Elian Gonzalez is once again being used as a political prop by Cuba’s dictatorship, as he is set for installment into its rubber-stamp legislature. When he’s touted as a symbol of communist glory, it’s up to Americans to remind the world of the dark truths behind the propaganda.

On November 21, 1999, Mr. Gonzalez’s mother, Elizabeth, boarded a rickety boat in hopes of escaping what President Kennedy described during the Cuban Missile Crisis as “that imprisoned island.” She drowned in the attempt, but her 5-year-old son reached America on Thanksgiving Day.

Relatives took in the young refugee and called his father, Juan Gonzalez, who had divorced his mother before their son’s birth. In court documents, an uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, quoted Juan Gonzalez as saying that “if the boy made it to this country safe and sound that we should protect him by whatever means available.”

At this point, the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, learned of the escape, recognized its public relations potential, and demanded the boy’s return from our nation of plenty and freedom to one of want. Juan Gonzalez had no choice but to recant and regurgitate his dictatorship’s calls for his son to be sent back.

In return, Castro described Juan Gonzalez as “a good worker,” the highest compliment of the dehumanizing communist ideology: People under that system are not individuals endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by their Creator, but cogs for a greedy and rusted machine to be discarded when they’re no longer of use.

After months of legal haggling, President Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, ordered an armed raid of the home where Elian Gonzalez had been given shelter. This resulted in the infamous photograph of the boy’s face contorted into an O of terror as he was ripped from his rescuer’s arms at gunpoint by U.S. Marshals.

This was the final image of Elian Gonzalez as a free person. It was in line with our laws as interpreted by the courts but sentenced the young man to a life controlled by the state. Once shipped back to Castro’s embrace, his indoctrination resumed. Castro often trotted him out as a prop to denounce the American embargo.

“I don’t profess to have any religion,” Elian Gonzalez said in an interview with state-controlled media in 2013, “but if I did, my god would be Fidel Castro,” a statement that underlines the difference between the nation he was forced back to and the one that gave him brief asylum.

The National Assembly also reflects the apartheid of Cuba’s system. “Black Cubans make 10 percent of the population,” Global Voices reported in 2018, “but their representation in circles of power has been very limited, in spite of ideals of equality after the revolution.”

While the Cuban regime delights in pointing the finger at America’s racial strife, it keeps its own under wraps, such as the arrest of activists protesting the police murder of a 27-year-old black man, Hansel Hernández, in 2020. The state also ran what the Daily Beast described as “concentration camps for gays.”

The machine in which Elian Gonzalez will function now is the National Assembly of People’s Power. It is neither representative of the people or a repository of their power. Freedom House ranks Cuba as “not free,” with a score of one out of 40 in political rights and 12 out of 60 in civil liberties.

It will be said that Elian Gonzalez is “elected” to his post, but he will be the only candidate, further illustrating the sham of a boy whose brain was washed to completion, the life he might have lived in the Land of the Free stolen from him the moment he set foot in Cuba to a crowd orchestrated to cheer.

Thirty years ago, Cuba’s dictatorship seized on the chance to hide its grim realities behind an innocent child. Americans can best honor the boy condemned to that fate by exposing the Potemkin political role that he’s been forced to perform and tout that screaming O of terror as the true face of communism.