Only a single row of chairs separated Manuel Gonzalez from his niece Marisleysis Gonzalez in the United States Senate hearing room last week. But as their testimony later showed, a sharp clash of viewpoints divides the Miami, Florida, branch of the Gonzalez clan over where 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez belongs. To Manuel Gonzalez, the child’s great-uncle who fled Fidel Castro’s regime 16 years ago, the issue is clear: the boy should go back to his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, in Cuba. To Marisleysis, Elian’s 21-year-old cousin, who became a kind of surrogate parent after Elian’s mother died in the ill-fated journey, the just outcome is equally clear. “[God] made a miracle to bring this boy to us,” said Marisleysis, choking back tears. “I am here to make his mother’s dream come true to stay in this country.”
The three-hour Senate Judiciary Committee hearing was the most public airing yet of the schism in the once close-knit Cuban family. This week the Elian saga shifts to a federal courtroom in Miami where U.S. district Judge K. Michael Moore will hear oral arguments from lawyers representing the U.S. government, Manuel Gonzalez and Lazaro Gonzalez, Marisleysis’s father, who wants to be granted permanent custody of Elian. Lazaro has been sheltering the boy since his rescue in November, and for the past two months he has defied a U.S. Justice Department decision ordering that the first grader be reunited with his father in Cuba. Lazaro’s lawyers will press his petition for political asylum on Elian’s behalf that would allow the boy to remain in Lazaro’s Miami home. U.S. government attorneys will oppose that motion, on the ground that the custody rights of a child’s biological parent take precedence and Elián should be sent home to Cuba.
On that point, Washington and Havana for once agree on something: international law and family-related legislation in both countries require the boy’s immediate repatriation. And that is certainly the way Manuel Gonzalez, a 59-year-old bus mechanic, sees things. Manuel knows the heartache of losing a child–his son, Manuel Antonio, died of cancer at the age of 14–and he has sided with the boy’s father from the outset, even at the cost of being ostracized by his Miami-based relatives. “I am destroyed, and all my family has suffered tremendously,” Manuel Gonzalez told the Senate panel. “But every son needs the character and tenacity of his father so that he can follow the right path.”
Conspicuous by his absence at last week’s proceedings in Washington was Lazaro Gonzalez. In the initial weeks of the Elian controversy, the 49-year-old Lazaro hosted U.S. legislators at his modest home in Miami’s Little Havana district and toured Capitol Hill offices to make his case for receiving permanent custody of the boy. But the onetime gymnastics coach and former Cuban policeman lowered his profile after published news reports in February disclosed he had been twice arrested and found guilty of drunken driving in south Florida during the 1990s.
Before this week’s court hearing in Miami, the Castro regime unleashed a smear campaign aimed at undermining Lazaro’s reputation. The vehicle for this effort was Jose Imperatori, the Cuban diplomat and alleged spy who was expelled from the United States after being linked to a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service official arrested last month on espionage charges. As he left Ottawa, where he had taken refuge in the Cuban Embassy after his expulsion from the United States, Imperatori issued a “message to the Canadian people” accusing Lazaro Gonzalez of having “sexually molested” students when he served as a trainer and coach at a sports training school in Cuba during the 1970s and 1980s. Lazaro emphatically denied the allegations. Haydee Gonzalez de Martell, one of Lazaro’s three siblings who still live in Cuba, told NEWSWEEK that recent rumors in Cardenas about her younger brother’s supposed homosexual past were “completely false.”
Lazaro and Manuel Gonzalez have been feuding over Elian since early December. According to his testimony at the Senate hearing, Manuel told his brother last fall that he was willing to travel to Cuba and serve as a mediator between the Miami branch of the family and Elian’s father, who has refused to come to Florida to retrieve his son. Manuel said that Lazaro and another brother named Delfin Gonzalez rejected his offer and have since treated him as a “persona non grata.” “For 40 years, the Cuban family has been separated in many ways,” noted Mel Martinez, a Cuban-born politician from Orlando, Florida, who testified at the Senate hearing. The Gonzalezes bear witness to that sad reality: when Marisleysis and her uncle Manuel finished answering questions Wednesday afternoon, they left the hearing room without exchanging a single word.
