Millions More in Cuba Rally for Return of Boy From U.S.

In a crescendo to a week of protest, millions of Cubans poured into the main plazas of the country’s 14 provincial capitals Friday to demand that the U.S. return a 6-year-old Cuban boy rescued off the Florida coast on Thanksgiving Day.

From the easternmost city of Santiago de Cuba to the seafront boulevard outside the heavily guarded U.S. diplomatic headquarters in Havana, the Cuban nation echoed President Fidel Castro’s outrage over what he calls “a flagrant kidnapping by American authorities” of Elian Gonzalez.

Just 200 miles north of Castro’s peaceful show of popular force, Elian remained in his great-uncle’s home in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. On Friday, anti-Castro U.S. lawmakers held a news conference in Miami to condemn the Cuban leader for politicizing the boy’s case--a charge Castro first leveled against them.

Unseen during the past few days of mounting protests here in Cuba, however, has been the boy’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. For two weeks, since the ill-fated journey in which Elian’s mother and 10 others drowned, Gonzalez has been demanding that his relatives in Miami return his son.

Lawyers for those relatives said they filed for political asylum for the boy in Florida courts Friday, but it was unclear how that could affect any unilateral decision by immigration authorities to send the boy home.

U.S. and Cuban officials here continued to work quietly behind the scenes in an effort to resolve the custody battle, which U.S. authorities say will be decided by the Immigration and Naturalization Service after it meets with the father.

But the custody battle is just one of many unresolved issues surrounding the potentially explosive debate about illegal migration to the U.S. from this nation of 11 million.

Negotiations to extend a 5-year-old migration pact between the two countries are scheduled to begin here next week. And most analysts here and in the U.S. agree that the extraordinary case of Elian Gonzalez has handed the Cuban government a powerful backdrop for those negotiations.

Cuba will set the agenda for the talks. And it looks like Elian’s case is likely to top that agenda: From the moment Castro issued his call for Cubans to take to the streets, the Communist leader has said Elian’s case exemplifies a lack of commitment by the U.S. to stop professional smuggling rings that are charging thousands of dollars a head to take Cubans to Florida.

Castro has blamed the vote-rich Cuban American political lobby in Miami as the ultimate culprit, which he asserts manipulates U.S. immigration policy and encourages illegal migration for propaganda purposes. The lobby denies these charges.

But Friday’s “Free Elian” protests--which the government called the largest mass mobilization in the nation’s history--equally used the battle for the boy to reinforce the values of Castro’s Communist revolution against materialism and capitalism.

A succession of uniformed schoolchildren took the stage at Havana’s seafront to condemn Elian’s Miami relatives for trying to bribe him with “sophisticated toys and games.”

“This is the moment to cry out in favor of the revolution and the fatherland,” moderators on state-run television declared.

And at a time when Cuba’s new dollar economy is beginning to erode many of those values, the crowds displayed banners that read: “We are and we will be socialist.”