From Herald wire services

 CARDENAS, Cuba -- Boasting that ``the battle of ideas cannot be lost, and it will not be lost,'' Fidel Castro joined Elián González on Saturday in opening a new museum exhibit about Cuba's successful efforts to bring the boy back from the United States last year.

 The Cuban leader praised his government for persevering in its custody battle for Elián, who was rescued and taken to the United States after being shipwrecked off the coast of Florida.

 "It was the greatest battle that our people ever fought,'' Castro said of the custody fight.

 Castro spoke after a private meeting with Elián in the Museum of the Battle of Ideas here in the boy's hometown, about 85 miles east of Havana. The new exhibit fills one of the museum's five rooms.

 It includes a bronze statue of Elián, some of his personal items, letters and postcards to him from Cuban schoolchildren, and a wide selection of photos and newspaper articles about the boy's return to Cuba.

 The museum is in a colonial-era building that has been a fire station and a conventional historical museum. It has been remodeled over the past 10 months and has been reopened under the new name.

 "The battle of ideas'' was a Castro phrase that originally referred to Cuba's campaign to retrieve Elián, but recently has come to describe an ideological campaign to
 reinforce the values of Cuban communism among the island's younger generation.

 "The battle of ideas cannot be lost, and it will not be lost,'' Castro wrote in the visitors' book at the museum Saturday.

 The same museum held an exhibition before Elián's return to Cuba that included pictures drawn by his Cuban classmates. A later exhibition showed Mother's Day cards drawn by Elián and four classmates who visited him in Washington.

 Elián, now 7, was found floating in an inner tube off Florida in 1999 after a boat carrying Cuban emigrants sank, killing his mother and 10 other people. His rescue touched off a custody battle between his father in Cuba, Juan Miguel González, and other relatives in Florida.

 A raid by U.S. authorities to seize him from the Florida relatives outraged many Cuban exiles in Miami. The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled in his father's favor, and Elián returned to Cuba in June 2000.

                                    © 2001