Send Elian back to Cuba and get over it

OK, fellow media types, enough of the Elian Gonzales circus already. Let the boy's father take him back to Cuba and go find another crusade.

Heaven knows there are lots and lots of crusades to be had. Why there are even some in Miami, where all of your television trucks and talking heads are camped today.

Pick up a copy of the Miami Herald and you'll find at least a dozen noble causes that would make for wonderful footage for the 6 O'clock news. Go talk to the prosecutor who let the guy out of jail after he admitted impregnating his girlfriend's 13-year-old daughter. Or go talk to the parents of a 10-year-old girl who was missing and later found hanging out with her 17-year-old cousin and her drug-dealer boyfriend. Maybe you can convince the courts to send the girl's parents to Cuba with Elian and his father until they can learn to keep better tabs on their daughter.

Considering how our courts have historically treated custody battles in this country, the Elian Gonzales case is open and shut. The boy's mother kidnapped him and took him on a very dangerous voyage. One that cost her life and nearly cost his.

That might be considered child endangerment in this country.

The boy is plucked from the ocean and handed over to relatives in Miami, who have determined that the fact that the boy has a father in Cuba, where the boy was kidnapped from, is inconsequential.

If not for the fact that the cameras have been rolling for the last five months, the boy would have been shipped back to Cuba within a week and there would still be a dozen or so lawyers looking for their 15 minutes of glory.

How many children in this country don't belong with their parents? I remember not too long ago reading about a crack addict whose child was returned to her by the courts and within a couple of weeks the child was murdered. Somewhere in that story I recall reading that, "whenever possible we always try to keep the child with his natural parents."

If Elian were from any other country he would have been returned long ago.

How many children are rounded up each day by the INS and trucked back to Mexico? I have a Mexican friend who is a U.S. citizen fighting to get his stepson returned. The boy traveled to Mexico with his mother and has been trapped in a paperwork nightmare ever since, unable to return to the U.S. to join his father until a citizenship issue is resolved.

As a matter of fact, how many fathers in this country are fighting for custody of their children? There seems to be an unwritten law that children are somehow better off with Mom than with Dad.

The federal courts have been asked to grant Elian political asylum. They must be arguing that communism is bad for 6-year-olds. It deprives them of Cartoon Network and Pokemon trading cards. And that Cuba would subject him to a lifetime of cigars, salsa music and giant posters of Fidel.

Never mind that Cuba is actually going to be bursting with American tourists again as soon as Castro takes his final puff. Heck, it's already happening by way of Canada.

The Bay of Pigs fiasco, an aborted invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained exiles, was 39 years old Monday. It was a dumb idea in the first place, but many Cuban-Americans are still bitter.

"We were betrayed by the government, by Kennedy, and if they turned the child back over it will be a second betrayal," one protester told an Associated Press reporter Monday.

Get over it. If anyone has a legitimate gripe in that area it's Meyer Lansky, who left millions on the craps tables in Havana when Fidel rolled into town. At least I think it was Lansky. Maybe it was Marlon Brando, Al Pacino or his brother Fredo.

Proponents of keeping Elian in Miami, where cocaine cowboys rule the night, argue that the boy prefers to stay. They even offered up a video tape of the boy shouting that message to his father.

Hey, give my son enough toys and candy and he'll milk it for as long as he can. "No, daddy! I don't want to go back to Carson City. I want to stay here in Miami with the toys, candy and thonged bikinis!"

At least until he wakes up with a tummy ache. Then he'll want his dad.

In the end, if Elian doesn't go back to Cuba there are probably lots of kids in Miami who would gladly volunteer to go in his place. Even a Cuba with Fidel is better than a crack-infested shack on the wrong side of town.

Jeff Ackerman is publisher and editor of the Nevada Appeal.