NEARLY SIX YEARS LATER, Elián Gonzalez remains as ineffably cute as ever. Sunday night’s 60 Minutes piece on the Cuban boy plucked from the sea taught us that–and not much else we didn’t already know.

Anyone who’s paid even a scintilla of attention to Elián, now age 11, since he returned to his native island in June 2000 realizes that he’s become a full-fledged totem of Castroism: a “conquering hero,” as CBS’s Bob Simon put it, who gets a chummy audience with the bearded dictator and whose likeness permeates Cuban propaganda.