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Elian's kin balk, but handover looks inevitable

April 12, 2000
Web posted at: 11:27 AM EDT (1527 GMT)

By Tony Karon

(TIME.com) -- Lazaro Gonzalez's brinkmanship suggests he and some of his backers may have decided to force the government's hand on returning Elian Gonzalez to his father.

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The great-uncle balked late Tuesday at a face-saving deal struck by a sympathetic legislator and the Cuban American National Foundation that would have involved transferring Elian to his father at a family meeting Wednesday in Washington at which the only outsiders would have been New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli (a White House-friendly Democrat who has long been a champion of the Cuban exile community) and an INS official. After the meeting was announced by the CANF -- which has played a leading role in efforts to keep Elian in the U.S. -- the Justice Department held off on plans to deliver a letter to Lazaro instructing him to return the boy to his father Thursday at a Miami airbase. But within hours, Lazaro Gonzalez had announced that the meeting was off because Elian didn't want to fly to Washington.

That explanation is unlikely to fly either with Juan Miguel Gonzalez or with the Justice Department, which is reportedly going ahead Wednesday with plans to order Lazaro to hand the boy over at a prescribed time and location.

The planned Washington meeting had been arranged as it became clear that the Miami family were running out of options, even as they battled to keep legal challenges alive in Florida state and family courts. Its cancellation may suggest a split among Cuban exile leaders, with the CANF now assisting in ensuring an orderly transfer of Elian in order to rebuild its standing in the capital -- which may have been somewhat bruised by the standoff over the boy -- while others could be more reluctant to facilitate his transfer into his father's care. The family's decision not to go to Washington could also, however, have come in response to government spin on the meeting: While CANF representatives had presented it simply as the family meeting for which the Florida relatives had pushed and said that Elian might even leave with his father if all went well, government officials told the media the handover was a done deal.

Still, the very fact that the most important Cuban exile organization, which played a leading role from the outset in the campaign to keep Elian here, is now involved in brokering an agreement to reunite the boy with his father suggests the standoff is very near its end.

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