By David Storey
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Cuban grandmothers of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez found him changed when they met him after he spent two months living with Miami relatives, a confidante of the two women said Thursday.
She was speaking amid charges that Elian's Miami relatives were manipulating the boy, who survived a shipwreck that killed his mother in November but has since been embroiled in a tug-of-war between Cuba and Cuban exiles in Florida.
``The grandmothers are worried about him. I think what they said immediately afterwards was 'he's not the same boy,''' said Joan Brown Campbell of the U.S. Council of Churches, which helped bring the grandmothers to the United States.
``I think they feel that he's been changed and they're more concerned than ever that he come home and be with his father before he is too changed,'' she said in an interview with ABC's Good Morning America.
Elian's father in Cuba, backed up by Cuba's communist leadership and mass demonstrations in Havana, has said Elian has been kidnapped and demanded that he be returned. Family members in Miami say he faces a better life in the United States.
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which has ruled that Elian should be returned to his father, ordered the reluctant relatives in Miami to bring the boy to a meeting with his grandmothers at a neutral place on Wednesday.
Attorney General Janet Reno, who has endorsed the INS position, commented indirectly on the relatives' practice of parading the boy before television cameras making V-for-victory signs and playing with a puppy they gave him.
At her weekly news conference, she said: ``I can't comment with respect to Elian but if my great nephew, who is only about a year, or a couple of months younger, had that happen to him, I sure wouldn't like it.''
After the meeting the boy emerged from a car at the relatives' Little Havana home and raised two fingers in a victory sign to cheers from a crowd -- though what he might have meant by that was impossible to say.
``I feel like he's more to this side than to that side,'' said his cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, who said she was happy and confident.
Later, he was paraded around the front yard of the home as the crowd chanted ``Libertad, Libertad'' (freedom, freedom).
Jorge Mas Santos, a millionaire businessman who leads the powerful Cuban American National Foundation, arrived back in the car with Elian.
Reno also said that the INS had, as expected, filed its response in federal court in Miami on Thursday morning to a suit brought by the relatives aimed at stymieing attempts to return the boy to Cuba.
``My hope is that people of good will who love the little boy can come together and reach some conclusion. We cannot forget what is at stake here is a six-year-old boy and he should not get caught up in other issues that do not have a direct bearing upon his life,'' Reno said.
In Havana Cuba's ruling Communist Party protested what it called the ``humiliating'' and ``inhuman'' treatment of the grandmothers during the meeting.
Havana complained that Elian's U.S. cousin, Marisleysis Gonzalez, violated ground rules of Wednesday's meeting by entering the reunion site with him, and that the grandmothers were later prevented from maintaining phone contact with Cuba.
The ``loving and heroic'' grandmothers endured ``deceits, lies, tricks, betrayals, humiliations, and an inhuman and despotic treatment,'' said a party statement.
The one-hour, 40-minute meeting was the first face-to-face contact between Elian and his family living in Cuba since he was picked up at sea off Florida Nov. 25, sparking a highly politicized feud between relatives on both sides over his future.
In the privacy of the residence of a respected Miami civic and religious leader, the two women who helped raise the boy in rural Cuba looked over a book of family photographs they had brought with them.
The grandmothers were back in Washington on Thursday, taking their case once again to sympathetic members of Congress who oppose moves led by some Republicans to rush through a bill to grant Elian U.S. citizenship or residency rights.
11:06 01-27-00
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