Uh, Cuba Holds Routine Elections

 

      It happens that Cuba's latest nationwide election evokes vivid memories in the U. S. media of this historic photo that flashed around the world on April 22nd of 2000. The graphic photo shows the 6-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez being rescued from a Miami closet by a heavily-armed U. S. Marshall so the terrified little boy could return to Cuba with his father.

     Some 23 years after 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez left that Miami closet and returned to Cuba, today -- March 28th-2023 -- the U. S. media is awash with Cuban headlines about Elian Gonzalez being elected to the Cuban parliament in the island's latest national elections. Note that today's CNN headline loudly wonders: "What Elian Gonzalez wants for Cuba?" It also seems to wonder Why Elian hasn't fled back to Little Havana in Miami where his memories of that closet remind him of how wonderful Little Havana Cubans treated him?

  To answer CNN, it appears that the adult Elian Gonzalez wants Little Havana in Miami to allow the U. S. government to permit Cubans in Cuba like him to rule Cuba...not Cubans in Miami!!!

      In fact, as you see above, Elian Gonzalez spoke directly to CNN and said he wants this: "That our governments reach an understanding and remove all the barriers between us. Our country doesn't have any sanctions on the United States."

     In the second paragraph above, CNN was honest enough to say: "Gonzalez spoke with CNN after going to vote on Sunday with his wife and their two-year-old daugher in Cardenas, which, like many small cities in Cuba, has been ravaged by economic calamity; harsher US sanctions, the sluggish pace of reforms by the communist-run government, a pandemic that scared off tourists and inflation that has made state salaries nearly worthless."

      And in the third paragraph above, CNN was honest enough to allow Elian Gonzalez to say: "Having a daughter, Gonzalez said, gave him a new perspective on the decisions his own father Juan Manuel made when in 1999 Elian's mother drowned after attempting...to take the dangerous journey by boat across the Florida Straits. It's helped me to understand my father. It's made me more sensitive. It's helped me understand how all the Cubans feel who are separated from their families, and fathers who aren't able to give all the attention and things their children want."

     The two above photos show Elian Gonzalez and his childhood sweetheart that became his wife in Revolutionary Cuba. Their little baby girl shown above is the event that, as Elian told CNN, that reminded him anew how correct his father and Fidel Castro and the U. S. government were when they fought so hard to rescue him from that Little Havana closet in Miami way back on April 22nd, 2000. The CNN report today about Elian getting elected to the Cuban parliament is, actually, one of the rare examples of the U. S. media reporting fairly about a major U. S. event, not just propaganizing about how wonderful the Batista-Mafia-US rule of Cuba was in the 1950s and how terrible the Cuban Revolution's rule of Cuba has been since 1959.

    But, folks, the above article via CNN this last week in March of 2023, amazingly, is perhaps the most honest journalism that the mainstream U. S. media has produced about U.S.-Cuban  Relations since 1959. Normally since 1959 all such perspectives reflect only the opinions of Counter Revolutionary Cubans in Miami. But in this aforementioned article, CNN actually included the opinions of a prominent Cuban in Cuba, the 29-year-old politician named Elian Gonzalez. So Americans know, for example, that Elian actually believes that Cubans in Havana, not Cubans in Miami's Little Havana, should rule Cuba.

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