Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old Cuban boy who clung to an inner-tube for two days after watching his mother and 10 others drown during a failed attempt at crossing the Atlantic Ocean, has become a pawn of sensationalized, unscrupulous geopolitics.

The boy’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzales, wants his son returned to his custody in Cuba. But many Americans, including many among the sizable Cuban population in South Florida, contend that Elian should remain with relatives in Miami, as his mother wanted.

The State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have succumbed for the time being to intense pressure, turning the boy’s fate over to the federal courts. In Congress, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) has tried to keep Elian in the U.S. by issuing a subpoena for him to testify in front of a House subcommittee.

Yet under American immigration policy, the boy should be returned to Cuba. If he had avoided apprehension and touched American soil, Elian would have been granted political asylum. Because he is a minor, Gonzalez became a special case.

But what if the situation were reversed? What if, for example, a single-parent American family traveled to Cuba to visit relatives and the parent suddenly died? Surely Americans would want the children returned to the parent living in the U.S.

Presidential candidate John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, surely wouldn’t agree that Cuba would have the right to keep the child. Yet McCain and Republican contender George W. Bush both think that Gonzalez shouldn’t be returned to his father in Cuba.

The real question is what is in the child’s best interests – whether communism is reason enough that a young boy should be kept from his father, a man who seems content to live in the hemisphere’s only communist nation.

Ultimately, Elian belongs with his remaining parent. No political ideology is so heinous as to supercede the bond between a son and his father.