Coverage of the sound and fury generated by Florida's Cuban exile community over the fate of a six-year-old boy has focused on the immediate human aspects of the story. But observed in a somewhat broader context, these actions tell a more significant, and more worrisome, tale. Pacific News Service editor Rene Ciria-Cruz is also a longtime editor of Filipinas Magazine.

"We feel discriminated against," a demonstrator outside Elian Gonzalez's residence was quoted as saying, "because the government won't listen to us and keep Elian here."

Please. I know about discrimination. I've written about it, protested against it. The justice department's decision to reunite Elian Gonzalez with his father in Cuba is not discrimination. If anything, this family tragedy has dragged out because public officials pander to the politically powerful Cuban exile community.

I know about the militancy that's ruling the streets of Little Havana, too. I've seen its face before, and it strikes me as a clear danger to one's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Just a few weeks ago in Oakland hundreds of screaming Vietnamese Americans protested an art exhibition that featured portraits of Ho Chi Minh by a Vietnam War veteran. They beat effigies to a pulp. That's okay.

What's not acceptable is when they threatened visitors to the gallery, and menaced and branded as traitors fellow Vietnamese Americans who wanted to see the exhibition. It was the same angry crowd that forced a defiant Vietnamese American video store owner in Southern California to finally remove a portrait of Ho from his shop. Forget freedom of expression.

I had seen a similar kind of extremism even before that. In the late 1980s, shortly after the Filipinos overthrew the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the couple's loyal legions began taking to the streets of Manila to foment a "counterrevolution." The Marcos loyalists regularly whipped themselves into a frenzy, staged lurid displays of simulated violence, claimed the backing of miraculous saints and threatened or physically assaulted bystanders who disagreed with them.

These hate-filled festivals of fanaticism were at times replicated in Honolulu where the exiled Marcoses went seeking refuge in the massive community of immigrants there from his home province in the Philippines. For a while, some Hawaii officials feared the Marcos family would settle there, eventually run for office and win elections giving them unwarranted influence over the political climate, as with anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Florida.

The same narrow-mindedness and intolerance are driving events in the streets of Little Havana. It's civil disobedience that has nothing to do with commitment to liberty and everything to do with exacting political vengeance and reclaiming lost wealth, power and privilege. It's hard to see any commitment to democracy in a movement that violently threatens second-generation Cuban Americans who disagree with its views.

As an immigrant, I should be inspired by the Cuban exiles' political clout, but I am not. I do not see them as role models for empowerment. Elian's saga has nothing to do with immigrants' efforts to gain equal access to the American dream. If anything, the Cuban exiles' actions reveal a stubborn refusal to assimilate into America's democratic culture.

And their friends -- Miami's mayor who virtually cleared the way for civil mayhem and all the politicians blinded by votes and campaign contributions -- are equally to blame for the warping of due process and U.S. foreign policy.

It's appalling that some politicians -- including my erstwhile presidential choice Al Gore -- are tripping all over themselves to sponsor legislation granting Elian and his father permanent residency, even instant U.S. citizenship.

Meanwhile, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is forcibly separating Haitian and Central American refugees from their children and thousands of immigrants must wait for decades before family members can be with them here -- and no member of Congress is buttonholing colleagues to stop these assaults on family values.

Fidel Castro's stock with the American public wouldn't rise even if you added "dot-com" to his name. Yet, a Gallup poll shows two-thirds of Americans are convinced Elian Gonzalez should be reunited with his father in Cuba. They haven't turned into communists. They simply can't accept the argument that Elian's father is unfit as a parent just because he lives in a social system they don't like.

Let us hope that the poll results also reflect a public that has grown weary of the Cuban exile agenda, and the politicians who feed on it and enable it to wield an undue and corrosive influence on American politics.