By Pascal Fletcher in Havana. Financial Times. Published: June 23 2000 00:01GMT | Last Updated: June 23 2000 02:37GMT
The face of Elián González peers down from propaganda billboards in Havana.
Traffic jams form as yet another government-organised march in support of the six-year-old Cuban castaway troops past the US diplomatic mission.
Like a daily religious ritual, state television broadcasts a regular afternoon chorus of government commentators who glibly pillory the Cuban-American "mafia kidnappers" of Elián, US "imperialism" and other "enemies of the Revolution".
Cuba is marching these days to a single, obsessive tune. The tune sings of Elián but bears the signature of Fidel Castro.
No one on the communist-ruled Caribbean island doubts that the 73-year-old president is the driving force behind the extraordinary seven-month patriotic crusade that has mobilised hundreds of thousands of Cubans in public demonstrations calling for the return of Elián from the US.
The six-year-old Cuban shipwreck survivor, whose mother drowned in a failed migrants' voyage last November, is still awaiting a final US court decision that will decide whether or not he can return to Cuba with his Cuban father. Father and son were reunited in the US in April by a controversial
raid by armed US immigration agents who took the boy from his Miami relatives.
Mr Castro, a consummate political showman, was quick to adopt little Elián as a nationalistic icon embodying his own lifelong struggle to defend Cuba's 41-year-old Revolution against US attempts to overthrow it.
In what he calls "the battle for Elián", the veteran "Comandante" has deployed Cuba's 11m people like a private army, sending out successive waves of workers, students, mothers and even schoolchildren - "my little comrades" - in mass marches and rallies
across the island.
The carefully orchestrated pro-Elián propaganda campaign has become almost Orwellian in its all-embracing, all-consuming intensity.
Clearly a deliberate attempt to rekindle revolutionary nationalism, it has also produced a fresh flowering of the personality cult surrounding Mr Castro.
The rallies include shrill speeches by both adult and child orators, most of whom hail not only Elián but also "our invincible Fidel".
Packets of pictures of Elián were distributed at schools to Cuban children. The packets carried Mr Castro's signature on the back.
On June 18, Father's Day in Cuba, uniformed schoolchildren appeared on state television to pay gushing tribute to "Papa" Fidel.
"I love him like my father ... I love him a little bit more than my father," said one schoolgirl. "Please, don't you ever die," said another.
"The love of President Castro for children has no comparison ... Fidel has taught us how to love," a Cuban TV reporter commented with utter seriousness.
Mr Castro has said that he disapproves of personality cults. But there is no doubt that the victor of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and veteran of the 1962 Missile Crisis is relishing the "battle for Elián".
He justifies the campaign of pro-Elián rallies and TV programmes, many of which he personally attends, as a valuable strategic exercise to regenerate what he likes to call the "political culture" of the Cuban Revolution.
It goes without saying that this "political culture" demands unconditional fidelity to the Revolution and its historic leader.
Mr Castro has made clear that the mobilisation campaign will not stop with Elián's return to Cuba, which he sees as inevitable.
Clearly encouraged by growing calls in the US for a change in Washington's policy towards Cuba, he has vowed to continue the ideological offensive - for years if necessary - to achieve a complete end to US hostility towards the island in all its forms, including the long-running economic
embargo.
Foreign diplomats fear that this attempt to revive nationalist fervour, harking back to the heady early years of the 1959 Revolution, will hamper international efforts to coax Cuba towards political and economic reform.
They point to Mr Castro's recent scathing rejection of foreign criticism of Cuba's human rights record and Havana's decision in April to spurn membership of a new trade and aid pact between the European Union (EU) and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries.
Another recent government move to freeze new foreign investments in residential real estate has also raised questions about just how wide and genuine Cuba's opening to foreign capital really is.
In a recent verbal assault that all but extinguished the candle of hope lit by Pope John Paul's 1998 visit to Cuba, the government sharply condemned criticism from within the lay Catholic community.
The question of succession remains virtually taboo. If they dare to speak in public at all, Mr Castro's comrades in government speak in unison with their leader.
In private, many ordinary Cubans say they are sick of the relentless pro-Elián campaign. |