By Lisa Baertlein
MIAMI, Jan 9 (Reuters) - A U.S. congressman whose committee issued a subpoena to bar 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez from being returned to his father in Cuba said on Sunday it would back down if courts rule the boy must go home.
A poll, meanwhile, showed Americans by a wide margin favour sending Elian back to Cuba, as the White House has sought and as Elian's father and Cuban President Fidel Castro have angrily demanded.
While Cuban exile leaders and politicians continued their rhetorical war over Elian, the child was cheered on Sunday at the annual Three Kings Day parade in Miami's Little Havana.
Representative Dan Burton, who heads the House Government Reform Committee that issued the subpoena on Friday, said opponents of sending Elian to Cuba should accept any court decision ordering the boy returned to the island nation.
Elian has been living with Cuban exile relatives in Miami since he was found clinging to an inner tube in the Atlantic in November.
``If the court decides the boy should go back then we should live with that. If the court decides the boy should stay here ...then we will live with that,'' Burton, an Indiana Republican and head of the Government Reform Committee, said on the ABC programme ``This Week.''
FATHER SAID FIT PARENT
The boy arrived in Miami after surviving a shipwreck in which his mother and 10 other people drowned while fleeing Cuba. He spent two days alone on an inner tube before being rescued by fishermen on Thanksgiving Day.
On Wednesday, U.S. immigration officials ruled that his father, a hotel worker in Cardenas who was divorced from his mother, Elisabet, was a fit parent and that Elian should go back to him.
The subpoena aimed to give the courts time to rule on the boy's fate before the Jan. 14 target date set by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) for his return.
A Miami-Dade County family court said it expected to issue a ruling early this week on a petition from Elian's Miami relatives to gain temporary custody of the boy.
White House spokesman Joe Lockhart had no comment on whether the U.S. government would send the boy back in defiance of the subpoena, but reiterated Washington's call to keep politics out of the matter.
``What should be done here should be based on the facts and the law (and) what's best for the young boy, and politics should be kept out of it,'' Lockhart told reporters travelling with U.S. President Bill Clinton to Middle East peace talks in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
NATIONAL POLL BACKS RETURN
In a national CNN poll, 56 percent said the boy should be reunited with his father in Cuba and 35 percent backed allowing him to stay in the United States. The poll had a margin of error of four percentage points, but the network did not say how many people were interviewed for it.
In Miami, the international custody battle over Elian has revealed a deep divide between exiles and their non-Hispanic neighbours.
In a recent poll conducted by WLTV-Channel 23, 86 percent of respondents from Miami's Hispanic majority opposed last week's INS decision to reunite Elian and his father. But 70 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 79 percent of non-Hispanic blacks said they agreed with the decision.
Editorial page letters and man-on-the-street interviews in the city also revealed deep divisions over Elian's fate.
``The INS finally got the nerve to state the obvious: A child doesn't belong to the wealthiest relative or the relative in the wealthiest country, but with his parents,'' said reader Andrew MacFarlane in a letter to the Miami Herald on Sunday.
Cuban exiles, who say they want Elian brought up in freedom in the United States, vowed to continue their fight against the INS decision last week to permit the return of the boy to his father and grandparents in the communist-ruled island.
After unruly protests that disrupted traffic and blocked the Port of Miami last week, hardline Cuban exiles suspended demonstrations on Saturday after the subpoena was issued.
But the exile group Democracy Movement has called on protesters ``to remain on...alert'' for a possible call to converge on Miami International Airport in a new round of civil disobedience.
STAR AT THE PARADE
At the annual Three Kings Day parade in Miami's Little Havana neighbourhood, participants on floats flashed Elian ``V'' for victory signs as he sat in the grandstand with relatives waving U.S. and Cuban flags.
As anti-Castro Cuban-American politicians including Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart filed by, Elian played in the grandstand, shooting streams of ``Silly String'' at other children in the crowd.
The parade marks the Day of the Epiphany, celebrated by many Christians as the day Jesus was revealed to the Three Magi. Fellow Cuban community hero Orlando ``El Duque'' Hernandez, a star pitcher for the New York Yankees who also left Cuba in a small boat, got out of a parade car and walked to
the stands to greet the boy.
22:35 01-09-00
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