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Taking a chance on love
Suddenly, we would be allowed to adopt a baby -- if we could accept the very real possibility that, one day, he would be mentally ill.
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[11/29/99]

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[11/29/99]

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So it is in the sad and twisted drama unfolding over the fate of a 5-year-old Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez, caught in the middle of a custody dispute between his father, who lives in Cuba, and a circle of relatives and newfound friends in Miami. Everyone involved is certain they know what it best for him.

Elian was rescued off the coast of South Florida on Thanksgiving Day. He had somehow survived for two days drifting in an inner tube in the Atlantic Ocean after the motorboat that carried him, his mother, his stepfather and 10 other people capsized on the journey from Cuba.

In the week since his arrival Elian has been showered with gifts and affection. He has also become a pawn in the interminable battle between the Cuban government and those in the United States who long to see the end of Fidel Castro.

The child, like the two other survivors, is eligible for political asylum in the United States. Elian's lawyer, Spencer Eig, has announced that he wants the child to remain here, presumably to be reared by the relatives with whom he has been staying in Miami. Elian's cause -- or rather the cause as defined by his lawyer -- has been taken up by Cuban American National Foundation, which has turned him -- literally -- into a poster child for the anti-Castro movement; the group has already printed 4,000 posters with a picture of Elian and a caption reading "Another Child Victim of Fidel Castro."

Elian's father, however, wants him back. Juan Miguel Gonzalez says that Elian's mother, from whom he was divorced, "kidnapped" the child. He fears that all the gifts heaped upon his son have somehow "brainwashed" him. Not surprisingly, he has been joined by the Cuban government, which has petitioned American representatives in Havana for the child's return. Eig, Elian's relatives and their supporters insist they will not let him go.

Elian, his relatives say, is happy. They do not doubt that his father -- a doorman at a tourist hotel, who is from their side of the family -- loves him. But, as one of them put it, "the only thing he could offer him would be love. We would offer him the same, as well [as] a future, a better lifestyle, an education."

Clearly, the involvement of two unfriendly governments, as well as a powerful lobbying group, has twisted the case so that what should be a question of the best interests of this child has been transformed to a debate about immigration policy and Castro's Cuba.

Freed from this geopolitical twist, the fracas is relatively, sadly, uncomplicated. Juan Miguel Gonzalez and his son are caught in the middle of a drama that is played out with numbing familiarity when parents seek to reclaim children who become the wards of the state.

Were Elian an American child who lost his mother and stepfather in, say, a bus accident on the road between Pensacola and Tallahassee, he likely would have been returned to his father without hesitation.

That is because, in the United States, the law sides with biological parents when others (be they foster parents, grandparents or other "psychological parents") seek custody of their children. Biological bonds trump all others, except when a parent has, in the eyes of the law, failed a child. Then things get messy.

And parents do fail their children, sometimes in horrific ways. Over the years, I have sat in various family courts and watched as parents whose children have been taken by the state try to get their children back. It is a demeaning spectacle. And while I in no way condone the behavior of parents who abandon, abuse and neglect their children, I have been struck time and again by the naivete and foolishness of the state's challenge to them: Prove you are worthy of your child, and if you can't, you will lose him forever.

Child welfare has always been about social engineering. The state attempts to make sure that the children of parents it disapproves of do not become people like their parents. Not that child welfare officials would ever admit to it. Nor would they admit to the enduring and crippling flaw in the way they see their mission, believing that the state can and must "save" a child from a parent, that it can take a child from a failed parent, place that child in a new home with substitute parents and thereby create a new life in which the past is made to disappear.

Next page | "Who does Elian see as the adult in his life?"