Elian (part 2)

I am posting a response to the execrable Leonard Pitts and his racist and insulting column written about Cuban Americans, as well as a piece I wrote (above) when Elian was flown from Miami.

Mr. Pitts:

Usually I read your column with the bemused detachment of one who is reading the "party line" he has read over and over again, ad nauseum. Today, however, your column in The Miami Herald ("Elian saga on a course for collision," March 30, 2000) so angered me that I had to respond directly to you.

How dare you compare the Cuban-Americans in Miami protesting the Federal government over Elian to Gov. Orval Faubus, that intolerant racist in Arkansas over 40 years ago, simply because he defied the Federal government as well? Are you such an advocate of "the state above all" that you cannot abide our protests and civil disobedience over the freedom of a six-year old? Are you such an elitist that you believe that the people should not dare express their dissent against injustice, regardless of the source?

You, and the rest of the so-called "free" press, insist on focusing a bright light on what happens in Miami and not on what happens in Havana. I have never read your "criticisms" of Castro's communist regime expressed as ferociously as your criticisms of us for protesting the Federal government and Fidel Castro. And, as an added bonus, you have the gall to compare us to Jim Crow racists!

With your indiscriminate brush you painted the Cuban-American community as comparable to the vilest racists: your race-baiting is reprehensible. You owe us an apology for this slander. You also restated an "opinion" that we are "intolerant of dissent" and that we "use violence and coercion as means of cowing disagreement." This is a pretty broad and inaccurate generalization you added to make your point. The organizers of the Elian protests have always called for non-violent protests and civil disobedience, if necessary. It is the right of every American to disagree with laws that are unjust and to protest those laws, if necessary -- short of violence.

Castro's Cuba is hardly the place where the very values you allegedly cherish would be taught to Elian. We do not want Elian to be sent back to Communism; we do not want to traumatize him any further. We want him to grow up free and loved and fed and cared for; we want him to learn how great freedom is. We want to him to know that the death of his mother was not in vain; we want to him to honor his mother’s memory by enjoying his new-found freedom; we want him to make the best of the opportunities he now has that she gave her life for. We want him to love the U.S. for what it truly is and not for what it has become. We want what is best for this child.

Simply stated, this is a fight for what is right.

Mr. Pitts, we have the rights we have today because many, many people did the very thing you criticize us for doing. You should turn that bright light you have shined on us with such maliciousness and mendacity and shine it on yourself and your hypocrisy.

Sincerely,

George L. Moneo
Miami, Florida

(This letter may be be published in its entirety without editorial changes and with attribution.)

The letter was never published. His original column can be found here: Leonard Pitts, "Elian saga on a course for collision," The Miami Herald, March 30, 2000, Page 1E.

Posted by George Moneo at April 22, 2005 08:51 AM

Comments

Posted by: A.M. Mora y Leon at April 23, 2005 11:45 PM