Reno's Showdown

By NANCY GIBBS

Six-year-olds are natural charmers, eager to please, brave, playful and about as grounded as soap bubbles. Now that Elian Gonzalez has made parents of us all, it was especially gruesome to watch his fate float by last week, in real time and on video, as the adults in his life prepared to tear him in two.

On the one hand, the more familiar he becomes to us with each passing slide down that swing set, the harder it is to imagine waving him onto the plane bound for Havana. On the other, there was a nasty sense last week that what his Miami relatives warned would happen to him in Cuba was already happening to him here. Was that really his idea to sit on a bed, wave his finger at his father and defy him--the father who must, surely, have played some role in making him the delightful kid everyone says he is? "Papa," he said, "I do not want to go to Cuba. If you want to, stay here. I am not going to Cuba." By the time his father Juan Miguel Gonzalez had watched it for the fourth or fifth time in his lawyer's office Thursday morning, he put his head down, his hands on the bridge of his nose, and cried. "Can we make them stop showing it?"

Attorney General Janet Reno, who from the start has been running this show and last week moved to center stage, seemed to be torn as well, between her promise to enforce the law and her vow to do it gently, in a way that will not break this kid into pieces or set Miami on fire. There is the law, and then there is the law of the street. "They will have to take this child by force," declared Great-Uncle Lazaro Gonzalez. Even as the Miami Cubans mocked Reno, called her a coward, practically dared her to come in and seize Elian, even as her Washington critics privately sneered that she was just a dithering social worker in over her head, she kept chanting her promise of a fair and appropriate response and patiently stood by as the case ground up both wings of the family in legal maneuvering that kept Elian's fate in limbo a few days longer.

The week began with at least a promise of an ending. Once Juan Miguel, after five long months, finally came to the U.S. to claim his son, Reno had assured him that the reunion would happen quickly and on the government's terms. But her legal power to make that happen, by force if needed, was hostage to her fear of a scene too ugly to imagine, of armed marshals and enraged crowds and a desperate child in the middle. Wouldn't it be nice if all the family could just sit down and work this out?

That would require a profound change of heart from Lazaro, a semi-employed mechanic with two drunk-driving convictions who had redeemed himself in the Cuban-exile community by his fight for custody of Elian. Now people called him a hero, a patriot. They leaned over the chain-link fence of his home just to touch his shirt. But Lazaro's older brother Manuel, cast out as family patriarch for his belief that Elian should be with his father, had a sense that perhaps even Lazaro was wavering. Manuel lost a son to cancer nine years ago. "Hermano," Manuel said in a phone call last week, "you and I were raised to believe in something very important--no one has the right to take a father's child from him, except God."

Manuel's words, at least early in the week, seemed to soften Lazaro's stance, but it was New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, whose state is home to the second largest Cuban-American community, who tried to broker a graceful exit strategy. Tracking down Juan Miguel's lawyer, Gregory Craig, Torricelli found him in Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder's office--along with Reno. Torricelli said the Miami wing continued to insist that if Juan Miguel wanted Elian, he would have to go to Miami to get him. It was a dare and a test. They knew a lot of people watching this saga have wondered what, other than wild horses, could have kept him from coming since the very first day. When Craig refused, Torricelli suggested that Lazaro and his daughter Marisleysis take Elian to Washington to meet with Juan Miguel at the diplomatic residence of the papal nuncio, with no Cuban officials present. Craig agreed, but Holder, sitting nearby, said, "That deal's too good to be true."

Holder turned out to be right. As Torricelli tells it, when the crowd surrounding Lazaro's house in Little Havana heard that Elian was going to Washington the next day, "the cord began to unravel." There were angry rumors that Lazaro was "selling out." When an official car arrived at 8 a.m., Lazaro would not leave his bedroom. Eventually he said the family would not be going at all. Elian had refused to get dressed, Lazaro claimed; the boy didn't want to go.

Reno had been planning for days for the possibility that she would have to go to Miami, look the family in the eye and demand that they obey the law. It was testimony to her nerve and to her confidence that her 15 years as a Miami prosecutor had taught her to handle the torrid politics of her hometown. And Reno, who has no children, sees herself as their special advocate. It still haunts her that within weeks of taking office in 1993, she relied on other people's advice in handling the standoff in Waco, Texas, which ended in a disaster that killed about 80 adults and children. This week is its seventh anniversary. And this time, says a Justice Department colleague, "she wanted to see for herself" what the situation was.

