Castro Boasts of Victory in Fight for Elian

Cuban President Fidel Castro, in a combative two-hour speech, said Wednesday that Cuba had already won in principle the six-month international custody dispute over 6-year-old shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez.

Castro, 73, immersed in a massive and unprecedented patriotic campaign to bring Elian back to Communist-run Cuba, said the boy’s Miami relatives had lost the support of international opinion in their bid to keep the boy in the United States.

“For all the things they invent, all the resources they use, they have lost the battle, legally and morally,” he told a peasant farmers’ rally in Havana on Wednesday. “They have lost it in U.S. and world public opinion.”

With Elian awaiting an Atlanta court’s ruling on his U.S. relatives’ attempt to win asylum for him, Castro predicted that the legal battle would end in failure for the Miami family and their backers in the anti-communist Cuban American community.

“I don’t think there is any way to take the boy from the father ever. What’s more, there is not even a way to prolong his stay much longer,” Castro said.

Elian, his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, and an entourage of family, friends and specialists from Cuba are staying at the Wye River Plantation compound outside Washington while the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta deliberates on the boy’s future.

He was taken in by his Miami relatives after being rescued at sea after a shipwreck that killed his mother and 10 other Cuban migrants.

With Elian’s father demanding his immediate return to Cuba, the ensuing family feud quickly escalated into a major dispute between the Castro government and its archenemies in Florida’s large Cuban American community.

Elian was reunited with his father after a predawn raid on the Miami family’s house by armed U.S. agents.