By Pascal Fletcher
HAVANA, Jan 28 (Reuters) Cuba celebrated the birthday of its 19th-century independence hero Jose Marti on Friday with nationwide patriotic marches that hailed shipwrecked boy Elian Gonzalez as the country's latest ``anti-imperialist'' idol.
President Fidel Castro has converted Havana's 2-month-old diplomatic fight for the return of Elian from the United States into a nationalistic crusade aimed at rekindling popular support for his one-party socialist revolution.
A torch-lit march through Havana by thousands of students at midnight on Thursday kicked off the annual celebration of Marti's birth 147 years ago. Marches by tens of thousands of other youths were held across Cuba on Friday.
They combined the traditional annual salute to ``the Teacher,'' Cuba's poet hero -- Marti championed the fight for independence from Spain and warned Cubans about encroaching U.S. ``imperialism'' -- with slogans hailing the 6-year-old boy at the centre of a bitter U.S.-Cuba child custody battle.
Cuba's ruling Communist Party said Elian, the subject of competing custody claims by his father on the island and more distant relatives in Miami, had become ``converted forever into a symbol of the crimes and injustices that imperialism is capable of committing against an innocent child.''
``We will keep on fighting until they return him,'' the party said in a front-page editorial in its official daily, Granma.
ELIAN COMPARED TO GUEVARA
It compared Elian to another Cuban revolutionary icon, the legendary Argentine guerrilla Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in 1967 and is buried in Cuba.
A group of visiting U.S. students joined in the Marti parade in Havana and expressed support for the custody claim of Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.
``There is a father here who wants his son. He should be returned. This is ridiculous,'' student Adam Iten said.
Friday's marches followed news from the United States that the drawn-out and acrimonious custody fight, which has pitted 73-year-old Castro against his Cuban exile foes in Miami, may last until March because of legal wrangling over Elian's case.
A U.S. judge set a six-week timetable on Thursday to hear a lawsuit filed by Elian's relatives in Miami, who want to keep him with them despite a U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Service ruling that he should be sent back to his father.
The boy has been staying with the Miami relatives since he was rescued from the sea on Nov. 25 after surviving the sinking off Florida of a boat carrying illegal Cuban migrants, including his mother, who drowned with 10 others.
Elian's father and Cuban authorities kept up a barrage of accusations on Friday against the Roman Catholic nun and INS officials who set up a meeting on Wednesday in Miami between the boy and his grandmothers from the island.
BAN ON CALL DENOUNCED
Gonzalez said in emotional comments to reporters he was outraged that the meeting's hosts did not allow his son to speak to him by mobile phone while the grandmothers were there.
``I just want my son because he belongs to me,'' he said.
He ridiculed moves by some legislators in the U.S. Congress to make Elian a U.S. citizen. ``The only one who can request his citizenship is me, and I will never do it,'' he said.
Granma condemned the circumstances surrounding Wednesday's meeting with the grandmothers, held at the Miami Beach home of Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, as ``something macabre.'' It said the proximity of the Miami relatives and their exile supporters subjected the encounter to unfair pressure.
``It was all a farce,'' said Cuba's National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, who on Thursday described the meeting as resembling a jail visit more than a family reunion. He likened Sister O'Laughlin to a jail warder.
She offered her residence for the meeting at the request of U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. Later she said Elian should stay in the United States because of the ``fear'' she sensed in the grandmothers, Mariela Quintana and Raquel Rodriguez.
13:09 01-28-00
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