Her chance came Wednesday night, at her friend Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin's Miami Beach home. Police cars lined streets; patrol boats cruised on the canal behind the house. Demonstrators shouted in Spanish that Reno was a witch. For 2 1/2 hours she talked with Elian, Lazaro, Marisleysis and their Miami handlers, as Elian moved from lap to lap. At one point during the negotiations, the boy even began playing with one of Reno's security people. "You know, we could solve this real quick," the agent reportedly said. "I could walk out of here with him right now."

Reno has said all along that she wouldn't play tricks. "You don't go in and pick up little boys like that," she told reporters weeks ago. "You work through the issue, and then everybody sits down and figures out how we comply with the law." So she played good cop, letting the relatives take Elian back to Little Havana, while the Justice Department fax machine delivered to Lazaro and his lawyers orders to turn over Elian at 2 p.m. the next day at Opa-Locka airport.

But having repeatedly promised to obey the law, the family grew more defiant as the end approached. "We will not turn this child over--not in Opa-Locka, not in any '-Locka,'" declared Lazaro. And they were willing to fight with the most powerful weapon they had. Sometime around midnight, they sat Elian on a bed and recorded his home video, which they passed along to the Spanish-language network Univision, and from there onto the endless cable-TV news loop and into every U.S. living room.

In Washington, meanwhile, Justice officials watched the failure of Reno's shuttle diplomacy with a growing sense of despair. They had no confidence that the Gonzalez clan would respect the 2 p.m. deadline--especially since in a noon press conference Reno precluded the use of force. The crowds, and the tension, around the Gonzalez house grew as the deadline approached. Pop star Gloria Estefan, who had been blasted by local Spanish radio for not getting involved, arrived at the scene to support the family, calm the crowd and then whip them back up. "We're also taxpayers in this country," she said, "and we don't understand why this family is being compelled to betray Elian's trust and hand him over on a silver platter." Estefan's presence brought its own historic resonance: her father Jose Fajardo took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion as a tank commander, was captured and spent two years in a Cuban prison.

Inside the house, where the family had allowed Miami Herald reporter Ana Acle to spend the day, the dignitaries came in waves--Estefan, actor Andy Garcia, priests, pols. Elian watched himself on big-screen TV, over and over, smiling. In one corner, Acle reported, was a pile of teddy bears and Winnie the Poohs, a stuffed toy dolphin and a crucifix. When the 2 p.m. deadline came and went without a knock on the door, the family, and the crowds outside, erupted in cheers and high-fives.

The delay enabled the family to shift the battle back to the courts. An hour later, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J.L. Edmondson handed down an emergency stay, freezing Elian in place while the court considered the relatives' motion not to let the boy leave the country until every legal remedy has been exhausted. Juan Miguel wrestled with impatience: "He disagrees with [Reno's] analysis of the relatives," says Craig. "She thinks they can be reasoned with. She thinks they are operating in good faith. He thinks none of that. But he understands what she's trying to do."

Unable to speak to his son, Juan Miguel began to speak instead to the rest of the country. His public appearances increased, his movements carefully staged by Havana's envoys in Washington and by Craig, who was speaking regularly by telephone to Cuban National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada, Castro's smooth American strategist. Almost every day, Juan Miguel was photographed with his wife and youngest child; on Friday he made a tourist stop at the National Cathedral; and on Saturday he taped an interview with Dan Rather for CBS's 60 Minutes. Arriving at the interview unaccompanied by handlers, he was animated, forceful and at times tearful as he denied allegations that he had abused his wife or that Castro is directing his actions. "I love Cuba," he said. "My judgment as a father is that Cuba is the best place for Elian to be."

The psychiatrists involved in the case are worried that no one is ready for the endgame--not Elian, who has come to bond with his Miami relatives, and not the Cuban exiles, who have had their hopes raised by each delay. Reno has legally stripped Lazaro of custody but promises that Elian and Juan Miguel will remain in the U.S. until the appeals process is completed next month. Sooner or later, though, whatever the path, someone is going to have to say goodbye.

--Reported by Tim Padgett/Miami and Ann Blackman, Viveca Novak and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Tim Padgett/Miami and Ann Blackman, Viveca Novak and Elaine Shannon/Washington