You’d have to overcome opposition from American sugar growers. They’re very well organized and politically adept, as we learned in Florida a few years back when he had a referendum (defeated) on a small sugar tax to be used for Everglades restoration. And they don’t want to have to compete with Cuban imports.
This is a political argument, and I’ve already agreed that there is little political benefit to normalization.
Haven’t there been cases of this right here in the US-the estranged parent snatching up children and refusing them contact with the rightful custodial parent?
Yes, it happens quite frequently, and it is generally illegal for one parent to unilaterally deprive another parent of his rights regarding a child. It really boils down to what type of custodial arrangement has been agreed to by the parents or ordered by the court. I’m not really an expert on family law, so someone else will have to delve into the details.
When a child is kidnapped across international borders, the 1980 Hague Convention requires the destination country to return the kidnapped child under certain circumstances. I’m not an expert on international law in this area, so I don’t know if Elian’s case fell under the 1980 Hague Convention. America is a signatory, but I believe Cuba is not.
That’s unidigital.
Y’know, I think it’s telling that the USA doesn’t want any normalization with Cuba, even now. I think it’s partly a sort of incoherent grudge, partly the fear that we’d have to give up Gitmo, & partly contempt for the Latins.
Nuclear missles. They’re one way. Or sided. I forget which.
What do we need Gitmo for, anyway? We’re never gonna fight the Cubans from there. We’re never gonna fight anybody from there. If we do ever again have to apply military force in the Caribbean, we can just as easily launch our ships and planes from Florida.
You sound woefully ignorant of contentious custody issues, with this statement. Parents kidnap their own children all the time. If there’s a shared custody agreement and one parent takes the child out of the country, and often enough simply out of the state, they often have done so to thumb their nose at any requirement to share custody of their child.
A quick look at the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows these results for the search “father suspect mother.” A quick look at those results show that approximately half of the hits that come up are from one parent kidnapping the child.
Additionally, there are huge, and on-going, problems in the US with recovering children who have been spirited out of the country in violation of custody orders. Even with countries we have friendly relations with getting such a child returned can take years, simply because of the hoops that people have to jump through once two different country’s legal systems get involved, and have to be mediated through the applicable State departments.
Given that, again AIUI, the US official policy is that any kidnapped child must be returned before negotiations about changing custody arrangements can begin, I really never saw how there was any choice for the US to do anything but follow the same principle and return Elian to his father.
Feel free to believe that the US was wrong to return Elian to his father, if you must, but don’t tell me that parents can’t kidnap their children!
God knows I am Elian-ed out but I have to clarify that even back in Cuba no one claimed that Elian had been kidnapped. After all they came to the US to stay with the father’s family.
There are two things going on here. One is the generic claim that a parent cannot kidnap their own child. That is clearly a false statement.
Then there is the question of whether Elian’s mom committed a kidnapping. While I don’t know the answer to this either way, nothing you’ve posted clarifies that he wasn’t kidnapped. As far as I know, the mother left Cuba without the father’s knowledge. And how would you know that the mother intended to stay with the father’s family, since she died at sea?
OK, let me clarify the “kidnapping” thing. Whether the mother had the right to take Elian to Florida doesn’t matter much. When I talked about kidnapping I was talking about the Florida relatives who refused to return Elian to his father. The kid’s mother was dead, so he should go to his father unless there was some determination that his father was unfit. Just because he lived in Cuba doesn’t make him an unfit parent. The Miami relatives had no right to keep Elian away from his father. It wasn’t as if Elian were going to be killed, imprisoned, or singled out for mistreatment by the Castro regime if he went back to Cuba.
The story at the time, remember I heard this in Cuba I have no idea how it was reported here, was that Elizabeth and Elian left with the consent of the father, who notified his relatives in Miami that they were coming. When they failed to show up the relatives alerted the US authorities.
When Elian was recovered he was sent to stay with Juan’s relatives in Miami, who then called Juan and gave him the news. The whole time Elian was in Miami he stayed with Juan’s uncles since had no family in the US. Believe me, if there had been a hint of kidnapping we would have been shouting about it in Cuba, and that was never even mentioned.
I could not agree more, however if the story is as I heard it, which was that Juan was told about Elizabeth’s death by his uncles, and he told them to keep Ellian safe. It was only later, after the story was covered by the Cuban press that Juan came out publicly saying that he wanted Elian returned. I imagine that his relatives wanted to make sure his statements were not forced by the Cuban government.
In any case there were no winners in Elian’s story. A six year old boy saw his mother drown, then floated at sea for hours, and then was rescued only to be used as a dildo to screw both Fidel and the US. The poor kid now lives in Cuba and has to attend state events to show he is doing well, so he is still being used.
Well, since you appear to be Cuban, I guess I’ll defer to you. It would be better if there was a cite, since this contradicts what I’ve read.
I don’t know if a cite can be found, I’m sure articles at the time said contradictory things on this depending on the source. For instance in wikipedia it says:
“The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) released Elián to his paternal great uncle, Lázaro González. According to the Washington Post, Elián’s father Juan Miguel González-Quintana had telephoned Lázaro from Cuba on November 22, 1999, to advise that Elián and his mother had left Cuba without Juan-Miguel’s knowledge, and to watch for their arrival.[3]”
However when you follow the cite, it says only:
“We know that Juan Miguel Gonzalez called his relatives in Miami on November 22 to let them know that his son Elian was on his way to America; a Sprint phone bill confirms the collect call. Three days later, on Thanksgiving morning, Elian was rescued off the Fort Lauderdale coast by two fisherman. Elian’s Miami family arrives at the hospital, where his uncle Lazaro confirms the boy’s identity and calls Elian’s father with the happy news; Juan Miguel asks his uncle to take care of the boy.”
The trouble is that Elian’s father wasn’t in a position to speak candidly. Even if he would honestly prefer the kid to grow up in Miami, once it becomes an international incident he can’t say so openly without going on a list.