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“STATE DEPARTMENT HAS CERTIFIED CUBA AS CHILD-ABUSER” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H1723 on April 4, 2000.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
STATE DEPARTMENT HAS CERTIFIED CUBA AS CHILD-ABUSER
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I would like to refer to an article that was in Human Events on February 18 of this year entitled
``State Department has Certified Cuba as a Child-abuser'' country. And the article reads as follows, ``the Clinton State Department's most recent annual human rights report describes Fidel Castro's Cuba as a vicious police state where children in particular are targeted for abuse by the government, but that, apparently, means nothing to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, an agency of Attorney General Janet Reno's Justice Department, which remains determined to deny even an initial political asylum hearing to a 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who arrived in Florida on Thanksgiving Day clinging desperately to an inner tube.
An INS spokesman told Human Events last week that the agency will not alter its position because of information in the State Department report. The INS has determined, said spokesman Maria Cardona, that the true will of the boy's father is that he be returned. Is it impossible, she asked rhetorically, that a little boy could grow up in a loving family in Cuba?
President Castro exercises control over all aspects of Cuban life through the Communist Party and the state security apparatus says the State Department report published in February 1999. A new report is due out in a few weeks.
Castro says the report uses agents of the Ministry of the Interior to investigate and suppress all public dissent. The agents recruit informers throughout Cuban society to create a pervasive system of vigilance. Jailed dissidents face a prison system designed to terrorize. Prison guards and state security officials says the State Department also subjected activists to threats of physical violence, systematic psychological intimidation and with detention or imprisonment in cells with common and violent criminals, aggressive homosexuals or state security agents posing as prisoners.
The report also cites widespread tuberculosis, hepatitis, parasitic infections and malnutrition in Castro's prisons. Prison officials, it says, regularly confiscate food or medicine brought to political prisoners by their relatives.
Short of imprisonment, Cuban dissidents are frequently targeted for systematic harassment campaigns or acts of repudiation. Castro routinely conscripts children, get this, conscripts children to participate in these campaigns in which neighbors, fellow workers and members of state-controlled organizations are corralled in front of a target's house. Once in place, they are coached to yell obscenities, damage property, and even physically attack the target.
In 1998, for example, Castro targeted the family of a journalist whom he ordered arrested for allegedly insulting him. Communist Party leaders and government officials conscripted local workers and grade school students and high school students to rally in front of the family's home and shout obscenities at the occupants before plainclothes security agents bashed down the door and beat family members.
Cuban youths are also forced to provide labor to the state. The government employs forced labor, including that by children reports the State Department.
All students over age 11 are expected to devote 30 to 45 hours of their summer vacation to farm work, laboring up to 8 hours per day.
These are among the reasons that the U.S. Cuban Reconstruction Act has held that Cuban refugees reaching U.S. soil should presumptively be considered political refugees who face a ``well-founded fear of persecution'' back in Cuba.
Janet Reno has short-circuited this law by claiming that only Elian's father has the standing to apply for asylum on Elian's behalf in the United States. If the State Department is right, of course, for Elian's father to apply could lead, at a minimum, to an ``act of repudiation'' in front of his home.
If returned to Cuba as Janet Reno wishes, Elian also would have to repudiate his mother, who in her own eloquent act of repudiating Castro gave her life to bring her son to freedom.
These are things I think the American people ought to think about before they make judgment about whether or not this boy should be sent back to a Communist prison in Cuba.
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