By Charles Krauthammer

                  Friday, January 28, 2000; Page A25

                  The phone rings: "Your 6-year-old son has just been found in the ocean,
                  shipwrecked, clinging to an inner tube. His mother drowned. He is now in
                  a Miami hospital."

                  Do you respond:

                  (1) "I'll be there as soon as I possibly can." Or

                  (2) "Send him back to me. I demand it. "

                  In an otherwise softball interview on "Nightline," Elian Gonzalez's father
                  was asked repeatedly why he didn't go to Miami to see his son. He never
                  answered the question. He simply repeated his demands for his son's
                  return with ever greater vehemence, finally threatening the Miami relatives
                  with whom Elian is staying.

                  No one knows the reasons for Juan Gonzalez's lack of urgency. He claims
                  his son is the subject of not only kidnapping but also child abuse. If your
                  son were kidnapped and abused, and the U.S. attorney general publicly
                  declared you were free to come see him, would you stay home?

                  Juan Gonzalez is staying home. Why? Does he simply lack true affection
                  for the child of a previous marriage? Is he so intimidated by Castro's
                  government that he is just mouthing the official line? Or is he one of those
                  political simpletons so imbued with Fidelism (millions cried, genuinely cried,
                  at the funerals of Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung) that he would rather let his
                  abused son languish than give the slightest political advantage to the United
                  States by flying to see him?

                  We don't know. But whatever the reason, should Elian be trusted to such a
                  man? The issue of Elian's return to Cuba has been framed as a struggle
                  between the political cynicism of anti-Castro Cuban exiles and the sweet
                  ties of affection between father and son.

                  What about the ties of affection between mother and son? If you frame the
                  issue as a contest between a father's wishes and that of more distant
                  relatives in Miami, you have rigged the conclusion. But the Miami cousins
                  are doing no more than giving life to the dying wishes of Elian's mother.
                  She risked, and gave, her life to bring him to freedom. Do her wishes count
                  for nothing?

                  Moreover, Elian will not return to a quiet life with father in a little Cuban
                  village. That might once have been a nice choice. But it no longer is. Fidel
                  Castro has decided that it will not be.

                  He has quite cynically made Elian a symbol of Fidelism. Posters proclaim
                  it: "You are our symbol. Our child hero." With his "spontaneous" mass
                  demonstrations, a Stalinist specialty, Fidel has turned a little boy into an
                  icon.

                  What kind of life awaits such an icon? Like the child heroes of Stalin,
                  honored for betraying and denouncing their parents, Elian will be raised to
                  be a model Fidelist, a vindication of the revolution, a validator of a father's
                  political loyalty over a mother's treason.

                  Castro's regime is an abject failure at every level. A half-million Cubans
                  await the lottery that allows a precious 20,000 annually to emigrate to
                  freedom. Such a regime requires constant revalidation by means of the
                  kind of mass mobilization Fidel has orchestrated around Elian.

                  Once returned, Elian becomes a precious political commodity for Fidel,
                  subject to far more indoctrination, far more surveillance than even the
                  average Cuban subject.

                  Imagine him at age 18. Raised here, if he decided to return to Cuba, he
                  would be free to go. It would be a one-day story. America's self-image
                  would survive quite nicely.

                  If he were raised in Cuba, it is unimaginable that he would be allowed even
                  to contemplate leaving. He would be a child of the state.

                  Elian should be allowed to stay here. First, to honor the wishes of his dead
                  mother. Second, because here he could actually have a reasonably normal
                  life, and not become the symbol and tool of a police state.

                  What to do? Congress has it right. Grant him citizenship.

                  The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell of the National Council of Churches has
                  denounced this attempt to "impose citizenship" on Elian. What a strange
                  locution. American citizenship is a badge of freedom so deeply and
                  universally coveted that people from the South China Sea to the Florida
                  Straits take to perilous boats in the distant hope of achieving it.

                  American citizenship is a license to liberty. An imposition? Tell that to those
                  who died in its defense--the boys at Normandy, for example. Or in its
                  pursuit--Elian's mother.

                  When Elian was brought ashore, my first instinct was to wish him returned
                  to his father. Given how the father acts, however, and how Fidel and his
                  American acolytes not only use him now but will invariably play on him
                  throughout his life, there really is no choice. Keep him here. Make him an
                  American. Honor his mother.

                           © Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company