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Originally posted by GePap
If the father wanted the child back, most certainly, since child custody is a matter of the law. So in the end, economic situations have little to do with it. The very fact that people fought to keep elian had much to do with politics, NOT sentiment.
If the father wanted the child back, most certainly, since child custody is a matter of the law. So in the end, economic situations have little to do with it. The very fact that people fought to keep elian had much to do with politics, NOT sentiment.
I would respectfully say that for the Cuban community in Miami politics and sentiment were (and are) inseperable. Their concern for Elian, a child, was inseperable from their view of Cuba, a country with which they were intimately involved, so that glib (if valid) comparisons to China did not move them. Given that they did so care, and were fighting to keep Elian, the rest of us had to react to that. That some chose to react with sympathy to the Miami family is not necessarily more political than that some chose to sympathize with the boys father (assuming that was really what he wanted) though the law may have been on the side of the latter.
To the cuban community in Miami, and to many of the rest of us, the notion that the father was acting under duress from the Cuban govt was not at all fantastic, and i dont know that its disproven to this day. Its hard to imagine a comparable situation wrt to Mexico or Brazil. It is very much possible to imagine such a situation wrt China - an extended family taking a child in, a father possibly under duress asking for custody - but geography militates against a similar situation wrt to China.
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