By John Ward Anderson. Foreign Service. Monday, May 1, 2000; Page A16 .
HAVANA –– Appearing at a sugar factory that was his command center during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba's charismatic dictator, Fidel Castro, delivered a vintage three-hour, nationally televised harangue last week that illustrated his newest obsession--Elian Gonzalez.
Castro gave an extraordinarily comprehensive, day-by-day, hour-by-hour critique of the case of the shipwrecked 6-year-old boy. The address included readings from U.S. court documents; references to television shows, diplomatic cables, attorney correspondence and family telephone calls; and
detailed explanations of the negotiating positions in the international custody battle.
It was a virtuoso performance, and showed how Castro is trying to turn a surge of popular support here for Elian's return to Cuba into a catalyst to revive flagging interest in the country's socialist revolution, particularly among the island's youth.
"It's a rallying point, particularly for the new generation of Cubans, for the young people," said Ricardo Alarcon, head of Cuba's National Assembly. "This issue of Elian is not something that they learned through history books. It's something they feel victimized and affected by."
At weekly mass rallies drawing tens of thousands of people, young grade-school revolutionaries in T-shirts emblazoned "Free Elian" alternate between ridiculing the United States for forcing the youngster to stay and blasting America for its crime, drugs, guns and violence. "This
doesn't happen in socialist Cuba!" a hoarse girl, about 12, screamed at a recent televised rally.
Other children at the Elian demonstrations lead oceans of Cubans in chants of "Long live Fidel! Long live the revolution!" and "Down with imperialism! Down with the embargo!"
But Castro's effort appears to be falling short, according to analysts and islanders. Many teenagers and young adults say they do not see a connection between Elian and leftist idealism, even though they strongly support Cuba's efforts to reunite the boy with his father.
"It's true, the government wants to use Elian to respark the revolution, but that's history that's already passed," said a 20-year-old man who just finished his obligatory two-year military service. "We want to do things in a different way. It should change--everything."
Cubans who experienced the Bay of Pigs and the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis feel strong ties to their country's revolutionary roots. Others who rallied to the cause in the 1970s, when Cuba supported Marxist insurgencies in Central America and Africa, also remember their country's sense of
mission.
But many young people here said they are tired of Communist sloganeering and the poverty caused by underemployment and the state-controlled economy. And they say they want unrestricted freedom to travel abroad and communicate.
"Everybody's bored with seeing the same [Elian shows] on television," said a 23-year-old woman, a former member of the Union of Young Communists. Like most Cubans, she did not wish to be identified by name for fear of government reprisals.
"The older generation forced us into this type of society--a Communist society--and right now there are a lot of needs that are not being met," said a 24-year-old physician, who complained that his salary of $15 a month was not enough to live on.
"The youth of today want to have a good time. . . . You get tired of the same speeches," said a 33-year-old metalworker as he sat with his wife and 7-year-old son along the Havana waterfront. He complained that since the fall of the Soviet Union, lifestyles have been depressed and
people feel cut off from the rest of the world. Government policies prohibit people from traveling to foreign countries and from participating in the global communications revolution.
"We're here alone after the fall of the Soviet Union in late 1991, like a boat adrift," he said. "I think the system is beautiful and has good intentions, but it doesn't work well. In the most profound sense, it's not what we want."
While they all favored the island's fight for Elian's return, none said it was revitalizing the revolutionary spirit in them or anyone they knew. Part of the problem, they said, was overkill, in the form of five months of nonstop Elian coverage and propaganda.
Nonetheless, after seeing how the Elian case captivated the island's 11 million people, who were furious that the child was not reunited with his father sooner after his rescue Thanksgiving Day off the coast of Florida, the government in February issued the Pledge of Baragua, which outlined its
strategy to broaden the boy's saga into a wider struggle against U.S. policy toward Cuba.
The pledge, which all citizens are being asked to sign, calls Elian's custody fight the first and "smallest battle" in a revitalized effort to overturn a host of U.S. policies: the 1962 U.S. trade and tourism embargo; the presence of the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay; special laws
that penalize people and companies that do business with Cuba or profit from properties expropriated during the 1959 revolution; and, most important, the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which allows any Cuban who manages to reach U.S. soil to stay in the United States and apply for permanent residency
after one year. Elian's mother and nine others trying to reach the United States drowned when their boat capsized.
Although the movement started as an attack on U.S. policies, it has expanded into a broader effort to rejuvenate and reinvigorate the island's Communist revolution, which many Cubans say seems worn out and irrelevant to their daily lives.
The time and place of Elian rallies are now coordinated with other historic events in the revolution, using the child's case as a catalyst for political demonstrations. The rally at which Castro spoke, for instance, marked Cuba's Bay of Pigs victory over a failed invasion by CIA-backed Cuban
exiles.
In a statement last week reported by Cuba's official National Information Agency, Raul Castro, Fidel's brother and the head of Cuba's army, said the fight for Elian's return was an "excellent and perfected method of mass political-ideological work, which the party and Fidel Castro direct.
This method has uncovered virtues that were not seen in previous days. It has brought brilliant people to the fore, from [young people] to senior citizens."
"I get the sense that Fidel is trying to bring the younger senior members of his government into contact with the good old days and the spirit that prevailed in the aftermath of the revolution," said a European diplomat in Havana. "We hear [younger officials] saying things like,
'This is great, the Cuban people have never been so united' " since the Bay of Pigs invasion.
And as his brother indicated, Fidel Castro, who ultimately controls the Cuban media and virtually all public debate, seems to be orchestrating the entire campaign, elevating Elian to national icon and building a huge propaganda and public relations industry around him.
The boy's picture is plastered across the island on billboards and posters, in classrooms and public buildings and on T-shirts and the doors of people's homes. A two-hour nightly television show is usually dedicated to his case, often with Castro in the studio audience apparently stage-managing
the broadcast. The leader spends hours every day orchestrating Cuba's every move in the case.
Elian is part of teachers' classroom lessons, and a museum in his home town has opened an Elian room "as an example for future generations of what happened at this stage of the revolution," the curator said.
Outside the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, the Cuban government built a huge, permanent sound stage--the Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Open Stage, better known as the Demo Dome--for Elian rallies, but says it will be used in the future to institutionalize anti-U.S. demonstrations.
What will happen to Elian if he comes back to Cuba remains to be seen. Residents say they hope he can return to the normal, carefree life of a 6-year-old, and Castro and other government officials insist that he will not be held up as a revolutionary hero or national icon.
"He'll never be an ordinary boy, teenager or man, but we're going to try to give him an ordinary life," said a government official involved in the case. "We won't turn Elian into a star in this country to be exploited in years to come."
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