Published Wednesday, January 26, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Grandmas find a few D.C. supporters
By Carol Rosenberg , crosenberg@herald.com
WASHINGTON -- Elian Gonzalez's grandmothers campaigned in a blizzard-paralyzed Congress Tuesday and won outspoken support from five senators and a handful of House members against making their grandson a U.S. citizen.
``Elian ought to go home and be with his father. This is ridiculous and shameful,'' said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., flanked by four other senators. ``You can have good families in bad countries. I regret deeply that this matter has come to Washington, D.C.''
Raquel Rodriguez and Mariela Quintana made a flurry of public and private pleas to block the citizenship move one day after an ill-fated mission to meet privately with their grandson in Miami. They had spent Monday night in the home of a consular officer for the Cuban Interest Section after
arriving in Washington late Monday with no hotel reservations.
``I ask all the American people who are on our side, and those who can help us, to stop the U.S. citizenship for our grandson,'' said Quintana, the boy's paternal grandmother.
``The only one who has the right to ask is his father. He's just a 6-year-old boy. He is a Cuban boy. He has to go back to Cuba and live in Cuba,'' she added.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, ranking Democrat on an immigration subcommittee, was the grandmothers' official host, escorting them through the tunnels of the capital complex, mostly dark because few Congress members were in town.
CUBAN CONTACTS
But Congressional sources confirmed that the Cuban Mission -- not their official sponsor, the National Council of Churches -- directly contacted sympathetic members of Congress and arranged their schedule. More appointments were expected today.
In one meeting, in the offices of Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., mission chief Fernando Remirez Estenoz, Cuba's vice minister of foreign affairs, waited in an anteroom while Congress members questioned the women about their desire to bring the child back to his father and grandfathers in Cuba.
But Dodd, a fluent Spanish speaker and longtime opponent of U.S. sanctions against Havana, said both church officials and Cuban diplomats were excluded from his meeting while senators questioned the women on their motives.
National Council of Churches spokesman Roy Lloyd said that in the first meeting Tuesday, with no Cuban officials present, Jackson Lee pointedly asked the women whether they were under duress, and whether they wanted political asylum. They declined the offer, Lloyd said, replying that they want
to live in Cuba and want to take the child there with them.
Dodd added that the women's emotions were credible.
Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska also said that from the same conversations, ``It is obvious to me that [Elian's mother] was not a woman fleeing from a tyrannical regime.'' Instead, he said, the women told him that Elian's mother ``was forced on that boat'' by a violent, abusive
boyfriend. Asked whether there would be a cost for opposing his Senate leadership's position on the Elian issue, he quipped, ``I'll probably lose my parking privileges.''
Congressional action was not expected on the citizenship bill until next week at the earliest. The storm shut down both the airport and much business in the Capitol, postponing Senate action on a bankruptcy bill that Sen. Majority Leader Trent Lott has said will go first.
House members don't meet for votes until next week.
FILIBUSTER THREAT
Meantime, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., vowed to filibuster ``as a grandmother'' to prevent a vote in the Senate.
Also supporting the grandmothers with Boxer, Dodd and Hagel Tuesday were Democrats Richard Durban of Illinois and Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
Rodriguez told Congress members that now that her daughter, Elian's mother, is dead, Elian is her last living family member -- and he belongs in Cuba.
``Elian has a fine home. He has three houses,'' she said, referring to hers, Quintana's and his father's. ``He has free education, the health care is free . . . I believe the child should be in Cuba. He was born in Cuba. He is a Cuban.''
Tuesday, several House members advocated Elian's return to Cuba. They were: Ohio Republican Steve LaTourette, and Democrats Elijah Cummings and John LaFalce of New York, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, Ciro Rodriquez of Texas and David Minge of Minnesota.
Grandmothers finally get to visit Elian
Cell phone, protesters contribute to suspicions
By Alfonso Chardy, Sandra Marquez Garcia And Andres Viglucci, viglucci@herald.com
Two months after they last embraced in Cuba, Elian Gonzalez's two grandmothers conducted a tense but emotional visit with their 6-year-old grandson Wednesday in the private and neutral setting of a Miami Beach waterfront mansion, attended by all the pomp and security of a presidential tour.
By all accounts, the meeting between Elian and his grandmothers, Raquel Rodriguez and Mariela Quintana, was warm and familial. Upon first seeing the boy, the women picked him up and hugged and kissed him, shaking slightly with the moment's emotion.
``It was a sacred moment,'' said Sister Leonor Esnard, a Cuban-American nun who witnessed the reunion at the stately home of Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, president of Barry University.
Elian and the two women then met, supervised at a discreet distance by Esnar and another nun, around a table in an upstairs room of the house. They chatted and pored over an album of family photos and sketches by his Cuban schoolmates that the grandmothers brought to give the boy. Though
initially quiet, Elian became more talkative as the visit progressed, at times laughing and smiling, the nuns said.
But the tension that has surrounded the long-awaited meeting did not dissipate, nor did it seem to bring the two sides of Elian's warring family any closer together.
After the two-hour visit, Elian's Miami relatives, who are fighting the boy's father and family in Cuba for custody, claimed that their ``side'' was winning the battle for the little boy's affections.
``I feel confident,'' said Elian's cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, whose father is the boy's great-uncle. ``Now I feel that he is more on this side than that side.''
Directly after the meeting, Rodriguez and Quintana flew back to Washington, D.C., where they have been lobbying in Congress against proposals to grant Elian U.S. citizenship. They did not speak to the press or issue any statement, and they displayed no emotion publicly as they departed.
