Popi

By
Rodolfo Acuņa

In an 1969 film, Alan Arkin played a Puerto Rican single parent with two boys, living in Spanish Harlem. Working three jobs just to survive he felt the boys slipping into what he terms a cesspool. Desperate for a solution to his plight, he notices that the U.S. gives Cubans who escape the island exceptional benefits and treat them royally. He concocts a scheme in which he takes his sons to Miami and sends them out to sea, hoping that they will get picked up by a friendly boat within a day. His plan is that rich Anglos will adopt his sons.

Abraham begins to worry when after a day he hears no word of the boys. He haunts the local bars, listening to television news programs. Finally, consumed by the guilt that he had forced the boys to go to sea, he tries to drown himself, only to hear that the coast guard had rescued them. The authorities had taken them to a local hospital, badly dehydrated and in critical condition. The Miami Cuban community goes wild, hailing them as heroes, and gifts and offers of adoption rolled in. The boys were unconscious, and doctors did not know if they would come out of the coma.

Now Abraham, fearing that the boys would die, and afraid that if they awoke, they would reveal his plot, he goes through a series of antics to get to see the boys at the hospital. When they awake, the younger boy tells the greeters that he hates his father, because he had told them that drowning at sea was better than dying in the sewer. Believing that the father was referring to Cuba and not the sewer of New York, a lady tells him that he should love his father because he wanted to save him and that he was a great man. In the end, the boys see Abraham and consumed with love for their father, they chase him and this gives him away. A Cuban official tells him that the boys want him and not the rich life he wants for them, and that because of this, his plan would not work. They all return to New York.

For those following the circus in Miami surrounding Elian Gonzalez, the parallels with Popi should hit close to home. Bonds exist between a father and a son that all the rationalization and bribery will not loosen. Despite all of the brainwashing evident in the treatment of Elian, ultimately he will bare the hurt of the rupturing of those bonds. Once the notoriety surrounding him has ceased and he becomes an ordinary young boy, his commercial value to relatives who had never met him until his tragic experience, his memories of his father will increase. He will no longer be showered with gifts, taken to Disney World on demand, and he will be just plain Elian.

The irony of Elian's case does not escape many Mexican Americans, other Latinos and even Black Americans. Identifying with Abraham is not difficult for them, and they recognize the preferential treatment of Cuban entering the country without documents. Literally thousands of Haitians, Mexicans and other Latinos are unceremoniously deported weekly, many of them returned to economic circumstances much worse than those of Elian.

When I visited Cuba this past July, I could not help but see the contrasts between it and my ancestral home of Mexico. Cuba is a poor country, kept that way by a cruel U.S. policy that panders to political fanatics who yearn for yesteryear and dream of returning to the island to mismanage it once again. No doubt that the economic boycott has hurt many young boys such as Elian, who appears to have been one of the more fortunate there. However, the fact is that I did not see the extremes that I saw in Mexico where poor native Americans beg and sleep in the streets of Mexico City. The truth be told, some Mexicans live in luxury, vacationing frequently in Cancun and Acapulco, paying $200 a day for a hotel room, while their compatriots earn a minimum wage of $3.50 a day.

I saw first hand that Cuba had a lower infant mortality than the United States. Cuba has one medical doctor for every 250 Cubans with universal health care. Its literacy rate is higher than the U.S. with students graduating from elementary school actually knowing how to read. Although poor with its automobiles relics from the 1950s, I could walk the streets of Habana at 4 in the morning and not get mugged.

Here in the land of the free we only have one Latino medical doctor for every 22,000 Latinos. Getting into medical school has become problematic and difficult to be admitted unless one's father is a medical doctor, or one has the funds to buy admission into a domestic or foreign medical school. The United States boasts of a low level of illiteracy, yet educators know that functional illiteracy is much higher. We also see the extremes. There is a marked difference between the quality of minority schools and those in white neighborhoods. In white schools in some suburban areas of Los Angeles 83 percent of the teachers are credentialed while less than 50 percent of the teachers in the inner city have credentials. Moreover, health care in this compassionate society that takes the propaganda of Cuban American expatriates seriously, is by law in California, withheld from those without papers.

Other ironies are that, while the Cuban American community laments the fate of Elian if he should returned to Cuba, Latino and African American first graders in California have a better chance of going to prison than being eligible for the University of California system. Even then, if one is a woman of any nationality, are you as safe alone in any neighborhood, whether rich or poor, as one would be in the streets of Habana? Frankly women are not even safe on college campuses in the evening where rapists have found a haven.

Most sociologists say that one predictor of future success is the relationship between father and son. Even agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service concede that the relationship between Juan, Elian's father, and Elian is positive, and that Juan has a stable job and home in Cuba. There is no credible evidence that Elian suffered in Cuba. Still, the Miami cabal wants to sever Elian from Juan based on their hatred of Fidel Castro. They maintain that a paternal great uncle who did not know Elian nor his mother before last November has more rights to Elian than his father or grandparents. This is not rational, this is not right.

What is so disturbing is that in this circus atmosphere the so-called free press has not looked into the background of Elian's Miami family (stretching the definition of family). What gives them the right to have a superior right to the custody of Elian than the father? Are they so much better educated? Do they have the resources to send Elian to college? If they loved Elian so much, why would they parade him, wrapped in an American flag?

Hopefully, the cable stations will screen the film "Popi," so it can remind us of the plight of the Abrahams of this country. Perhaps then more people will appreciate the hypocrisy of politicos who weep for family values while keeping a child from his father. Meanwhile, the Miami circus will continue.