The crowd, which grew to 100,000, gathered for a speakout to demand that the U.S. government return Elián González to his country and to protest Washington's hostile policy against the Cuban revolution. The U.S. government has yet to return the six-year-old since he was found adrift off the Florida coast in November. The boy and his father, Juan Miguel González, are currently housed at an estate in Maryland, awaiting a decision by a federal court before being allowed to return to Cuba. The court is expected to decide in the coming weeks on a request for political asylum for the boy filed by distant relatives living in Miami.

Rallies like the May 20 event are held every Saturday in a different part of Cuba. They are organized by the Union of Young Communists and other mass organizations.

Vice president Raul Castro attended the Mariel rally, where speaker after speaker--students, a sugar mill worker, a teacher, local officials, and others--explained how Washington's policies seek to destroy the Cuban revolution. They condemned the Helms-Burton and Torricelli laws, which tighten the four-decade-long U.S. trade embargo against the Caribbean nation, and the Cuban Adjustment Act, which encourages Cubans to emigrate outside legal channels by granting them U.S. residency if they make it to U.S. soil.

Mariel, located about 50 miles from Havana, was the launch area in 1980 for tens of thousands of Cubans who set out in small boats and homemade rafts to emigrate to the United States. At that time, in response to a series of aggressive actions by the Carter administration and its provocative claims that Havana prevented people from emigrating, the revolutionary government opened the port of Mariel, calling Washington's bluff.

Several speakers underlined the importance of having the rally at this port city and giving a different meaning to the word "Mariel."  
 
 
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