CHILD EXCITED
While driving away from the meeting, Elian flashed a V sign out the window and, in an interview broadcast over Spanish-language Radio Mambi, WAQI-AM, said: ``Tomorrow they're going to make me an American citizen.'' The proposal is not expected to come up for debate until next week at the
earliest, however.
O'Laughlin depicted the early stages of the visit as difficult and marred by mutual mistrust. By previous agreement, the grandmothers and Elian's Miami relatives were in separate sections of the sprawling villa during the visit, she said.
The long-awaited meeting came a day after the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered the boy's Miami relatives, with whom Elian has been living since his rescue on Thanksgiving Day, to make the child available.
An attempt on Monday by Quintana and Rodriguez to visit Elian came to naught when the grandmothers refused to go to the family's Little Havana home. They said they were concerned by the presence of demonstrators. The Miami relatives refused to take the boy to a neutral place, expressing fears
the INS would try to snatch him.
OVERCOMING MISTRUST
On Wednesday, O'Laughlin said she had to demonstrate to the boy's Miami family members that ``windows could not be opened, that doors would not be opened, that there were no disappearing trap doors.''
She described Elian's great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, as ``honest'' but ``weary and frightened.'' She said the grandmothers, too, appeared scared, but ``truly showed their love'' for Elian.
``There was pain on both sides and hurt on both sides,'' O'Laughlin said, adding later: ``Today was about the future of a child and together we must all weep for the days of anguish and suffering that that child has had to endure.''
The visit was also marked by a dispute over a cellular phone carried by one of the grandmothers. O'Laughlin said a nun at the house asked a police officer to take the phone away when it rang because it violated ground rules for the meeting.
DAD ASKED FOR CALL
The grandmothers may have been expecting a call from Elian's father in Cuba, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. In a letter to the grandmothers signed by Gonzalez and the child's grandfathers, published Wednesday in Granma, the Communist Party daily, Elian's father asked to speak ``freely'' with his son
during the meeting -- presumably meaning outside the presence of the Miami relatives.
The Cuban version of the incident was that there was no prior agreement to ban cell phones, and that it would have been just and humane for the father in Cuba to speak to his son in Miami.
The incident was only one among many that contributed to the less-than-conciliatory atmosphere.
Exile leaders who are managing the Miami family's campaign to keep Elian repeatedly attempted to discredit the grandmothers, portraying them to the media as having been manipulated by the Cuban government. Family spokesman Armando Gutierrez and officials of the Cuban American National Foundation
(CANF) issued assertions or suggestions throughout the day that the women, accompanying clergy or O'Laughlin were in contact with Cuban officials, and acting on their instructions.
CANF officials who were sighted in the yard of the house next door to Sister Jeanne's -- where they said they had been invited by the homeowner -- were asked to leave, though it was unclear by whom. A Foundation spokeswoman, Ninoska Perez, said Sister Jeanne herself knocked on the neighbor's
door and said the Cuban government had complained about the exiles' presence there. But a law-enforcement source at the scene said U.S. immigration officials who were at the nun's house may have asked the CANF officials to leave.
Foundation leader Jorge Mas Santos, who accompanied the family to the meeting, also asserted that the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, the former general secretary of the National Council of Churches who escorted the grandmothers, was calling Cuba with her cell phone at the house.
ORCHESTRATION?
``I think it is very obvious that Havana has been orchestrating the whole thing,'' Mas said after the meeting.
A group of about 50 demonstrators, kept by police at a distance from the home's entrance on Pine Tree Drive, loudly hailed Elian's arrival and produced a mix of cheers and jeers for the grandmothers whose attempts to rally support for the boy's return to Cuba during their six-day trip have made
them the object of resentment from some Cuban exiles.
The grandmothers' Miami visit ratcheted up media attention on the Elian saga, already at an intense pitch, to an even higher plane. All local TV stations interrupted daytime programming to carry the grandmothers' and Elians' every move live for hours.
The events began as the grandmothers landed in Opa-locka at about 3:10 p.m. aboard a chartered private jet from Washington, almost two hours late. Although the meeting was set for 4 p.m., they did not depart for Miami Beach until 4:50 p.m. The reason for the delay was unknown.
As dusk fell over Biscayne Bay, Rodriguez and Quintana were whisked to the Beach in a helicopter, closely trailed by a half-dozen news helicopters as it swooped over the glistening green bay to Mount Sinai Medical Center's helipad. A three-car motorcade then delivered the O'Laughlin's home.
There Elian awaited them, having arrived some 45 minutes earlier in a Lexus sedan with his Miami relatives and supporters.
News helicopters also followed every yard of Elian's trip from Little Havana to O'Lauighlin's front gate.
EMBRACE OF WELCOME
As the women stepped out of a red Ford sedan upon their arrival, Sister Jeanne opened her arms wide and embraced them before escorting them into the house. Also there to greet them were officials from the INS.
The "neutral site'' was chosen after INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, who ruled earlier this month that Elian should be reunited with his father in Cuba, called former Miami Herald Publisher David Lawrence to ask his recommendation of suitable locations.
Lawrence said he offered two possibilities: O'Laughlin's home and the Coral Gables home of Dr. Pedro Jose Greer Jr., founder of the Camillus Health Concern free clinic.
"The only thing I did was make the suggestions,'' Lawrence said.
Herald staff writers Ana Acle, Mireidy Fernandez, Sonji Jacobs, Marika Lynch, Curtis Morgan, Roxana Soto and Juan O. Tamayo, and Herald translator Renato Perez contributed to this report.
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