Dissidents fear harsh campaign to boost Cuba's communist zeal

 BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

 Ever the master tactician, President Fidel Castro of Cuba has scored a powerful propaganda victory with
 Elián González' return following a campaign that he compared to the impact of U.S. public opinion on
 the Vietnam War.

 The long-term effect of the Elián saga is uncertain with dissidents fearing that Castro may now launch
 a harsh campaign to resuscitate Cuba's ideological spirits, flagging since the collapse of communism in
 Eastern Europe in 1989.

 But in the short run, Castro has unquestionably managed to spin the drownings of Elián's
 mother and nine others in a desperate attempt to leave the island into a case in which Cuba
 became the victim and exiles became the victimizers.

 ``Even those of us who see him as one of the most bloody and repugnant
 dictators that Latin America's authoritarian fauna has produced must tip our hats,''
 Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa wrote recently.

 With ``chilling cynicism, he manipulated the Elián case so that for . . . months no
 one talked of the satrapy he created or the catastrophic economic condition that
 the Cuban people suffer, only of the boy martyr,'' he added.

 Elián's saga eclipsed even the black eye that Castro suffered in November when
 five heads of state attending an Ibero-American Summit in November met with
 leading dissidents, giving Cuba's small opposition movement the most
 international recognition it had ever received.

 Castro achieved victory with typical intensity and abandon, like a general at war,
 calling virtually every shot in the seven-month-long campaign and committing
 scarce resources to the battle.

 He closed factories and schools so that millions of Cubans could join
 demonstrations demanding Elián's return and ordered all television and radio
 stations to devote at least four hours a day to the case.

 Castro appeared on almost all of the nightly programs, sometimes sitting quietly
 in the audience, most often giving long explanations of everything from the U.S.
 legal system to the anti-depressant pills seized by U.S. Customs from a Cuban
 doctor who treated Elián in Washington.

 He has acknowledged spending $2 million on T-shirts, posters and in other ways
 to aid the protest. He even built an amphitheater, known jokingly as a
 ``protest-o-drome'' in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana.

 ``We're always mismatched. Castro commits all his resources, and we don't take
 him seriously,'' said Richard Nuccio, a former Clinton administration adviser on
 Cuba who favored Elián's return to Cuba.

 And when visiting U.S. journalists didn't publish Cuban officials' tips of sexual
 misconduct by two Elián relatives in Miami, he made the allegations public
 himself, in effect forcing the media to publish them.

 Cuban exiles meanwhile appeared to play right into Castro's hands, stubbornly
 opposing the boy's return to his father, Juan Miguel González, and to Cuba in the
 face of personal entreaties from Attorney General Janet Reno.

 Many Americans came to see exiles as radical right-wingers and ungrateful
 immigrants, willing to defy U.S. laws and then launch street protests when federal
 agents removed Elián from his Miami relatives' home in April.

 ANTI-EMBARGO MOOD

 The anti-exile wave in turn boosted the anti-embargo lobby in the United States,
 which won a major victory Tuesday with a congressional agreement to ease
 restrictions on food and medical sales to Cuba.

 ``The more isolated Cuban exiles become, the easier it is for the anti-embargo
 lobby to operate in Washington,'' said Pamela Falk, a City University of New York
 law professor who is writing a book on Cuba.

 The Elián case has been, Castro said last month, ``a lesson for us [that] public
 opinion in the United States deserves much more consideration. . . . For me,
 there have been two important moments in which public opinion has played a key
 role -- during the Vietnam war, and in the case of Elián.'' Beyond the propaganda
 victory, Castro managed to mobilize many Cubans around a nationalist cause at
 a time when some analysts were saying that his decision to legalize dollar
 remittances from exiles had left the 73-year-old leader looking increasingly
 irrelevant to the island's daily life.

 ``Many Cubans now praise Castro for again proving that he can protect the
 country's children, and protect the nation itself,'' said Vivian Mannerud, owner of
 Airline Brokers Co., a Miami firm that charters flights to Cuba.

 Some analysts also say that Castro's ability to keep his relations with the Clinton
 administration on an even keel throughout the seven-month battle may have won
 him some good will in Washington.

 ``There's been a maturing of bilateral relations,'' said John Kavulich, head of the
 U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, a New York group that monitors
 business opportunities in Cuba.

 What else Castro may have achieved with Elián's return is in question, however.

 Castro can hardly be said to have won a victory over the Clinton administration,
 since Washington began backing Elián's return to Cuba since shortly after his
 rescue from an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day.

 IMPROVED RELATIONS?

 ``This was a victory for Elián's father and the rule of law, not for Fidel,'' said Robert
 Pastor, a former Latin American adviser to President Jimmy Carter and now at
 Emory University in Atlanta.

 State Department officials have been quick to reject speculation on improved
 relations following an Elián settlement, saying that Havana's lack of democracy
 remains at the root of the animosity between the two countries.

 ``They just built a permanent protest center in front of our mission and we
 slammed them in Geneva'' over a U.N. resolution condemning Cuba's human
 rights record, one department official said. ``Gee, I don't think this signals major
 changes.''

 In Havana, meanwhile, Cubans have been awaiting Elián's return with mixed
 feelings.

 ``First there will be relief that the child is back and that . . . the endless
 propaganda on television will end,'' said one Cuban journalist in Havana. ``We are
 tired, very tired of all this.''

 But the journalist and other Cubans interviewed by telephone cautioned that the
 initial relief could be followed by a tough campaign to pull up Cuba's revolutionary
 socks, drooping since communism's collapse in 1989.

 ``I now perceive an overgrown sense of triumphalism within government circles,
 said human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez. ``It looks like Fidel is heading for a
 tropical version of China's Cultural Revolution.''

 Mao Zedong was in his early 70s, about the same age as Castro, when he
 launched his disastrous attempt to revive China's flagging revolutionary zeal.

 At a time when Cubans are growing increasingly frustrated with the economic
 crisis left by the end of Soviet subsidies in 1991, Sánchez added, any new
 tightening of government controls ``could strip the thread.''