Half a Million Women in Havana Protest Delay in Elian’s Return

Shouting “Bring back Elian!” and “Down with the lies!” half a million women answered Fidel Castro’s call to flood Havana’s main coastal highway Friday to protest another delay in Elian Gonzalez’s return to his communist homeland.

Leading the march were Elian’s grandmothers, Raquel Rodriguez and Mariela Quintana. The women waved small Cuban flags and marched in step with a uniformed military band in one of the largest mobilizations of the Cuban president’s six-month campaign to bring the 6-year-old boy home.

In a rare appearance at a large outdoor event, Castro himself showed up to greet the women and listen to political speeches by young children in school uniforms and folk music performances by young adults.

“We Cubans are accustomed to fighting,” a teacher in her 20s shouted to the marchers from a stage erected in front of the U.S. Interests Section, the American mission in Havana. “People of Cuba: We cannot grow faint in combat.”

A U.S. appellate court panel sided Thursday with Elian’s father, saying that immigration officials were entitled to deny an asylum hearing for the boy and take him back to Cuba. But under the ruling, Elian must remain in the United States for 14 days to give his Miami relatives a chance to appeal, and then another week after that.

However, legal experts said Friday that the ruling has left the Miami relatives with scant hope of winning their battle for him to stay in the United States.

“The legal options available to the Miami family are increasingly narrow and are unlikely to carry the day,” said Anthony Alfieri, a professor and director of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami Law School.

For the moment, Elian will stay with his father, stepmother, half-brother and a small entourage of playmates in Washington.

The child survived a nightmare illegal migrant voyage from Cuba in which his mother and 10 other people died. He was taken into the Miami home of his great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez, but he was promptly caught up in a fierce and highly politicized feud over his future that was fueled by decades-old enmity between Castro and Cuban exiles in Miami.

The Miami relatives’ options now are to drop the case, ask for a rehearing by the same three-judge Atlanta panel that ruled, 3 to 0, against them, ask for a full hearing before all members of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals or appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.