Send in the Grandmas

By Tim Padgett/Miami

Before Elian Gonzalez's grandmothers arrived in Miami to see him last week, Cuban Americans confronted the nun at whose home the meeting would take place. They demanded that Jeanne O'Laughlin, a Dominican sister and president of Miami's Barry University, prove there were no trapdoors in her house from which agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service could jump out to seize the boy. Then when the grandmothers landed in Miami, their Cuban handlers kept them on the tarmac for an hour to deliver words of warning. Beware, they told the 51-year-old matriarchs: Miami's Cuban exiles may try to hurt you.

It was going to be that kind of family reunion. Elian's grandmothers--his abuelas--spent 90 minutes last Wednesday chatting with and hugging their six-year-old grandson. But they might as well have grabbed one of his arms and not let go: this family gathering was a diplomatic tug-of-war. When it ended, the abuelas, Mariela Quintana and Raquel Rodriguez, said Elian had seemed a "completely different boy." The meeting hardened their resolve to take him home. "I feel angry and impotent," a tearful Rodriguez told TIME. "What is happening is inhuman." But Elian's Miami clan had its own spin. Marisleysis Gonzalez, 21, a cousin who seems to portray herself as Elian's new mom, crowed to reporters that he had rejected his abuelas and was now on her "side."

The grandma meeting was the high (and low) point of a week in which two bitter and ruthless camps--Fidel Castro's Cuba and Miami's Cuban-American community--battled to win Yanqui hearts and minds. It's a war on three fronts: the INS, which has ruled that Elian should be returned to Cuba; Congress, which is weighing a bill to give him U.S. citizenship; and the federal courts, in which Elian's Miami family is filing suit to win him asylum.

In the middle is Elian, the little boy plucked from the Atlantic on Thanksgiving Day after the boat carrying him, his mother and 12 others capsized on its way to the U.S. Elian, one of three survivors, floated for two days on an inner tube. The Cubans insist he belongs with his only living parent, his father Juan Miguel Gonzalez, 31. The Cuban Americans say Elian should be allowed to live with the freedom his mother wanted for him.

Castro apparently won't let Elian's father travel to the U.S.--probably because he fears Juan Miguel would defect. But the Cuban dictator seems to have found potent ambassadors in the grandmas. They first went to Miami on Monday. The Cubans and the INS insisted on a meeting in a neutral location, but the Miami relatives would make Elian available only in their home, forcing the grandmothers to leave without seeing him.

In Washington the next day, the abuelas tearfully lobbied against the citizenship bill. And they won a key victory: the INS ordered that Elian be made available at a neutral site. At the meeting, the Cubans shrewdly had the grandmothers carry in a cell phone so Elian's father could talk to him--and the Miami camp just as shrewdly got the phone taken away.

After the grandma meeting, each side quickly resumed the salvos. Sister O'Laughlin, the once neutral nun, announced she now favors keeping Elian in the U.S., in part because the abuelas seemed manipulated by fear. Elian's father, a Communist Party member, claimed in papers filed in the federal lawsuit that the Miami camp had offered him $2 million, a house and a car if he would move to America.

If Elian is sent back, the grandmas--who were expected to return to Elian's hometown of Cardenas, Cuba, over the weekend--will almost certainly be the ones to retrieve him. Abuelas are usually respected moral authorities, but that Cuban tradition isn't worth a knitted shawl in this fight. In fact, the Miami exiles have assailed the grandmas--for not thanking Elian's granduncle Lazaro Gonzalez for taking him in. "We are thankful to Lazaro for what he did at the beginning," Quintana told TIME. "But now he is using my grandson."

In the week's tug-of-war, the grandmas seemed to have the stronger grip. Congressional support for citizenship for Elian waned, even among Republicans. The federal judge moved up the deadline for the Miami relatives to present their final case and scolded lawyers for their media grandstanding. Which means these abuelas' first visit to the U.S. may not be their last.

--With reporting by Jeanne DeQuine/Miami and Dolly Mascarenas/Cardenas

With reporting by Jeanne DeQuine/Miami and Dolly Mascarenas/Cardenas