Elian Redux

[Volokh, Eugene]

        My parents and grandparents were mistreated because of their
ethnicity (Jewish) in the Soviet Union, but they, along with all their
non-Jewish friends, were far more mistreated by the government simply
because they had the misfortune of being Soviet citizens.  And this
mistreatment -- for instance, the denial of the right to leave, the killings
and the deportations during the 1930s, and all the rest -- did not just
apply to political opponents of the regime; it applied to millions of people
who were not at all politically active (though I agree that it varied in
degree from era to era, with the 1970s being less repressive than the late
1920s and the late 1930s).  Especially during the worst days, when people
really did live or die at Stalin's whim, this was a form of slavery, and the
fact that it was a mostly equal opportunity enslavement of the whole nation,
rather than the enslavement of certain ethnic subgroups within the nation,
strikes me as not terribly relevant.

        Finally, as to Cuban law, let me suggest at least the possibility
that reference to "Cuban law" might not be terribly helpful.  At least in
the Soviet Union, the assumption that someone could not be prosecuted for a
certain course of conduct because it violated no Soviet law was usually
completely false -- during the Stalinist era, you could be shot simply
because the Communists wanted you shot, and even during the 1970s, you could
be prosecuted on a variety of trumped-up charges, as many people were, or be
locked away in an insane asylum on a trumped-up psychiatric diagnosis, as
many people were.  In fact, the assumption was generally just as false as an
assumption that this-and-such slave couldn't be punished by his master
because he violated none of the rules that the master had set.

        I acknowledge again that I'm no expert on Cuba, and perhaps the
Cuban government is in practice more law-abiding than the Soviet government
was.  But I just wouldn't assume this.

Paul Finkelman writes:

> Without trying to ressurrect the enslavement debates, I think that we need
> to be
> able to draw distinctions between groups of people that are mistreated,
> and
> enslaved, because of their ethnicity (German Jews in the 1930s; Serbs in
> Croatia;
> Croats in Serbia; Albanians in Serbia and Croatia), people who are
> oppressed for
> their politics (open opponents of Castro; black activists in the old South
> Africa; opponents of various Latin American dictators); furthermore we
> must be
> careful not to lump in with these groups people are not essentially
> political  in
> their home country, but are simply living in poor nations or under
> repressive
> regimes (like Elian's mother in Cuba);  these people are not "slaves" by
> any
> reasonable understanding of the term. Nor are they normally entitled to
> political
> asylum.
>
> I did misunderstand Michael's statement on prosecutions, but I would
> assume that
> that Juan Miguel could not be be prosecuted if he allowed Elian to remain,
> since
> he violated no Cuban law by bringing him out of the country.   But, maybe
> someone
> who knows more about Cuban law can answer that question.
>
>
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