By Anita Snow, .c The Associated Press
HAVANA, 3 (AP) - A leader of the National Council of Churches arrived in Cuba to meet today with the father of a 6-year-old boy who was rescued at sea and to discuss efforts to return the child from the United States.
``We are puzzled why it has taken so long,'' said the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, the council's outgoing general secretary, after her arrival late Sunday night. ``We thought the child would have been returned by now.''
The boy, Elian Gonzalez, was paroled by U.S. officials to his paternal great-uncle in Miami in late November after the boy was found clinging to an inner tube off the Florida coast. Elian's mother died in the apparent attempt to illegally emigrate to the United States.
The case has become a political tug-of-war, with the boy's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, demanding that his son be returned to him in Cuba and the great-uncle fighting to keep the child with him in Miami.
People on both sides of the Florida Straits have used the case to make their own political points for or against Fidel Castro's communist government.
Campbell informed the White House about the group's trip and efforts to reunite Elian with his father. The council is the United States' largest ecumenical organization, representing 35 Protestant and Orthodox denominations comprising 52 million congregants.
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service postponed until Jan. 21 a hearing that had been scheduled for before Christmas, dragging out Elian's case for another month.
Campbell and the Rev. Oscar Bolioli, director of the council's office for Latin America and the Caribbean, had a meeting scheduled today with Gonzalez in the family's hometown, Cardenas, a two-hour's drive east of Havana. Also scheduled to attend the meeting were Elian's four grandparents and a
great-grandmother - all of whom want the boy returned to Cuba.
The council has been working with the Cuban Council of Churches on the case, Campbell said.
Campbell wrapped up her term as general secretary with the beginning of the new year on Saturday, but she said the new general secretary, the Rev. Robert W. Edgar, asked her to make the trip because of her two decades of experience in dealing with Cuba.
AP-NY-01-03-00 0235EST
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