Let me see if I’ve got this right:
  A group of people holds a small boy hostage and uses him as a pawn in their dispute with a foreign government.
  That group defies its own government and stalls efforts to re-unite the boy with his immediate family, preferring to wave the boy like a red flag in the face of a bull, teasing a foreign leader with a bizarre version of the children’s game called keep-away.
  Finally, its patience exhausted, the government rescues the hostage by force, without injuring anyone, and restores him to his family.
  Rule of law prevails. A hostage is rescued. A family is reunited and restored.
  So who is wailing loudest and gnashing their teeth hardest? Not the liberals who abhor force and faint at the sight of guns. Nope, it’s the folks who champion “family values,” whatever that means. It’s the folks who don’t mind invading small foreign countries such as Iraq, Grenada, and Panama, on any handy political or economic pretext.
  None of this Miami madness has anything to do with values, family or otherwise. It has everything to do with politics. There is only one child at the center of this circus, but almost all involved are acting like children.
  The Cuban-Americans want to protect the boy from the horrible fate of growing up under a Communist government with his own family in his home country. The boy is too young to know communism from corned beef, and before he becomes an adult, the head of his country’s government will have died of old age.
  The only thing preventing normal relations between our country and Cuba is the person of Fidel Castro. It’s not that the Cuban government is Communist. If that were the only problem, we would not have dealings with China.
  The Cuban-Americans hate Castro with such ferocity that our own government is hostage to their rage.
  The Cuban-Americans didn’t want the boy to be with his father because they feared his father would “brainwash” him, as if they hadn’t been doing just that from the moment he was delivered into their hands.
  They say they don’t want the boy to go home because he’ll grow up under communist oppression. They don’t want Castro to win any sort of propaganda victory. They seem to think that displaying the boy as a prize in a contest here is a better life for him.
  They probably also hoped that, if they stalled long enough and forced the boy’s father to stay in this country long enough, he’d choose to stay here himself. That would give the Cuban-Americans a double victory and give Castro a sharp slap in the face.
  The Cuban-Americans have accomplished one thing for the boy. They have guaranteed that his life in Cuba will not be one deprived of material goods. The last thing Castro wants is for the boy to be unhappy in his homeland.
  His father was pretty well off before, by Cuban standards, but, when he and his family go home, they will all benefit from the interest and scrutiny they will be under. Castro will want the rest of the world, or at least that part of it that gives a hoot about this soap opera, to see that they don’t regret going home.
  The boy will not put his stay in America out of his mind. Imagine the awe and envy tales of his adventure will instill in his playmates.
  By the time he is grown, the greatest obstacle to relations between Cuba and the U.S. will be gone. Time will defeat Fidel Castro, even though half a century of American hostility will not. With Castro dead and buried, the Cuban-Americans will lose the primary target of their hatred, and the 50-year farce of Cuban-U.S. relations can finally end.
  Then, who knows? Maybe the Cuban boy grown to adulthood will bring his bride to Florida for their honeymoon. Maybe a few years later, he’ll come back with his son, take him to Disneyworld, and tell him again of his great adventure when he was a little boy.