"Let Juan Miguel, Elián and family go home!" stated the leaflet used to publicize the picket in New York, which drew 100 people to Union Square in Manhattan. The sponsoring coalition, the National Committee for the Return of Elián to his Father in Cuba, demanded "Lift the U.S. blockade and travel ban on Cuba," and "No more Eliáns, repeal the Cuban Adjustment Act." The anti-Cuba measure encourages perilous immigration from Cuba to the United States outside legal channels by granting those who touch U.S. shores a fast track to residency rights. At the same time the U.S. government places strict limits on legal immigration from Cuba into this country.

The demonstrators in New York picketed, chanted, and listened to speeches by representatives of numerous organizations, including Casa de las Americas. A local Spanish-language TV channel carried reports of the protests.

Forty people joined a picket line in San Francisco to call for the immediate return of the boy and his family to Cuba. "Now is the time to stand by the Cuban Revolution," Sierra Madrid of the Venceremos Brigade told participants. She attacked the U.S. government's long-standing ban on travel to Cuba.

At the federal courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, 15 people picketed during the afternoon rush hour. One of the pickets, Susan LaMont, told the press, "We are here to demand the asylum proceedings be stopped. The U.S. government has no authority in this case. The boy should be returned to his family in Cuba immediately. We are calling for repeal of the Cuban Adjustment Act, which encourages people like Elián's mother to take rickety boats across the Florida Straits; and to end the trade embargo against Cuba."

More than a dozen people protested outside the federal courthouse in downtown Philadelphia in an action called by the Philadelphia Cuba Coalition. Among those demonstrating were two students from Bryn Mawr college who heard about the demonstration by an Internet posting at their school. A number of cars passing by honked their horns in support of the picket after reading the large signs protesters held highlighting the demands of the demonstration. The picket attracted a number of area media, including two TV stations, as well as the local Temple University–based National Public Radio affiliate.

The Atlanta Network on Cuba held an action May 10 outside venue for the asylum hearing. In Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, supporters of Cuban sovereignty also organized pickets.

The protests responded to the fact that Elián González remains in the United States more than five months after being picked up from the waters off the Florida Coast, having survived a journey from Cuba in which his mother and 10 others drowned.

At present the boy, along with his father, Juan Miguel González, and other family members and friends, is staying at a U.S. government retreat in Maryland. The judges hearing the asylum case have barred the boy from leaving the country until they rule.

Juan Miguel and Elián González were taken to Maryland after the April 22 seizure of the boy by agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Around 130 INS cops and 20 U.S. marshals, many of them heavily armed, burst into the Miami house of Lázaro González in the predawn hours. INS officials had delivered Elián to the household last November.

"We have promised that we will give this case expedited treatment," said Circuit Judge J.L. Edmondson, the senior figure on the three-judge panel that presides over the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court stands one step below the U.S. Supreme Court. "My guess is that we will be able to render a decision in this case in a few weeks, rather than a few months," he said. In the first day's proceedings Edmondson twice referred to Cuba as a "communist, totalitarian state."

In Cuba, a rally of 50,000 people May 13 on the Isle of Youth backed up the call for the immediate return of Juan Miguel and Elián González. The occasion was a celebration of the 45th anniversary of the release of Fidel Castro from a notorious prison used by the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The revolutionary government formed after Batista's overthrow in 1959 turned the prison into a school. "Our legacy for the present and future generations is...we are and will continue to be in a state of combat," Pedro Miret, vice president of Cuba's Council of Ministers, told the crowd.  
 
 
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