Send Elian Home Say Cuba's Evangelicals
Church leaders who don't usually agree with Castro or the Cuban Council of Churches say family comes first.
By Mackie Landers in Havana | posted 4/01/2000 12:00AM
Cuban government censors filter details of the Elián González case broadcast on the island, but when Leoncio Veguilla visited the United States last month, he couldn't escape the news. Now Veguilla, president of the Western Baptist Convention of Cuba, has heard all the stories, rumors, and reports:
- That Elián's father was an unfit parent who had abused his ex-wife, Elián's mother, who perished off Miami's coast before fishermen plucked their child from shark-infested waters.
- That Elián's grandmothers told a Miami nun, who now wants Elián to stay, of their desires to defect to the United States.
- That the same grandmothers had behaved in a sexually inappropriate manner with the boy during their visit with him.
- That Elián's father knew his wife was planning to flee Cuba with the child and gave his blessing because deep down he truly wants his son to live in the United States.
So knowing now what he couldn't hear in Cuba, what does Veguilla believe should be the fate of this child?
"The boy should come back to Cuba."
Veguilla's opinion stands in stark contrast to opinions in Miami, where polls show that three-quarters of the city's Cuban-American residents believe the boy should stay. Just 90 miles across the Florida Strait, however, interviews with Havana pastors and national church leaders reveal that most evangelicals share Veguilla's opinion.
But don't the details censored from Cuban media shed important new light on the child's case? Not according to Veguilla, father of three and grandfather of six.
"There's no proof of any of these accusations," Veguilla says in the perfect freedom of his son's home in Miami, where no government censors monitor phone calls for counterrevolutionary speech. "In reality, there's not much foundation [to the accusations]. It's very important, this matter of proof.
"As a pastor, grandfather, and father, I'd want my children and grandchildren to be where I am."
What has shocked Veguilla most on his visit to Miami was not the revelation of details withheld from the Cuban public but the reaction of the Cuban-American community to the case. "I believed I was going to find opinion here as I did in Cuba, but it's very different," he says. "Here, there's no Cuban passion. It's a tremendous tangle."
Veguilla himself is no Castro cheerleader. In 1965 he began serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence for alleged ties to the CIA. In 1994, secret police arrested his son, Eliezer, and accused him of the same ties. Police ordered Eliezer Veguilla to confess or he would face a live bear he could see through a screen in his roach-infested cell. Later, state agents placed him before a firing squad for a mock execution. He was released and left Cuba in 1995 to live in the United States.
Veguilla's denomination is not a member of the Cuban Council of Churches, the progovernment counterpart to the U.S. National Council of Churches, which has lobbied for the United States to return Elián to his relatives in Cuba. Nor are the denominations represented by other pastors who spoke with Christianity Today.
What about the National Council of Churches' role in trying to reunite Elián with his father? Veguilla describes the NCC as left-leaning and supportive of liberation theology, in contrast to the conservative Western Baptist denomination Veguilla leads, but "It appears to me that [the NCC's] intentions aren't bad, that it's a good thing."
Hector Hunter, Cuban Assemblies of God superintendent, concurs with Veguilla. "It's the order of God that [Elián] be returned to Cuba," Hunter says. "For the good of the child, not for politics, it's better for him to be with his family. I think whatever person in the same situation would say the same, independent of who controls or governs.
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