BY ELAINE DE VALLE

 Cuban President Fidel Castro told reporters in Havana Saturday morning that the
 great-uncle of Elian Gonzalez -- who has temporary custody of the boy in Miami
 while the 6-year-old's fate is decided -- had sexually molested young children
 while he was a physical education teacher in Cuba.

 At his Little Havana home, Lazaro Gonzalez scoffed at the allegation and said the
 Cuban government was obviously grasping at straws in its effort to have Elian
 returned to Cuba. Gonzalez has filed a suit in federal court in an attempt to keep
 him here.

 ``I'm not even insulted by this. After 41 years, we are used to taking lies and
 humiliation from him,'' said Gonzalez, 49. ``He is desperate.''

 Lazaro Gonzalez's brother Manuel, who believes the boy belongs back in Cuba
 with his father, said he doesn't believe the allegation.

 ``There's no way I would believe that,'' he said when reached at his Little Havana
 home by telephone Saturday afternoon. ``I think it is fabricated. It's a little
 embarrassing just to hear them say it.

 ``What is all of this coming to? Where is it going to end?''

 Castro told local and foreign press in Havana that Gonzalez was ``a pervert'' who
 had abused students in two or three sports schools where he worked, the French
 news agency Agence France Presse reported Saturday.

 The charge comes more than three months after Elian was found clinging to an
 inner tube off the Florida Coast. Castro offered no evidence to support his
 allegation.

 ``If that were true, why didn't they bring any charges against me when I was in
 Cuba,'' said Lazaro Gonzalez, who left the island in 1983. ``Why didn't they arrest
 me when I went the year before last and they accepted me and everything was
 fine? Why don't they ask the kids, who are adults now -- men and women who I
 visited two years ago when I went?''

 He said that Castro was just trying to stain his family's name and that the Cuban
 government had already spread lies about him, his relatives and others in the
 Elian case.

 His brother Delfin has been painted as a terrorist bomber in the Communist Party
 daily Granma; Gonzalez said he was simply a political prisoner for not agreeing
 with the party line. The boy's stepfather, Lazaro Munero, was labeled a delinquent
 and violent man in the same newspaper, which also said the other two survivors of
 the tragic voyage -- Nivaldo Fernandez and Arianne Horta -- were a womanizer
 and a prostitute, respectively.

 ``What haven't they said? Nobody who is against him is any good. He's inventing
 stories about anyone who doesn't agree with him,'' Lazaro Gonzalez said.

 Manuel Gonzalez's wife, America, who agrees with her husband that Elian should
 be reunited with his father on the island, was also adamant that the charge wasn't
 true.

 ``Oh, my God. No, no, no. Oh, my God,'' she said.
 

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald