A Six-Year-Old's Plight Is a Gift to Havana

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It's not like the Cuban-American anti-Castro lobby to spoon-feed the aging strongman a propaganda victory, but then things haven't been going their way for some time now. The anti-Castro camp is fighting to keep Elian Gonzalez, who turned six Monday, from being reunited with his father in Cuba, after his mother and stepfather died when their vessel went down on the journey from Cuba. Elian, who was found clinging to an inner tube, was placed with relatives in Florida, and anti-Castro activists have showered him with toys and urged that he be allowed to stay to enjoy the freedom he'd be denied in Cuba. The almost soap-operatic human dimension of the story of a boy separated from his natural father — who, by most accounts, was his primary caregiver — by an ideological dispute has been grist to the mill for Castro's propaganda machine, which has used it to rally Cuban public opinion against Washington.

"Both sides are using this as a propaganda strategy, and the only one who really loses out is Elian," says TIME Miami bureau chief Tim Padgett. "The Cuban-American community in Miami is holding the boy up as an anti-Castro cherub to keep the heat up on their political agenda and put pressure on Washington not to return the boy to his father, while the Cuban government is turning the issue into an epic Cold War crusade when all they really have to do is let the father travel to Miami and let any family court judge release Elian to him." But that would be passing up a propaganda gift.