Police and television crews stand by. The case is being adjudicated in the court of public relations. The moralizing dynamics of daytime television supersede, almost, the rule of law. The father is now portrayed as subtly responsible for Fidel Castro's sins, or at least, complicit in them. It would be taken for granted that Castro or no Castro, the child's place is with his mother, the quicker the better.
Men are a problematic business, a kind of bad weather.
They are unreliable, untrustworthy, given to unpredictable temper, maybe even to violence, or, in any case, to rotten behavior of one kind or another. The truth, that men and women are just about equal in their virtues and their defects, as parents and as human beings, gets lost in a welter of tendentious anecdote. Those e-mails are filled with stories. From wives and ex-wives come some notes of sympathy, but mainly contrary tales of woe, of the obdurate male swinishness. Send him back.