Return the Kidnapped
Cuban Boy!
Millions of people throughout the world are demanding that
Elián González, the six-year-old Cuban child kidnapped in Miami,
be returned to his father in Cuba.
Here in Britain, an emergency picket of the US Embassy,
Grosvenor Square, is taking place on Saturday, January 29, at 2.00 pm, to call
for the boy’s immediate return and ensure that justice is done.
Elián González was taken out of Cuba by his
mother without the permission of the child’s father. The mother paid some
people who traffic in human beings illegally leaving Cuba. She and all but two
adults subsequently died in the dangerous voyage across the Florida Straits and
the child miraculously survived. Instead of returning the child to Cuba and his
father, the child has become a pawn in the hands of the Cuban-American mafia.
President Castro described it as a "flagrant crime of kidnapping by the US
authorities". Millions of people in Cuba and throughout the world have
demonstrated and are concerned that the boy should be returned to his homeland.
Our Party, RCPB(ML), vigorously supports this campaign. The continued detention
of Elián González is a dangerous precedent whereby children can
be used as political pawns in the attempt by the US to subjugate and destroy an
entire people and their state.
The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspect of International
Child Abduction (October 25, 1980) established the legal rights and procedures
for the prompt return of children who have been wrongfully removed from one
country to another, or retained in one country. Many other international
conventions as well as bilateral migratory accords between Cuba and the United
States have been violated by the child’s abduction by the US. Besides
anything else, the virulent anti-Cuba stance of the United States leads it to
traffic in human beings, thereby completely discrediting all its actions which
are said to defend the highest ideals.
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has stated that he does not
feel the matter is for his concern and that "I will not run my neck into
that noose". This is coming from a person who everybody knows staked his
claim to an "ethical dimension" in the British government’s
foreign policy, while justice demands that Elián should be returned
immediately and the US condemned for using the child for political purposes.
WDIE calls on the working class and people to join
with the efforts of the people of Cuba and the peoples everywhere to make sure
that the kidnapping of children is not used to compel an entire people to
surrender, does not succeed as a diabolical weapon along with the barbaric
economic, trade and financial blockade in denying a people the right to build
the socialist system of their choice.
There must be no more pretexts for delaying the return of
Elián González and further harming his emotional and mental
health. Not to return the child immediately is to make a mockery of the law and
is completely inhuman and only serves to further expose the case as kidnapping
for political ends.
Elián Must Be Returned!
