The first NCC statement urged the United States to recognize the Castro regime. In 1977, a year before his election as NCC president, Methodist bishop James Armstrong led a delegation of American church officials to Cuba, where they supported the regime's repressions. In other reports, Amnesty International mentioned imprisoned poet Armando Valladares, who noted that Cuban officials used pro-Castro statements of American clergy to torment prisoners. Incomprehensibly to us, while we waited for the embrace of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our tormentors. That is the ethos of the current NCC leadership, which also supports lifting the U.S. embargo.
Family reunification has nothing to do with it.
The NCC leadership believes that Elian Gonzalez will be better off under socialism in Cuba, better off without the right to free speech, free association, and freedom of movement, the bourgeois capitalist vices that the NCC believes dehumanize people. Cuba confirms that nations that are barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. But the NCC believes Elian will be better off under a regime of shared scarcity. The Council's stand can only be described as loathsome, the direct opposite of the most Christ-like figure in this episode, Elian's mother. She died that her son might be free.