An old man transports equipment past the cathedral to a nearby outdoor market. No one's gotten over it. Everyone talks about it. Some long for reconciliation. Others fear it.
Parents press their children to take sides.
In the evening, when Cubans usually seek refuge from their grinding reality in foreign soap operas, the airwaves are taken over by demands for his return. Sometimes bars are painted around his picture, to depict his ''imprisonment'' by the Miami relatives who are fighting his Cuban father to keep him in Florida. In this crumbling country, Elian's image adorns new T-shirts, handed out free by the government and visible everywhere. Buses and military trucks habitually unload demonstrators at the plaza beside the U.S. mission in Havana, which crews are turning into a permanent protest site. City workers, university teachers and seas of students fill out the crowds, waiting for the buses that brought them to take them home.