Young Cubans Suggest Effort Is Failing

                  By John Ward Anderson
                  Washington Post Foreign Service

                  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."