knew that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were not "acting on behalf of the citizenry" when they were forced to federalize the National Guard or send in U.S. troops in response to demands from a growing mass movement. The vanguard of Black rights fighters, many of whom were organizing armed self-defense against racist terror, raised further demands as opposed to "commending" the White House. They took advantage of the political space they had won and used it to advance as far as they were strong enough to press.

Nor, as last week's article explained, did the use of federal troops strengthen — politically, morally, or otherwise — the position of the capitalist state to use arbitrary force and abridge the hard-won democratic rights of the toilers. To the contrary, the rights conquered by working people and the labor movement were expanded in ways the U.S. rulers — despite their current assaults on many fronts, with the Clinton administration in the vanguard — have been able to erode but cannot reverse short of bloody defeats for the toilers in major class battles still to come.

What about the "proper actions" of the police "against murderers and rapists"?

The capitalist police don't take action against murderers and rapists. They take action against those they accuse — and then most of the time convict and sentence — as "murderers," "rapists," "burglars," "armed robbers" (who are usually found to have "resisted arrest," to boot, and treated accordingly). The real "growth industry" among the U.S. cops, courts, and "Justice Department" over the past decade — largely responsible for the unprecedented explosion of the U.S. prison population, especially among Black youth — has been those accused of drug-dealing.

This is how capitalist police forces operate all the time, not "at other times." This is not what they "do wrong," it is what they do.

In Illinois this simple fact of capitalist society began taking on such a stench among broad layers of working people over the past few years that even the conservative, pro-death penalty Governor George Ryan was compelled to issue a moratorium on executions, acknowledging there is no justice in the courts. His action was neither "commendable," nor taken "on behalf of the citizenry." Ryan simply made a cold-blooded political decision in face of well-publicized evidence that in Illinois alone, 12 human beings had been executed since 1973 while 13 others on death row — more than half — had been exonerated and released. Nationally over that same period, 85 death-row prisoners had been released — 1 for every 7
executed.

'Humanitarian intervention'
Nor are the implications of the question "What else could they have done?" limited to support for the rulers' exercise of police power domestically in the United States and other imperialist countries. To the contrary. Among growing layers of bourgeois liberals, middle-class radicals, and centrists in the workers movement, there are mounting calls for imperialist-organized troops, flying the United Nations banner, to conduct "humanitarian intervention" around the world — to echo the headline of a recent feature section of the liberal, popular-frontist Nation magazine.

Proponents of this course point to "terrible dilemmas."

"How else are 'we' to stop the horrible tribal genocide in 'failed states' such as Rwanda?" they ask.

"If NATO had not sent tens of thousands of troops into Bosnia and Kosova — whatever the righteous criticism of their excesses — how else were 'we' to stop the ethnic cleansing?"

"Without the 'peacekeeping' force led by Australian imperialism last year, how else could 'we' have rescued the innocent people of East Timor, terrorized by the rightist militias sponsored by the Indonesian regime?"

And we can expand the list. (Reaching back in history 35 years, for example, it could be asked: "How else could 'we' turn back the Belgian- and U.S.-organized mercenaries in the Congo without the UN intervention force? — the UN forces that at best stood by and did nothing while Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba was seized by rightist forces and later murdered. Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution gave a different answer.)

As the Militant editorial pointed out last week, the imperialist rulers "do at home what they do abroad. Foreign policy is always ultimately an expression of the real trajectory of domestic policy." In an interview in another prominent liberal magazine, The Progressive, David McReynolds — the Socialist Party-USA's 2000 presidential candidate and retired leader of the War Resisters League — drew the parallel quite succinctly: "What we are lacking [once again, who is "we"? — SC] is some kind of international United Nations police force.... It needs to be a police force that is not carrying AK-47s as much [as much!!] as it is carrying nonlethal means of crowd control and is trained in medical care.... There are lots of tricks for keeping crowds under moderate control and we haven't succeeded." [Another advisor! And this time not just for Janet Reno, but for the NATO Command and Joint Chiefs of Staff!]

Such rationalizations for imperialist war and carnage are not new, either in the workers movement or among bourgeois and middle-class radicals and pacifists. As the workers and peasants of Russia were led into the slaughter of World War I, their class-collaborationist misleaders asked: "How else are 'we' to stop the depredations of the German Kaiser?" The workers and farmers of Germany were told by their misleaders: "How else are 'we' to resist the backwardness and expansionism of the Russian tsar?" And the betrayers of the working-class movement in the United States helped the rulers mobilize workers as cannon fodder in support of president Woodrow Wilson's promise of "a war to end all wars" and to rescue oppressed peoples across Europe and ensure them "national self-determination." The Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin provided an example in practice of the effective — and definitive — reply.

