By Gilberto Firmat
ATLANTA — A Federal Court ruling on Elian Gonzalez's case was put off on February 22 until at least March 6 after the Judge William Hoeveler was hospitalised with a stroke. Another judge has been assigned the case.
The February 22 hearing in Miami had become the focal point in the battle for the repatriation of the six-year-old, found adrift near Florida on November 25. Right-wing Cuban emigre groups have been waging an all-out battle to stop the child from being reunited with his father, who lives in Cuba.
The US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) formally ruled in early January that the boy should go back to his father, but the Clinton administration has not lifted a finger to apply this decision.
In the days before the hearing there was a sharp escalation of anti-Cuba propaganda and provocations. The most important was the arrest on February 17 of Mariano Faget, a supervisor at the Miami office of the INS. The FBI and INS depicted Faget as a long-time operative of the Cuban intelligence services. The day after, the State Department announced that they had asked Cuba to withdraw a Cuban diplomat linked to Faget.
The case rocked Miami because Faget is a 34-year veteran of the INS and the son of a notorious henchman of former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The press was full of lurid speculation about "defectors" Faget may have "betrayed" over the years.
Spying claim
The FBI claims that Faget was put under surveillance after making an "unauthorised" phone call to Cuba's diplomatic mission in Washington. He was subsequently seen, at least twice, meeting with Cuban diplomats, and was in frequent contact with a Cuban businessman in New York who the government hasn't publicly identified or charged but who was described as Faget's superior in the espionage ring.
On February 11, the head of the FBI and INS in Miami met with Faget to ask him to prepare a political asylum request for a Cuban defector. According to the FBI, minutes later Faget called the New York businessman and gave him a cryptic message about the defection, which he fleshed out hours later in a phone call from his home.
In a nationally televised news conference, the FBI was very sketchy with details. The timing of the news conference — the last working day before the scheduled Elian court hearing — was said to be a coincidence.
The details the FBI did not mention turn out to be very significant. The New York businessman may be a spy, but he was something else to Faget. Pedro Font is a life-long friend of Faget. The two had chartered a Florida corporation several years back for the express purpose of conducting trade with Cuba. Faget was scheduled to retire in about a month and join his partner's various business ventures.
The alleged Cuban "defector" was none other than one of the Cuban diplomats Faget had met with, and with whom Font was scheduled to have lunch the next day.
If Faget were an intelligence operative, he had to assume that, if the defection story was true, he'd be exposed any minute. If the defection story was a fabrication, however, it meant it was a sting and that the US was on to him. Either way, he had to make a run for it.
But what did Faget do? He went home for a relaxing weekend and then back to work on the Monday.
As well, one would have to assume that the Cuban intelligence services were brain-dead for them not to realise that they had to pull Faget out immediately. Yet they did not.
The FBI, it seems, also missed the significance of presenting Faget with a story about his own spy master being a double agent. They did not arrest Faget until six days later; a real spy would have been long gone.
The detailed allegations presented by the government suggest a much more straightforward explanation. Faget and Font were planning business deals in relation to Cuba. Upon being told that their contact with the Cuban authorities was a US agent, Faget urgently contacted his partner, who was meeting the Cuban diplomat the next day.
The main charge against Faget is passing classified information (the news about the defection) to someone not authorised to receive it (Font). The accusation is clearly a frame-up, for Faget did not pass on classified information, but phony information. The real secret was that the defection was bogus. Notably absent are espionage and conspiracy charges.
Cuba has reacted with outrage at the accusation. In a move veteran reporters are calling unprecedented, the Cuban government has announced that it will urge the diplomat to remain in the US to testify about the truth of the matter, whatever the consequences.
The February 22 Granma defiantly challenged Washington to charge the diplomat: "We reiterate to the US government, that instead of expelling an official of our interests section, it should accept debating the issue before a US federal court".
Cuba denounced the entire affair as a fabrication by the right-wing Cuban emigre groups and their associates within the US government to torpedo Elian's repatriation by placing a cloud of McCarthyite innuendo over the US immigration service. And 250,000 residents of Havana held a "March of the Fighting People" on February 21 in front of the US diplomatic mission in Havana to denounce the accusations and demand Elian's return.
Nun recants
The second major propaganda attack blew up in the face of its perpetrators without any direct help from Cuba.
On February 20, the Miami Herald front page story was about the damning accusations made by Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, the supposedly impartial hostess of the reunion between Elian and his grandmothers several weeks ago, about the grandmothers' visit.
The morning after the reunion, O'Laughlin, head of the Catholic Barry University in Miami, had "abruptly" changed sides and come out against Elian being reunited with his father. In the Herald article, O'Laughlin admitted that she had lied about why she'd had a change of heart. Originally, the nun had said she was influenced by seeing how Elian had bonded with his 21-year-old second cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, and by what she claimed was an aura of fear surrounding the grandmothers, which she intuited was caused by Fidel Castro 200 miles away in Cuba, not the right-wing extremists who were all around and at the meeting site between Elian and his grandmothers.
Now she claimed that the real reason for her about-face was that one of the grandmothers had told her in a brief, private conversation that she wanted to defect, that Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, had been an abusive husband and that the father's family had known about the mother's plan to take the boy and even notified the Miami great uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, who now has the boy, 10 days before the trip.
O'Laughlin also said that her religious superiors gave her a green light to speak out in favour of Elian's retention in the US.
O'Laughlin said that she decided to come clean about her real reasons only after speaking with lawyers trying to prevent Elian's repatriation.
The Herald's reporter seemed skeptical about the account. After all, Lazaro Gonzalez's family had never claimed to have known about the trip in advance, neither of Elian's grandmothers spoke one word of English and O'Laughlin was not known for speaking Spanish. (The 70-year-old told the Herald that she'd had four years of Spanish in college and understood "the gist" of what was said to her in that language.)
Then, on the same day that the Herald was printed, O'Laughlin, in a statement released through Barry University's spokesperson, claimed that the Herald had misrepresented her. She admitted that she never met with the grandmothers and attributed to unnamed, "trusted" sources the information she previously had attributed to the grandmother. O'Laughlin, who until now had seemed eager for the media spotlight, refused to speak to reporters.
The Herald issued a terse statement standing by its story. Journalists in Miami say that O'Laughlin recanted following a request from the authorities that she provide a sworn version of the account the Herald had printed.
Thus, what was meant to have been a devastating blow to the credibility of Elian's family in Cuba turned into another black eye for the Miami side.
The US media have been openly speculating in recent days that people in Cuba are "tired" of the campaign to save Elian and are becoming demoralised. Cuba responded with a renewed commitment to the fight, and a new slogan: "We'll see who gets tired first. We'll see who can resist longer."