Elian Struggle Over, Cuba Sees a New Battle

MANZANILLO, Cuba — With more than 300,000 people gathered Saturday in a sweltering downtown plaza here, the Cuban government delivered its first official response to the return of castaway Elian Gonzalez: a defiant declaration of yet another ideological battle against the United States.

It was unclear, however, whether the Cuban masses will mobilize for the new “struggle” with the same fervor they displayed on behalf of 6-year-old Elian.

President Fidel Castro, who made the boy’s return from the United States a personal, paternal and national crusade, was conspicuously absent from Saturday’s massive rally.

Instead, he sent a two-page letter, read to the crowd on live national television, declaring that neither Elian nor the results of the U.S. elections in November can ease tensions between two nations that have been enemies for 40 years.

“We are not a people who stop to savor the pleasure of victories, nor to glorify our successes,” the letter said.

At that very moment, Castro was on Havana’s seafront, 400 miles away, overseeing an army graduation ceremony in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission that was televised soon after coverage of the Manzanillo gathering ended.

One by one Saturday, in fact, Cuba’s top officials told their 11 million people--most happy about the boy’s return yet worn out from a 7-month-long “Free Elian” campaign--that they must continue to fight.

The new official targets: an array of U.S. laws that Cuba asserts amount to economic warfare and help sanction a thriving trade in human smuggling that lies at the core of the Elian affair.

Even Castro’s younger brother, Gen. Raul Castro, the 73-year-old leader’s official successor and defense minister, joined in this opening offensive.

During a rare, 15-minute meeting with the foreign press as the masses filed out of the plaza here toward home, the general declared: “Now begins the second stage, which also will be triumphant.”

Jovial, self-assured and clad in a dress uniform heavy with medals, Raul Castro, who is 69 and chief of the Cuban army, added with a shrug: “What other solution do we have? What other solution do the Americans have? Invade us? I would not like to see that, because we would pay a terrible price. And they would pay as terrible a price as us.”

Citing the 1966 U.S. legislation that was Cuba’s principal target of the day, Raul Castro said flatly: “The Cuban Adjustment Act has to end. Because Cuba will not change.”

The Cold War-era congressional act presumes that all Cubans who leave this Communist-run island for the U.S. are political refugees. Together with the 38-year-old U.S. economic embargo, it was meant to help bring down Castro’s government.

But the law has become the cornerstone of the Clinton administration’s so-called wet foot/dry foot immigration policy, which permits Cubans--and only Cubans--who reach America’s shores to remain, while those intercepted at sea are sent home.

Cuba asserts--and many U.S. law enforcement officials agree--that the law and the policy are fueling a multimillion-dollar, Miami-based human smuggling trade that left more than 60 Cubans dead last year alone in the treacherous straits that separate Florida from Cuba, just 90 miles away.

“Today is the beginning of the battle against the Cuban Adjustment Act,” shouted Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, 35, who represented the government onstage in Manzanillo.

He added that Saturday’s celebration of “a great victory of the people” was mixed with the sadness of the lives of so many Cubans lost at sea--men and women like Elian’s mother and fellow passengers who were killed when their smuggler’s boat capsized. Elian was rescued from an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day.

The boy’s separation from his father and fatherland touched the hearts of hundreds of thousands of families here who are divided from sons, parents, sisters and brothers now living in a country most cannot enter legally.

The workers, students, farmers and teachers who filled Manzanillo’s Celia Sanchez Manduley Plaza--named for Castro’s former personal secretary and confidant, who died of cancer in the 1970s--chanted their official slogans on cue. Schoolchildren waved their small Cuban flags in unison. And all shouted “Long live Fidel! Socialism or death!” with gusto and conviction.

But many seemed tired. And most simply shrugged, raised eyebrows or rolled their eyes when asked about what lies ahead--a mass demonstration every Saturday, in a different city each week, along with a continuing daily “Round Table” show on state-run TV.

Both Castro brothers acknowledged their nation’s exhaustion after the saga of Elian, who will remain out of sight for at least several weeks, along with his family, teachers and closest friends, in a seaside Havana villa.

“Our struggle cannot be without a cost,” Raul Castro told reporters under the noontime sun behind the Manzanillo stage. “But it’s preferable for us to get sweaty and tired than to live life lying down.”

He also used the occasion to address the fundamental issue that obsesses most Cubans in Miami--and U.S. officials: What will happen when, after at least 40 years of continuous rule, Fidel Castro is gone?

“Now they’re talking about that famous transition,” said the younger Castro, who was publicly anointed by his brother as his “good reliever” at a Communist Party congress in 1997.

“I’ve read dozens of articles about that famous transition: Who comes after? [They say] Castro’s brother would not be able to keep control. Here, anybody can have control.”

The president, for his part, addressed a different succession issue: the U.S. presidential election, which obsesses most Cubans here. They hope that a new American president will lift the punishing economic embargo.

But Castro spoke about the election with little more than a verbal shrug of defiant resignation.

“We don’t care who is the next head of government of the superpower that has imposed on the world its system of dominance and hegemonic power,” he said in ending his open letter.

“Whoever is the new president of the United States should know that Cuba is here, and will be here, with its ideas, its example and the unconquerable rebellion of its people.”