Custody Fight Renews Debate on Relations

                  By Karen DeYoung
                  Washington Post Staff Writer
 

                  President Fidel Castro used one of his favorite similes yesterday in his May
                  Day speech on Havana's Revolution Square. Cuba, he said, is like the
                  biblical David, confronting "the great Goliath of finance, colossal riches,
                  nuclear arms, sophisticated technology and world political power,
                  sustained by egoism, demagoguery and lies."

                  If the Elian Gonzalez case found the governments of Cuba and the United
                  States in a marriage of convenience, siding together over the fate of a
                  6-year-old boy, it appears the honeymoon is over.

                  In the State Department's annual report on terrorism yesterday, Cuba was
                  in its customary place, accused of sponsoring mayhem. Apart from the
                  Elian matter, U.S. officials say, relations actually have worsened lately. The
                  United States has protested a rise in political arrests by Havana and
                  persuaded the U.N. Human Rights Commission to pass a stinging
                  resolution against Cuba.

                  "We believe that our policy is the correct one--economic sanctions and
                  other kinds of instruments to isolate a renegade regime, an undemocratic
                  regime," Peter Romero, the acting assisting secretary of state for Latin
                  America, said last week.

                  There is little reason to expect any overnight change in that assessment.
                  Yet many inside and outside both governments believe--or fear--that over
                  time the Gonzalez case could alter the U.S.-Cuba equation, if only because
                  it forced millions of Americans to pay attention.

                  What many saw, according to public opinion polls, was a tightly knit exile
                  community that seemed to feel its views and grievances should take
                  precedence over U.S. law. TV networks covered a debate over U.S.
                  policy toward Cuba that had been ignored. The media-savvy Cuban
                  government quickly invited U.S. reporters and cameras to tour Elian's
                  humble hometown and the streets of Havana, where they were given
                  access to citizens who seemed normal and decent--not the deprived and
                  repressed masses depicted by their compatriots in Miami.

                  "If I were a leader of the Cuban American community, it's something I'd be
                  thinking about," said one administration official. "It could all go away in six
                  months, or it could make people question, 'Why do we have this policy?'"

                  Political debate over Cuba had begun to shift before the Elian controversy,
                  as business and agricultural lobbies pressed to open the Cuba market. But
                  those who favor normalized relations believe they have found a whole new
                  audience. "It doesn't work," Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said of the
                  trade embargo, and "more and more people are seeing" that.

                  According to an ABC News poll before the seizure of Elian, nearly half of
                  Americans favored lifting the embargo, compared with 38 percent in
                  January 1998; post-raid polls have indicated large anti-embargo majorities.
                  Although the public initially seemed evenly divided over the raid, opinion
                  had shifted sharply in the government's favor by the end of last week.

                  First imposed by presidential order in 1960, prohibitions against U.S. trade
                  with Cuba--including restrictions on travel there--have been tightened or
                  loosened over the years depending on prevailing U.S. politics and acts by
                  the Castro government.

                  During the 1970s, movement by the Nixon administration toward
                  reestablishing diplomatic relations was suspended when Cuba sent troops
                  to fight in Angola's civil war. During the Carter administration, the two
                  governments established interests sections-- diplomatic missions short of
                  full representation--in each other's capital. But relations hit bottom in 1980,
                  when Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans, including many criminals and
                  mental patients, to leave the country from the port of Mariel.

                  The early Reagan administration explored prospects for better relations,
                  although during most of the 1980s the United States and Cuba backed
                  different sides in wars in Central America.

                  When President Clinton took office, "there was a desire among all of us to
                  see whether something could be different about the relationship with
                  Cuba," Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright recalled last month. After
                  another 30,000 Cubans left the island in rafts and small boats in 1994, the
                  administration negotiated two agreements on orderly departure.

                  Clinton considered vetoing Republican-sponsored legislation in 1996 that
                  enshrined the sanctions in law. But the Cuban military shootdown of two
                  U.S. civilian aircraft in international airspace that year "made it very difficult
                  to pursue change," Albright said. The legislation passed, and Clinton signed
                  it.

