Video for Elián Is Called Letter From Home
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
HAVANA, April
27 -- His classmates blow kisses into the camera
and promise
hearty hugs when he returns. His relatives clown for
the camera,
with one donning a wig to the delighted squeals of the clan.
Two cousins
splash about in a swimming pool, show off karate moves --
in slow motion
as dreamy violins play -- and romp with three puppies in
an idyllic park
that could be in, well, Miami.
But it is not.
It is Cuba, and it is a home video, shot in and around his
hometown, Cárdenas,
and sent to Elián González in Maryland as a sort
of letter from
home.
The ostensible
reason is to counteract any homesickness Elián may feel
as he and his
father await court rulings to determine whether the boy
should remain
in the United States as is the wish of Miami relatives who
had cared for
the boy after his shipwreck last November. He was
removed from
their home by immigration agents last Saturday after they
refused to turn
him over.
But the indisputable
message for Elián -- and perhaps Cubans who saw
excerpts of
the 41-minute video last night and this morning on television
-- is that,
whatever impressions they may have of Miami, life is good
here, too.
The video is
part of the propaganda campaign President Fidel Castro has
waged almost
since the inception of the case.
Every night for
over two hours Cuba's two television stations, which are
state run, broadcast
round-table discussions in which a panel of six or
seven people
-- journalists, law professors and psychologists -- often
citing news
reports in the United States, dissect the latest turns in the case
before an studio
audience that often includes Mr. Castro.
One of the fixtures
in the broadcasts has been Yasmani Betancourt,
Elián's
10-year-old cousin who arrived in Washington on Wednesday for
a visit with
Elián. Cuban television has broadcast interviews with the boy
in which he
expresses how much he misses his cousin and playmate.
Yasmani is at
center stage in the video, doing the karate kicks, and
speaking at
a demonstration before thousands of people last Saturday in
a rural town,
Jagüey Grande, after Elián was returned to his father.
"The demonstrations,
the video, the round-table discussions all are
calculated to
whip up patriotic fervor, with this boy at the center of it all."
a Western diplomat
said of the fight over Elián.
To a large extent
the propaganda war is aimed at answering the
Cuban-American
community in Miami, routinely referred to here as the
Miami mafia
by party stalwarts. And so Cuban news media have taken
unusual steps,
replaying CNN, NBC and CBS interviews -- faithfully
translated into
Spanish -- with Attorney General Janet Reno, the
immigration
commissioner, Doris Meissner, and other officials.
Cuban television
has shown extensive images of Miami and anti-Castro
demonstrators,
glimpses rarely seen here except by those with the illegal
satellite dishes
or antennas.
The images shown
on Cuban television, however, seem intended less to
present the
other side than to set up incendiary commentary. The pictures
are usually
accompanied by analysis from Cuban journalists ridiculing
things like
the weeping visage of Marisleysis González, Elián's cousin,
who has fought
for his custody, and the "total failure" of demonstrators to
shut down the
city on Tuesday in protest of Elián's seizure.
Cuban commentators
on the round-table discussions have often repeated
an important
criticism of Mr. Castro by the Cuban-American community
in Miami, that
Elián will be brainwashed upon his return, though such
remarks have
been quickly and arduously disputed by Cuban
psychologists.
In the Cuban
video, images of horse and buggies clattering by stone
bungalows on
the streets of Cárdenas are interspersed with clips of
neighbors and
relatives in their homes wishing him a quick return. A
cousin reports
how much he has grown.
After its broadcast,
a beaming Cuban commentator pronounced it
"moving."