During the Second World War, once again, misleaders of labor and the oppressed told working people: "How else will 'we' defeat Hitler, and help the Soviet Union defend itself, if the working class does not support the imperialist government of Franklin Roosevelt and its war policies?" Using that rationalization, workers were told they were "undermining the war effort" if they didn't support the federal wage freeze and no-strike pledge. Blacks were told they were "objectively" aiding the Nazis if they demonstrated to demand equal rights in wartime industries and in the U.S. armed forces itself. Puerto Ricans were denounced as reactionary nationalists for resisting the draft. Japanese-Americans were told to go peacefully into Roosevelt's Nisei concentration camps if they wanted to prove their patriotism and truly help the Soviet workers and peasants turn back Hitler's invasion force.

And the Militant stood alone in the workers movement in August 1945 in condemning the barbaric U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How else, after all, could the peoples of Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere throughout Asia be freed from Emperor Hirohito's boot?

The August 7 issue of the Daily Worker — the newspaper of the Communist Party USA, which supported the imperialist war — ran in full U.S. president Harry Truman's justification of the annihilation of the people of Hiroshima, and the next day proclaimed in a headline: "American labor contributed its share in creating Atombomb." After the assault on Nagasaki a few days later, the Worker featured a racist caricature of a Japanese soldier with two explosions blowing his brains out — one labeled "atomic bomb," the other "Soviet declaration of war," with the overall caption: "The old one-two."

That very same week, the Militant was emblazoned with the headline that told the truth about the course of U.S. imperialism over the next 55 years and counting: "There is no peace!"

Unbending determination
Referring to the U.S. rulers' contemptible use of the Cuban child they hold hostage, Fidel Castro told the hundreds of thousands who turned out for May Day in Havana: "It is obvious that they underestimated our people, who have not rested a single day for something absolutely just."

Revolutionary-minded workers and farmers in the United States and the world over continue to salute the unbending determination of the Cuban people to resist U.S. imperialism's latest, five-month-long assault on their national sovereignty. In doing so, they have made it impossible for the U.S. government not to return Elián González to his homeland, sooner rather than later.

We continue to salute the dignity and firmness with which Cuba's communist leadership has conducted its dealings with the Clinton administration, making the concessions they deemed necessary to try to resolve the crisis while standing their ground on defense of Cuba's national rights. In doing so, they are acting in the traditions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who faced imperialist aggression from all sides against the young Soviet workers and peasants republic some 80 years ago.

In supporting unconditionally the right of the Cuban government to pursue its course in the difficult and unfinished negotiations with Washington over the return of Elián González, working people in the United States at the same time denounce every single demand the imperialist rulers of this country have placed on revolutionary Cuba and its citizens: the insolent INS trip to Cárdenas to determine Juan Miguel González's "fitness" as a father; the pressure on him to come to the United States, as he did in early April; and now the conditions under which the six-year-old and his family are still kept from returning to Cuba.

For the very same reasons, communists and other class-conscious working people in the United States are obligated to condemn in the most uncompromising terms the April 22 commando-style raid in Miami. Millions in the United States saw images of that operation on TV and in the newspapers and sensed — correctlyùthat comparable police assaults can, will, and do happen to many of them too, all the more so as the capitalist crisis and political polarization deepen worldwide. (As this issue goes to press, one such assault is under way right now on a small Puerto Rican island, as federal marshals, FBI agents, and U.S. marines remove protesters who have camped there for more than a year demanding a halt to use of Vieques as a practice area for U.S. military bombing and shelling.)

As last week's Militant editorial underlined, "if the only voice working people and worse-off layers of the middle classes hear speaking out against such indignities are those of reaction; if no angry and determined working-class voice is heard pointing a class-struggle way forward, then the radical siren song of fascist demagogues will gain an ever more receptive ear."

The rise in resistance by workers and farmers across the United States over the past few years, however, is creating new openings for the revolutionary workers movement to gain a hearing today. Together with the reverberations of the Cuban people's intransigence, this shift in U.S. politics is transforming politics in South Florida, pushing back rightist forces there, and sharpening divisions within the U.S. ruling class over Washington's unsuccessful four-decade-long effort to bring Cuba to its knees.
Normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba!
End the reactionary ban on trade and economic relations!
Send Elián González, with his family and friends, back home today!
http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6419/641901.html  

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
May 15, 2000

Vol.64/No.19            May 15, 2000

Letters

Commend what cops do right

I usually try to stay out of disputes among and between organizations and people of the left, as long as we have some basis of agreement over the issues.

