With its long experience of housing Vietnamese boat people, Hong Kong knows well that when it comes to politics, diplomacy and immigration, the gap between rhetoric and reality is often a painfully cynical one. So too is it the case with Elian.

The facts themselves, however, are as straightforward as they are moving.

On Thanksgiving Day, Elian was one of three Cubans rescued by fishermen from the waters of Miami, clinging to an inner-tube after their boat sank.

His mother was among the 11 others who drowned. Once ashore in the United States, Elian was taken in by Cuban-American relatives in Florida. Despite an Immigration and Naturalisation Service decision that he should be returned to his father in Havana, they are fighting through the courts to keep him, saying his mother's last wish was that he grow up free in the United States.

His father, Juan Miguel, is a decent man by all accounts and wants him back. Just yesterday he wrote again to Attorney-General Janet Reno pointing out the illegality of Elian's continued stay in the US. The longer the case drags on, however, the more it is masking some glaring hypocrisies.

For most of the decade, both Democrats and Republicans alike have been making it harder than ever to get to the US for asylum-seekers, whether they are fleeing communist Cuba or China or other desperately poor Caribbean states.

Only 38 per cent of those who make it into the US and seek asylum are granted the permission to stay.

'Show the people one Elian,' said social commentator Jonathan Rauch, 'and they see a desperate child. Show them thousands and they see an 'influx'.' Elian's fortunes were boosted by the mere fact he was pulled from the sea by fishermen and taken ashore. Under a 1996 law, Cubans who manage to reach dry land are virtually assured of asylum. Had he been caught at sea by the US Coast Guard - a force now patrolling international waters for this very purpose - he would have returned without ever having set foot in the US, like 900 of his fellow country-folk last year.

He would have been even worse off if he were born in nearby Haiti, an island nation with far more serious poverty in parts than Cuba and a brutal right-wing government that barely functions. Haitians enjoy no such 'dry land' loophole. On New Year's Day, 400 Haitians - including children - washed ashore on the Florida coast in a leaking wooden boat. Four had died in the crossing. Virtually all who survived are already back in Port Au Prince.

'If Elian Gonzalez were Haitian,' wrote Elmer Smith in the Philiadelphia Daily News, 'he would have been out of here so fast you could water-ski behind the boat that hauled him home.' The defiance of Cuban leader Fidel Castro - another Cuban dad who lost his only son to the US more than three decades ago - and vast protests across Cuba have done little to build sympathy for the father's case in the US.

Many here write-off the demonstrations as propaganda - a claim only partly true. Any mention of Dr Castro meanwhile still sets pulses racing in anger on all sides of the US political spectrum, fuelled by a powerful Cuba-American lobby in Miami.

Elian's plight is yet another reminder that Cuba still labours under a strict US economic embargo of the sort that once helped cripple a victorious Vietnam. Poverty as much as persecution underpins the desire to flee. Slowly but surely preparations are under way in the private sector and some political circles for the day the embargo is finally lifted. Most expect that to happen only when Dr Castro dies or is finally forced from power. Just like the embargo, Dr Castro has survived eight US presidencies but he probably won't make it through a ninth.

And, just like Vietnam, only when the embargo is finally lifted will illegal immigration - and the horrors and contradictions it produces - start to end.

Greg Torode is the Post's Washington correspondent