Memory lapse.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.
• Position: Editorial

The Clinton administration's refugee policy is a victory for welfare statism--and for Castro.

"You just can't grasp what it's like to live your life with someone telling you where you can or can't go--what it's like not to have the simple freedom to do what you want, when you want, to go wherever you want. I'm 37 years old, and l grew up knowing nothing but East Germany and knowing I would never know anything else of the world. When I stood in front of the Wall that night, I cried like a baby. I couldn't stop.

"My dream, my real fantasy, is to go to America. I want to water ski in Florida."

"Sigrid," quoted in the Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1989

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THE end of history would be so literal? That, five years after the Wall came down, no one would remember how it happened or what it meant? That, five years after the Wall came down, its fall would be as meaningless to the president of the United States as the Monroe Doctrine is to the typical 10th grader?

Five years is not a long time, even in the life of Bill Clinton.

But there are 30,000 Cuban refugees behind barbed wire in the sweltering sun of Guantanamo Bay who can testify that Clinton does not know the meaning of the Berlin Wall. And that he does not know why it fell.

Ever eager to pretend he is John Kennedy, Clinton earlier this year traveled to Berlin and declared, "Berlin ist frei" (Berlin is free). "The Berlin Wall is gone," he said. "Now we must decide what we will build in its place." He has decided. Faced with his own Cuban "crisis," he has successfully begged Fidel Castro to build a Wall in the Caribbean.

Bill Clinton is a cowardly man. He is afraid, above all else, of political defeat. Castro has played masterfully to that fear, forcing a change in three decades of U.S. immigration policy and shoring up his government's waning legitimacy in the process. Castro knows that Clinton is terrified of Cuban refugees. They are to Clinton what Willie Horton is to Michael Dukakis--scapegoats for political defeat. Clinton blames violence at an Arkansas refugee camp in part for his traumatic gubernatorial reelection loss. To Clinton, the 1980 Mariel boatlift will always be the Mariel disaster. U.S. immigration policy is driven by fear of "another Mariel."

BUT THE MARlEL DISASTER IS A MYTH. OF the 125,000 Cubans who fled Castro in 1980, maybe as many as 5,000--a mere 4 percent of the total--were prisoners and mental patients Castro wanted to get rid of. Of those, the...