So it is with regret that I have come to the conclusion that this topic really must be addressed publicly. The Militant and some of its writers have really gone off the deep end in attacking the mission to rescue Elián González above and beyond the point that we all agree on: that if the INS and Clinton administration would have done what they should have in the first place (if there weren't an anti-Cuba policy in effect for the last 40 years) none of this would have become necessary. But it DID become necessary. And we ourselves could not have rescued that boy.

I take exception to the notion that what the Militant prints is automatically "the communist viewpoint." There is nothing "communist" about the confused stance taken by the Militant and Steve Clark in siding with the occupants of the "private home" where Elián was kept hostage for five months.

Clark objects to the comparison many have made to sending in troops to enforce integration in the South over the opposition of segregationist mayors and governors. Well, you don't need seven paragraphs of the history of the Civil Rights movement to understand where the similarities lie — just read your own words:

"How many more lynchings, beatings, floggings, and kidnappings must we have before the federal government acts to protect the Negro people of Mississippi?" Steve Clark recalls the grassroots movement of the '50s and '60s asking. Now, let's ask the same question after five months of the political kidnapping of Elián González: "How many more...kidnappings must we have before the federal government acts...[to take that little boy out of the hands of a group of crazed kidnappers and return him to his father, his family, his country]?"

Criticize all the many things that need to be criticized — but acknowledge that when they sent in troops to undo the horrendous mess they had gotten themselves into (which included bringing into total disrepute the one sector that gave them "cover" for their anti-Cuban policies), they were also saving the life of a little boy and reuniting a family.

The raid was neither "unconstitutional" nor "anti-working class"; it was simply the only way to rescue a small child being illegally held by a presumably armed group with a known terrorist record who had already stated publicly and privately that the only way they would give him up would be through the use of force.

There is no way that that should be equated with the brutal, inhuman actions that the Migra is prone to in its daily abuses of immigrants seeking work and a better standard of living that they hope to attain in the U.S. Just as you would not condemn the police force in a capitalist city for any number of proper actions they take on behalf of the citizenry — against murders and rapists, for instance — simply on the basis that at other times the police force acts in unacceptable ways. Criticize what they do wrong, and commend what they do right.

I hope you will act like real communists, in analyzing what you have written until now, finding the errors in it, and printing a retraction.
Karen Lee Wald
Havana, Cuba

Reno's record in Florida
When the raid on the house first occurred, I remembered who Janet Reno is. She was the prosecuting attorney in Dade County for more than 15 years. During that time bombings, shootings, mob attacks on peaceful meetings and demonstrations, and other terrorism by the Cuban right wing were more common than today. Reno never carried a successful prosecution of any of them, not one.

I myself was beaten up by a right-wing Cuban youth at a meeting at Florida International University in 1992. The incident was recorded on several different video tapes and there were many witnesses. Reno's office intentionally sabotaged the case.

At the same time she was notorious for her equal inability to convict any of the county and city police who murdered innocent working people and was a big law and order supporter of the corrupt and violent local police.

This is why Clinton picked her as someone he could trust to lead the assault on civil liberties and the lives of working people by appointing her attorney general.
Tony Thomas
Miami, Florida

Defend democratic rights
The Militant's coverage of the INS spearheaded assault in Miami is exactly correct.

I think it should be pointed out that the democratic rights for which workers and farmers have struggled, in the United States and worldwide, are not just for the "innocent," as suggested by Laurence Tribe and other apologists for the naked rule of capital. Tribe wrote that the U.S. Constitution prevents the executive branch from "entering people's homes forcibly to remove innocent individuals...." This is simply false. The U.S. Constitution makes no such differentiation for seizing innocent as opposed to "noninnocent" individuals.

To the ruling class, no worker, no debt slave, no oppressed person anywhere in the world is "innocent" when she or he puts up a fight against the boss, the landlord, or their thugs (both the "legal" ones in police uniforms and the "extra-legal" ones). When workers organize and strike, the bosses call out the cops to protect the property rights of the "innocent" against the pickets.

The right to be secure in one's person against unreasonable search and seizure is not just for the "innocent." Every time the cops break into a worker's home, stop and frisk a person for being "suspicious," or pull a driver over for DWB ("Driving While Black"), the victim is presumed guilty by the cops and therefore not to be protected by the rights in place for the "innocent."

Democratic rights are among the most important tools we have to defend ourselves against the constant assaults by imperialism. They are not "technicalities." The predawn cop assault was not for the protection of the innocent child and his right to go home. It was to make clear that the most violent ruling class in history is still in full command of its powers and to provide justification for further attacks on democratic rights.
Robin Maisel
Los Angeles, California

An immigration case
Just a note to thank you for the points in last week's Militant editorial about the phrase "Miami mafia." I had already become uncomfortable with that one, and the editorial finished it off. It also eliminated the wishful thinking that this was not an immigration case. Of course, in a better world, this would not be an immigration case because Elián was not an immigrant. But in the wicked world we live in, this was an immigration case.