                  The act ensured that no president could significantly alter Cuba policy
                  without congressional assent, and it was seen as a victory by the Cuban
                  exile community. But suspicions remained that the administration harbored
                  hopes of better relations. And to many Cuban Americans and their political
                  supporters, the Elian Gonzalez case proved it.

                  "My opinion is, they cut a deal with Fidel Castro," House Minority Whip
                  Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said after the seizure.

                  "Make no mistake," said New York mayor and Republican senatorial
                  candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani. "These decisions were being made in the
                  White House, and they were being made for political reasons and for
                  diplomatic reasons."

                  Administration officials deny any such plot. "At no point, in no way, was
                  this ever linked with any sort of larger agenda item," said one senior
                  official.

                  "I've been in dozens of meetings on Cuba since Nov. 26," the day the
                  Immigration and Naturalization Service released Elian into the care of his
                  Miami relatives, said another, "and nobody, at any of those meetings, has
                  ever suggested that something we needed to do would [affect] our
                  relations with Cuba. . . . The executive branch believed the boy should be
                  returned; Cuba believed the boy should be returned. That is the only point
                  of coincidence."

                  Others see evidence of a larger agenda in the initial days of the saga. Elian
                  was rescued from the ocean on Nov. 25. The boy's Cuban father wrote to
                  the U.S. Interests Section in Havana asking for his son back, and on Dec.
                  1 the INS announced that Elian's custody should be worked out by his
                  family in a Florida court.

                  The following weekend, Castro threatened to unleash "a battle of public
                  opinion . . . that will move heaven and earth." Other Cuban officials linked
                  the case to U.S.-Cuban immigration talks.

                  On Dec. 7, the INS and the White House changed position, announcing
                  that Elian's fate would not be decided by a Florida court--where those
                  favoring Elian's U.S. residence believed they could prevail--but by the
                  INS, whose regulations "recognize the right of a parent to assert parental
                  interests in an immigration proceeding."

                  To critics, the reason for the change was obvious: The U.S. government
                  had interpreted the statements by Castro and other officials as threats to
                  unleash another flood of refugees.

                  The administration denies it. "I am not aware of any migration threat from
                  Castro," Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, Clinton's national security adviser,
                  said Friday.

                  The administration credits bureaucratic snafus and confusion for the shift.
                  Elian's rescue on a holiday weekend found many senior INS and State
                  Department officials on vacation. Normal procedure in such potentially
                  high-profile cases is to convene a telephone conference including
                  representatives of the State and Justice Departments, the INS and the
                  Coast Guard.

                  In the Gonzalez case, no such conference was held, and the boy was
                  released--with his father's telephoned permission--into the care of his great
                  uncle Lazaro Gonzalez. But later that afternoon, according to father Juan
                  Miguel Gonzalez, Lazaro Gonzalez told him he wanted Elian to stay. By
                  evening, Cuban American groups had printed tens of thousands of posters
                  picturing Elian as "another victim" of Cuban communism.

                  The father's letter to the U.S. Interests section demanding his son back
                  filled the news media. But it wasn't until the end of the following
                  week--after transmission to Washington, official translation and the receipt
                  of a Cuban diplomatic note--that the United States designated the letter an
                  "official" document. It was not transmitted to immigration officials until Dec. 7.

                  In the meantime, as vacationing officials returned, it was determined that
                  Elian had never been "paroled" as a Cuban alien into the United
                  States--the normal designation for a child with no surviving parent. Instead,
                  officials said, paperwork indicated he had been given "deferred
                  inspection," a status that left him in immigration limbo, and under the
                  jurisdiction of the INS.

                  As these details are dissected and debated, the American public, for the
                  moment, seems to be paying attention--a point not lost on Castro.

                  American opinion always supported the return of Elian to his father, Cuban
                  state radio noted in its report on Castro's reaction to the armed raid last
                  month. "The maximum leader of the Cuban Revolution affirmed that U.S.
                  public opinion has to be taken into account, emphasizing that it deserves
                  more consideration, and should be a lesson to us."