Fidel Castro took an active role in May Day festivities for the first time in years Monday, marching in the parade and ending a speech with a cell-phone call to Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who is fighting to bring his son, Elian, home to Cuba.

Castro traded his black boots for white tennis shoes, grasped a red, white and blue Cuban flag and led hundreds of thousands of people through the streets of Havana. With a white T-shirt peeking out from his traditional olive green uniform, the 73-year-old leader who has ruled this island for 41 years guided a sea of chanting, flag-waving men, women and children from Havana's sprawling Plaza of the Revolution to the U.S. Interests Section almost two miles away. The scene was reminiscent of Castro in his early years in power, after the revolution that triumphed on New Year's Day 1959. During his speech, Castro linked Elian's case to Cuba's struggle against the U.S. trade embargo and international criticism of the island's human-rights record. He accused a "Cuban-American terrorist mob" of fighting to keep the shipwreck survivor in the United States. Castro said he is not convinced that an appeals court in Atlanta, which has set a May 11 hearing in the case, will rule in favor of Elian's father. Father and son are staying in the United States pending the hearing on a request by their Miami relatives for a political asylum hearing for the boy. The gathering this year was also unusual in that it was being described as an "open tribune" - the government term used to describe the mass concentrations regularly held to press for Elian's return to Cuba. Elian's case has absorbed Cubans and their government since Nov. 25, when the boy was found floating on an inner tube off the Florida coast following a boating accident that killed his mother and 10 others. The castaway quickly found himself at the center of an international custody battle. His anti-communist Miami relatives are fighting to keep him in the United States, while his father is demanding to take the boy back to Cuba. Elian was reunited with his father in Washington last week after a dramatic raid of the Miami relatives' home. Armed agents whisked the boy away and flew him to his dad. The raid has been bitterly criticized by the Miami relatives and many of their supporters in South Florida's large Cuban-American community, as well as by conservative members of Congress.