By Muriel Sluyter

Greetings, Gentle Reader:

We crawled out of bed Saturday morning to be greeted with the news that Elian Gonzalez had been taken from his Miami home by a Swat team, in riot garb, at gunpoint. We were stunned. We knew this thing had become a mess, exemplifying the usual lack of leadership and management skills exhibited by the Clinton-Reno team, with Waco as the prime example, but we didn’t expect this.

We soon learned that the media had all received letters from Greg Craig, Clinton’s pet lawyer, requesting that they not show pictures or report events, when Elian would be taken from his Miami relatives. The letters didn’t say "if," they said "when." They were dated April 20. The child wasn’t taken until April 22, but the plans were in place by April 20.

His relative’s lawyers and neutral negotiators were working in what they assumed was good faith, right up to the moment the battering ram smashed the family’s door. They say they had not "changed the goal posts," as Reno charged, when she justified this outrage.

When the child was fished from the ocean, the INS sent his guardianship question to family court. Then Castro got in the middle of it, threatening Clinton with a flotilla of refugees and criminals from his prisons, if Elian were not returned to Cuba, according to Richard Nuccio, an agent who was in the middle of it. Clinton promptly tossed the case to the INS.

When Clinton was a first-term governor of Arkansas, the Marialistas, the criminals, political prisoners and psychopaths sent to our shores during Carter’s presidency cost him the next election, because he let Carter send some to Arkansas. Arkansans were enraged, and Clinton’s opponent rode that rage to victory. Clinton never forgot that, and had no intention of permitting Elian’s plight to harm him or Gore politically. He knew Castro would act on his threat, and he behaved as any other person of his type would; he threw the little boy to the wolves — wolves in riot gear.

Many Americans think the child should be with his father, but when they get to Cuba, the father will not be permitted to raise him. Every person who has grown up in Cuba and escaped says that is how it is in Cuba. Even Castro’s daughter, who escaped and lives in Europe, says the child will be taken from his father and spend years in indoctrination and labor camps.

From the time Castro seized power in Cuba, he transported vast number of children to Russia for indoctrination. The Soviet Union was his nursing mother, as it were, supporting him financially, militarily and politically. Militant communism came from Russia to Cuba, and was exported from there to other South American and Caribbean nations. Some of them accepted it; others such as Chile managed to overthrow it.

Even though the Soviet Union is gone — sort of — the communist revolution is alive and well in Latin American countries, and they receive constant support from their American and European comrades, who, primarily, are recruited from college campuses.

This child got in the way of powerful people, with equally powerful political ambitions, and is paying the price. The court had given custody to his great-uncle Lazaro, but court orders don’t matter when there is this much at stake.