The Cuban government set a 24-hour period of no criticism of the U.S. government — basically a period of silence — in response to Elián's return to his father. But the truce on the petty-bourgeois left has now lasted two weeks with no end in sight. No silence there.
Fred Feldman
Newark, New Jersey

Superb editorial
I had waiting for me on an e-group's site a letter Karen Wald sent from Cuba denouncing the Militant's article on the erroneous call for "federal troops to Miami." In case you hadn't also seen the forwarded message, in which Wald offers encouragement and advice to Attorney General Reno on how to conduct a raid, I'm attaching it for your information. [See next letter.]

The Militant's articles and editorial on the raid, in defense of the Cuban revolution, and all related issues are superb. They should be seen as a source of appreciative study by all those who seek political clarity and the most effective way to stand up to the imperialist regime, defend the Cuban revolution, and advance the interests of the working class. Thank you.
Jon Hillson
Los Angeles, California

Arrest everyone, including reporters

April 13, 2000

Attorney General:

Our Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment." What you are doing to Juan Miguel and his family, and to Elián, is both cruel and unusual.

Over and over again, when you had the complete authority to go get that boy and return him to his father, you vacillated. Each delay has made things worse for everyone involved. You are letting that small group of Cuban-Americans who can see nothing but their hatred of Fidel Castro make a complete mockery of our laws and turn a little boy into a monster who may never be able to return to normal. You are keeping his father dangling from a rope as surely as though you had hung him from a tree.

"Usual" would have been to return Elián — in November; in December; in January, and every day of this week. There was nothing to stop you, as you well know. "Cruel" is what you have done and are doing to his family.

The solution is really simple. As a journalist I've seen it done on dozens of occasions in various cities and states around the country: Send in officers to clear away the crowd, declaring it an illegal gathering and giving them five minutes to disperse; arresting those who fail to obey the law. Including all the reporters and cameras. Remove everyone from a five block radius. Go into that house and arrest Lázaro González and all of those who have been openly defying the law. Then quietly remove that child and take him back to where he belongs.

It is what almost everyone in the U.S. expects of you as Attorney General. All it takes is the courage to enforce the law. Please— now.
Sincerely, Karen Lee Wald

Show more understanding
I think the Militant needs to show more understanding as to why many workers, especially Blacks and other oppressed minorities, as well as Cuba solidarity groups, would be confused and thereby celebrate Reno's INS raid of Lázaro González's home.

For years the right wing in the Cuban-American community has shown contempt for the democratic rights of anybody to discuss any issue concerning Cuba. Many have been subject to illegal and violent intimidation by Cuban counterrevolutionaries.

In these fights, we have to force the cops to defend our democratic rights. To those who don't take a moment to contemplate the implications for workers, Blacks, the undocumented immigrant workers, and solidarity activists, the situation can appear to be one of "bad guy versus bad guy." These things are not really based on thought or reason but on gut-level emotions that stem from anger and frustration.

There is something about the tone of the Militant's editorials that sounds like a condemnation of those who are confused by the capitalist media's anti-Cuban chauvinism. Even as I mentally understood the raid, for it was an attack on workers' rights, I myself couldn't help but feel elated at the humiliation of the gusano right wing. I knew that the police assault did not bode well for any of us. But your editorials had a tone of a broadside against your enemies, rather than a sensitive and understanding attempt to try and convince a friend.
Jeffrey Des Verney
by e-mail

http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6419/641917.html

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
May 22, 2000

Stalin admirer advocates 'Bomb Little Havana'
I would like to congratulate the Militant on your excellent coverage and editorial with regards to the INS raid on the González household in Miami.

I have been able to get out on sales teams with this issue of the Militant and have gotten a very interesting response. Overall, many workers I talked to appreciated the coverage, saying that their gut reaction was similar to the line of the Militant: there is something extremely unsettling about seeing the INS and federal marshals bust into someone's house and remove an individual before sunrise. Several Vieques activists also saw the connection between the two raids, and had a strong reaction against both.

One individual I spoke to, however, a fellow student at Hunter College, had a very different response. His opinion was that, not only was he glad to see the INS bust up "those gusanos'" house, the U.S. government should have gone further and dropped an atomic bomb on Little Havana. He also said that he considers himself a communist, though one who sympathizes more with Josef Stalin. We're doing another sales table at Hunter tomorrow.

Elena Tate
New York, New York
http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6420/642035.html

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In Cuba, they looked at this somewhat differently, of course:
"Victory is not complete in the case of Elian," warns Fidel

And through the years, that difference deepened...

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