Newsweek, February 14, 2000

What exactly went on behind closed doors when Cuban raft-boy Elián González met with his grandmothers in Miami Beach last month? Elián's paternal grandmother Mariela González-Quintana provided some peculiar details last week to state-run Cuban television. When Elián seemed reticent at the outset of the meeting, Mariela Quintana said she teased him about his silence, asked the boy to stick out his tongue and then bit it. Later, she said, she undid Elián's zipper and asked him to reveal his private "parts"—apparently to see "whether they had grown."

The account left Elián's Miami relatives angry and flabbergasted. The boy's great-uncle Lazaro González has filed a petition to grant the first grader political asylum in the United States; he wants to keep the boy in Miami against the wishes of Elián's father, Juan Miguel González. "It's embarrassing," said Armando Gutierrez, a spokesman for the Miami family. "I came from Cuba when I was 11 years old, and my grandmother never measured me in that way." Instead of nibbling Elián's tongue, perhaps Grandma should have bitten her own.

© 2000 Newsweek, Inc.

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