By John Rice, .c The Associated Press
HAVANA, 20 (AP) - In Cuba, it's all Elian, all the time.
From the moment people turn on their radios in the morning until they switch off their televisions at night, Cubans are bombarded with news and comment about Elian Gonzalez and demands that the 6-year-old be returned from the United States.
Elian's face peers from the front page of every newspaper, hundreds of billboards and posters, hundreds of thousands of T-shirts.
Every night experts debate the boy's future for hours on live prime-time television broadcasts, often with President Fidel Castro present. Clips of those shows are repeated throughout the following day.
For the communist state's formidable propaganda machine, the boy has been a gift, the flashpoint for one of the major national crusades of recent Cuban history.
The campaign for Elian's return has prompted international news coverage and a level of organized demonstrations that Cubans say is unprecedented in the past decade - perhaps since the 1980 Mariel exile crisis led the government to rally mass support in the streets.
Dozens of times over the past six weeks, people have been given time off work to march in the streets, sometimes by the hundreds of thousands.
On Thursday, news about Elian covered almost half of the only daily newspaper in the country, Granma. Radio commentary throughout the day denounced the ``mafia'' holding the child in Miami.
Elian quickly became a political symbol for both sides after he was found Nov. 25 clinging to an inner tube off the Florida coast. His mother and stepfather were among 11 people who drowned in an apparent attempt to immigrate illegally to the United States. He has been staying with his relatives
in Miami - including a great-uncle - since then.
On both sides, the debate has sometimes been surreal.
In Miami, some have compared Elian to Winston Churchill. Others have portrayed him as a child chosen by God to remain in Florida.
In Havana on Wednesday night, the Brazilian theologian Frei Betto suggested that U.S. culture denigrates fathers and exalts uncles: He cited examples such as Uncle Sam and Donald Duck, who is accompanied by nephews rather than sons.
``The Cuban exiles have handed Cuba a win-win situation,'' said Nelson Valdes, a University of New Mexico sociologist who specializes in Cuba.
If Elian is returned to Cuba, it would be a victory for Castro.
``If indeed the child is not returned,'' it is because ``the Cuban-Americans in Miami are willing to take children away from Cuban parents in Cuba,'' said Valdes, who was one of thousands of Cuban children sent to the United States between 1961 and 1964 to live in foster homes or orphanages
under a U.S. government operation named ``Peter Pan.''
The issue also puts Castro in the role of defending families.
``There is no other issue that could be more useful (for the Cuban government) than the defense of the family,'' Valdes said.
``I cannot recollect anything of this nature which has resonated with the people as this has,'' said Susan Eckstein, a Cuba specialist at Boston University. She said that while there have been other rallies over other issues, this was is very different because it focuses on families. ``I think
it's because it gets at very deep values that Cubans have.''
In recent years, Cuba has suffered economic hardship and has seen a slippage of the ideological passion that charged many on the island after the 1959 revolution led by Castro.
``At a time when it is hard to get people to rally for the party, to rally for anything, this works,'' Eckstein said.
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Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. |