HAVANA -- (AP) -- President Fidel Castro exhorted about 400,000 rallying
 Cubans on Saturday to keep up the pressure on the United States to return Elian
 Gonzalez -- and to continue their protests against Washington even after the boy
 is home.

 ``Not even when Elian and his valiant father return to Cuba with their family and
 close friends will we take a minute's rest!'' Castro said in a message read on his
 behalf at a rally in the eastern city of Holguin.

 Cubans have a ``sacred duty'' to keep fighting against the U.S. embargo on the
 island, laws that allow Cubans who reach U.S. soil to remain, and America's
 ``incessant policies of subversive and destabilization'' against the Cuban
 revolution, the message said.

 The rally was held a day after a U.S. federal appeals court in Atlanta refused to
 review the case of 6-year-old Elian, forcing his Miami relatives to take their appeal
 to keep him in the United States to the U.S. Supreme Court.

 The relatives have said they would appeal. The highest court in the United States
 hears about 1 percent of the cases it receives.

 Castro warned the flag-waving crowd that the legal process could still take
 months and that the relatives would use all legal means available to them
 because they had no scruples about ``torturing the victims of their hatred'' by
 pursing the case.

 But he noted that public opinion polls in the United States overwhelmingly
 supported Elian's father's right to decide his future -- sentiments ``which cannot
 and will never be forgotten,'' said the message, read by a television anchor to the
 crowd in Holguin, about 730 kilometers (455 miles) east of the capital Havana.

 Elian was rescued off the Florida coast in November after his mother and 10 other
 people drowned when their boat sank en route from Cuba to the United States.

 The Miami relatives argue that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta
 was wrong to uphold an Immigration and Naturalization Service decision that Elian
 should return to Cuba with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who came to the
 United States in April to bring him home.

 On Friday, the tribunal denied the family's request for a rehearing and said its
 earlier stay requiring Elian's father to keep the boy in the United States will
 dissolve at 4 p.m. (2000 GMT) Wednesday.

 At the rally, headed by Castro's brother, Raul Castro, the No. 2 man in both
 Cuba's Communist Party and the government's ruling Council of State, as well as
 head of the armed forces, speaker after speaker denounced the Miami relatives
 for continuing to keep Elian in the United States.

 Cuba has staged similar rallies around the country in the seven months that Elian
 has been away, but Saturday's was the first that also focused on a non-Cuban
 topic: the death penalty in the United States.

 Official Cuban media has spent much of this week criticizing the case of Gary
 Graham, who was executed by lethal injection Thursday night in Texas.

 In his message, Castro said Graham had been ``assassinated,'' because he was
 black and poor.