When I was 7 or 8 years old, not much older than Elian Gonzalez is today, the principal at my school in Cuba forced me to wear a Young Pioneer scarf. He simply announced, in front of the whole class, that he'd had it with my refusal to join, and that I couldn't say No any longer.

The Pioneers are the communist version of the Hitler Youth. All those kids you see on television, wearing blue-and-white scarves around their neck and taking part in government-staged demonstrations for Elian's return, are Pioneers.

I had again and again, for two years, told my teachers and the principal that I would not join the Pioneers. I was the lone holdout in a classroom that included the children of political prisoners and others from known anti-communist families. My conscientious objection cost the class a 100 percent participation rate and therefore perks such as field trips. I wasn't the most popular kid in school.

But my new status as a Pioneer also did not make me very popular with my father, as I had feared. Dad had his ear glued to his (highly illegal) shortwave radio when I arrived home for lunch. I still can picture him, sitting in his rocking chair. He was home because he was very ill; he had two to three years left at most, and he (and all of us) knew it. Just after the revolution he had walked away from a post as a professor of law at the University of Havana, an institution he loved, because -- the words still ring in my ears -- ``you can't teach law in a country not ruled by it.'' He died soon after because lack of a proper diet aggravated his diabetes.
COULDN'T KILL CASTRO

It didn't take too long for me to explain to my father why I was wearing the Pioneer scarf, or for him to renounce me for my weakness. He also decided that if they were going to take his family away, there was nothing left, so he would have to go to the school and kill the principal. Because the principal was the agent of government who had transgressed his family's freedom, he was the obvious choice. Killing the principal's boss would have made no sense, and killing Fidel Castro was impossible. I don't fault my father's logic in the slightest.

Castro had forced Cubans to hand over all their private weapons very early in his rule, but Dad had kept his father's gun, thinking the ability it gave him to take one last stand for his family against tyranny was a thread of freedom to cling on to. Again, I admire him for thinking this way.

My grandmother had other ideas. She promptly locked her son up in his room as he was getting the gun and announced to him that he would have to go through her on his way out. Mother soon was fetched from her office, and she informed my father that he would have to do away with two women in his family. While he remained pathetically locked in his room, my mother walked me back to school, still empty of schoolchildren at lunchtime, and had a quick word with the principal as she handed back the Pioneer neckwear. The essence of it was that her husband was very upset and that the principal had better not try this sort of thing again. Until I left Cuba three or four years later, I was not bothered on this score again.

My father and I made up that evening, of course, and he explained to me that once I was living in freedom, I'd be able to make up my own mind, and that if I then turned into a communist, that was my business. I didn't -- far from it -- and I'm glad my father decided to try to get us out, though he did not live to see the day.

Even if you think my father may have been right about wanting to shoot the principal, you might wonder if he was not a bit too severe with me. I was, after all, just a kid, and the principal had forced the thing on me. In fact, Dad understood all too well that I had had it with resistance, for otherwise the principal really couldn't have forced anything on me. Dad knew that after putting up a good fight for some time, I, too, had had enough, and that I was more than happy to join in, not to stand out, not to have to fight after school or suffer the taunts of others, including teachers. That's why he acted the way he did, and why I remain so grateful to him.
NO AUTONOMY IN CUBA

In totalitarian systems it takes desperate measures to remain an individual, to have any degree of autonomy even within the most narrowly defined private sphere. Our natural instinct for survival militates against fighting the system; we have to overcome human nature just to resist.

This is the kind of world that produced Elian's father, the man who, after Castro organized anti-American rallies, said that he wanted his son back -- even though he (the father) knows that his ex-wife (the mother) died taking the boy out and that Elian would have a better life in America, and not just materially.

This is the world that produced the people at the rallies, very many of whom would escape Cuba if given the chance. And much, much worse, this is the kind of world President Clinton is sending Elian back to. If Elian is strong, he will survive, but I somehow think his father is very different from mine.

I am an American today, and I love America as only someone with my kind of background can.