Elian Battle Reinforces Castro’s Hold on Masses

Thirty-nine years to the day after Fidel Castro handed the United States its humiliating Bay of Pigs defeat, the aging Cuban president marshaled his people again Thursday against America in one of the most strident mass demonstrations yet in the Elian Gonzalez custody dispute.

On a day when headlines such as “Armed Mafiosos Near Elian” blazed across front pages, more than 100,000 students and workers packed the new Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Open Stage in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission here, using flags as weapons and slogans as ammunition.

But on the anniversary of the CIA’s failed 1961 invasion, the rally went far beyond a collective Cuban expression of frustration at Washington’s seeming powerlessness to enforce its own order reuniting Juan Miguel Gonzalez with his son Elian, who now lives with anti-Castro relatives in Miami.

A succession of speakers at the rally targeted the array of U.S. legislation that has formed Washington’s policy toward Cuba since Castro’s 1959 revolution--from a punishing economic embargo of the island to its Cold War-era military base in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, to its unique “wet foot/dry foot” immigration policy that allows any Cuban who touches U.S. soil to stay.

The protest, in fact, highlighted Castro’s strategy. The Cuban government plans to use each day until the 6-year-old boy returns home in a calculated campaign to change U.S. policy toward this Communist-run island.

And the event testified to how Castro’s personal battle for the boy’s return has reinforced his revolution while discrediting Miami’s exile community more each day that the stalemate over the boy continues.

“The two most hated people in Cuba today are Fulgencio Batista and Lazaro Gonzalez,” said a retired Cuban diplomat, equating Elian’s great-uncle and the corrupt, U.S.-backed Cuban dictator whom Castro overthrew four decades ago.

“The Cuban people are tired of this Elian thing. They’ve had it up to here. Every day, it’s Elian, Elian, Elian,” said the diplomat, who asked not to be named. “But the image of this Lazaro Gonzalez with his gold chains strutting around his yard--really, like some Mafioso--while this poor, skinny kid suffers keeps our blood boiling.”

The diplomat, however, is among those here who question whether Castro can sustain the broader protest movement beyond the dispute over Elian.

In fact, when government analysts and senior officials spent four hours on state television Wednesday night analyzing a U.N. Human Rights Commission condemnation of political repression in Cuba, many people simply flicked off their sets. Tens of thousands opted instead to walk over to Havana’s Latin American baseball stadium for the night’s playoff game.

But as long as Elian’s case drags on, other analysts both here and in the United States see opportunities that clearly are embraced in Castro’s expanded “Save Elian” campaign.

Two Democratic U.S. congressmen who joined a delegation of Massachusetts college professors quietly visiting Havana this week said that the battle for the boy ultimately could serve as a catalyst for warmer relations between the United States and Cuba.

“Elian already is beginning to change U.S. policy,” said Rep. James P. McGovern (D-Mass.), a longtime opponent of the embargo against Cuba. “What we are seeing based on the polls is that the American people are starting to change their perceptions of Cuba and of these groups in Miami.”

McGovern and his fellow Democrat, 28-year congressional veteran John Joseph Moakley, who led the Massachusetts delegation, said in interviews here that Elian’s case has forced average Americans to focus on the once-obscure Cuban American lobby that quietly has influenced U.S. policy for decades, mainly through hefty campaign contributions.

“It’s a public-relations war now,” said Moakley, who was once labeled “Havana Joe” by a Cuban American-backed opponent. “The Miami Cubans are losing a lot of the support they had in the past. And now, I think they’re running the risk of losing the embargo.”

Castro clearly has similar aims--to further discredit the Cuban American leaders and to deepen the wedge between the fiercely anti-Communist Miami lobby and America’s political mainstream.

“Each one of these developments unite the Cuban people more and more,” said Andres Gonzalez Gonzalez, the 42-year-old artist in Thursday’s crowd who sculpted the Jose Marti statue that anchors the permanent, open-air protest plaza. “And each one demonstrates--not only to us but to the world--how this group in Miami really is a mafia.

“This Elian case has touched the feelings of the people here at the deepest level. Even those who are angry with the revolution are upset about the way America is handling the case,” he said.

Cuba’s latest formal protest to Washington sought to underscore the theme of discrediting Cuban American leaders in Miami. It supplied the names and alleged criminal records of “armed counterrevolutionaries” whom Cuba asserts are outside the Miami home of Lazaro Gonzalez.

And Thursday’s rally at the Anti-Imperialist Open Stage--built deliberately in full sight of the U.S. Interests Section building--dramatically displayed how the two goals of bringing the boy home and demonizing the capitalists to the north are intertwined.

A Cuban poet read an ode to “a boy who is all of our children, a boy who is all of us.” The poem described Elian’s separation from his father as a powerful symbol of “an embargo against millions of fathers, against millions of children.”

At the back of the crowd, Javier Gonzalez, a 20-year-old soldier wearing a “Save Elian” T-shirt, summed up the mood of the day: “The United States is still the enemy. The pressures remain the same. They’re even increasing.

“With all of its political power, the United States could have solved this problem immediately. It’s all a game.”

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A FATHER’S PLEA

Elian’s dad urges public to lobby for reunion with son. A18

* ASYLUM BID A LONGSHOT

Persecution issue makes rejection likely, experts say. A19