By Steven Gutkin, Associated Press. Sun-Sentinel. Web-posted: 10:12 a.m. Feb. 18, 2000
CARDENAS, Cuba -- Cuban officials insist that Elian Gonzalez's mother undertook her fatal journey to the United States under pressure from a brutal boyfriend with a long criminal record.
But interviews with those who knew the couple in their home province indicate that the government's depiction of the boyfriend, Lazaro Munero, as a violent felon was likely an exaggeration.
"I would not categorize him as a criminal," said Seida Garcia, a former school official in the small town of Jaguey Grande, where Munero was transferred after misbehaving at another school down the road.
What emerges from the interviews is a love story between a hardworking young woman in good standing with the Communist Party and an anxious young man who liked to buck the system.
Munero and Elian's mother, Elisabeth Brotons, were killed along with nine other people when the boat they were riding in sank in the Atlantic. Clinging to an inner tube, Elian survived two days alone at sea until he was rescued on Nov. 25.
The boy is now living in Miami with his paternal great uncle who's fighting to keep him in the United States, claiming his mother died trying to bring him to freedom.
Cuba's communist government has turned the case into a major national crusade, demanding that the boy be returned to his father in Cuba and insisting Brotons made the trip under "threats and violence" from Munero.
Brotons apparently told no one of her plans to leave Cuba, but some of her friends in her home town of Cardenas believe she left neither to pursue freedom nor because she was threatened. She just wanted to be with Munero, they said.
"I can say she did what she did because of love," said Lisbeth Garcia, 28, who worked alongside Brotons as a hotel chambermaid.
To understand the story of Lazaro and Elisabeth is to understand life in Cardenas, where the Communist Party controls most of daily life, where many people still get around by horse and buggy and where earning an extra buck through prohibited activities is common.
A big banner near the city's entrance reads: "Elian, your city awaits you!"
Much of what the Cuban government has said about Munero is true: that he once broke into a tourist's hotel room, that he was kicked out of a high school for dropping feces-filled cans into a courtyard, that he illegally used his car as a taxi and sold beer on the black market.
But it's also true that the Cuban government, which employs widespread surveillance, turned over virtually every rock in Munero's life. Not surprisingly, it found some dirt.
U.S. immigration authorities earlier said that they believed Munero earned money by smuggling aliens and charged passengers for the fatal trip. Although the two adults who survived with Elian said they paid Munero $1,000 each for the journey, it remains unclear if Munero made his living as
an alien smuggler.
Last week Cuba's Communist Party daily Granma published a long expose describing Munero's "fines, convictions for armed robberies, felonies, swindle, the crime of buying and selling stolen goods, all sorts of illegal activities, alcohol abuse and others."
Several of Brotons' friends in Cardenas said they heard about Munero's violent personality in government news reports after the tragedy, but never actually saw him mistreat Brotons. In fact, some said he treated both her and Elian well.
"He was very good to the boy. Every morning they would wait for Elisa to catch her bus and then Lazaro would take the boy to school," Garcia said.
Added 67-year-old Clemente Robaina, whose daughter is married to Brotons' brother Pedro: "To me he was a good person."
Other acquaintances echoed the government's position, calling Munero a bully and a thug.
Few were willing to speak well of Munero, which would mean contradicting the party line.
One man whom neighbors described as Munero's best friend refused to let his name be used or even speak about the case, saying he could get in trouble.
One of Elian's former neighbors said she thinks Munero got a bum rap.
"The dead don't talk. Who will defend him now?" she said, refusing to give her name because she said she could "go to jail for 20 years" for publicly disagreeing with the government.
The newspaper Granma said Munero, as an 18-year-old in 1993, was convicted for breaking into a hotel room in the nearby tourist mecca of Varadero and stealing from a German tourist.
But Hector Reyes, the hotel's security chief, described the incident as minor.
"There's a long list of similar incidents from back then because there was no security or fence around the hotel. It was more to make trouble than any serious robbery," he said.
Garcia, the former school official, confirmed that Munero had been in trouble for dropping the feces-filled cans and for slightly injuring a fellow student with a sharp metal object during a fight.
She described him as a fun-loving kid who loved to dance but who was also "very conflictive." She said he wasn't her worst student or even one of her worst.
"He always wanted to be the center of attention," she said.
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