HAVANA — Waving a Cuban flag, President Fidel Castro's brother and official successor, Raul Castro, led tens of thousands of protesters Saturday in a rally to demand the return of 6-year-old shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez.
The patriotic demonstration in the eastern province of Granma came a day after the boy's Miami relatives said they would only turn him over to U.S. authorities if agents from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service came to fetch him at their home, which has been surrounded by vocal anti-Castro protesters.
U.S. Department of Justice officials have been pressing the family to agree by Tuesday to turn over the boy if, among other things, there was "a material change of circumstances, including the father's coming to the United States," the Miami Herald reported.
U.S. authorities have been pressuring Elian's Miami relatives to pledge to obey an Atlanta appeals court ruling when it considers whether the boy belongs with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, in Cuba. Oral arguments are set for the week of May 8.
Despite the heightened tension, the four-month saga of motherless Elian, who was found floating in an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day, shows no sign of ending. Elian's mother and 10 others drowned in that disastrous trip.
Since November, the boy's father, backed by the Cuban and U.S. governments, has waged an international custody battle with Elian's more distant Miami relatives, backed by vocal Cuban-Americans in Miami who are determined that Elian not return to communist Cuba.
The 50,000-strong crowd in Niquero waved flags and chanted, "Free Elian!" as dancers and singers performed between speeches laced with anti-American diatribes and praise for the Cuban Revolution.
"There is not a boy, a mother, a father, or an elderly person who will stop fighting for the freedom of Elian," shouted one girl, Virgen Martinez Fonseca, speaking on behalf of Cuba's state-affiliated children's Pioneer movement.