By Joel Achenbach
                  Washington Post Staff Writer
                  Saturday, April 8, 2000; Page C01

                  Washington area residents need to throw their arms around Juan Miguel
                  Gonzalez, and assure him that we honor the bond of parent and child and
                  that, even if we can't give him back his son, we can definitely take him on
                  some incredible shopping excursions. He's just a short drive from the
                  Montgomery Mall!

                  It makes no sense at all for him to come all this way and not see, for
                  example, Potomac Mills. We have retail acreage that can blow his mind. Let
                  him take a gander at Tysons Corner and then tell us he still wants to go back
                  to Cuba.

                  I am just saying, this is an incredible public relations opportunity for our
                  country, above and beyond the specific legal matter of the fate of young
                  Elian. This is why I'm concerned about where the father is staying, a
                  neighborhood called Kenwood Park, in Bethesda. Someone needs to tell him
                  that there are, in fact, places in America that have a pulse. My knowledge of
                  Kenwood Park is extremely superficial, but at first glance it appears to be a
                  neighborhood for people who think that Chevy Chase is too raucous and
                  gritty.

                  Just judging by the lawns, you'd think that Kenwood Park was under the
                  thumb of a totalitarian political system. This is the kind of place where, if
                  people discover a sprout of crab grass, they dial 911. It may actually be
                  against the law here to have grass taller than four inches. We need a new
                  chant: Free the Fescue!

                  So hyper-manicured is this neighborhood that there's not even any sign of
                  trash cans. Perhaps the trash is sucked away in hidden underground vacuum
                  tubes. My strong suspicion is that the residents have started laundering their
                  trash, and reusing it.

                  In suburban areas like this, every residence tends to be highly self-contained.
                  Nothing slops from one house to the next. People exist, in other words, in
                  individual pods. The Pod People are almost completely invisible. When Mr.
                  Gonzalez wheeled into Bethesda, he almost surely noticed that there were
                  hardly any signs of inhabitants. In America, a measure of the affluence of a
                  neighborhood is the degree to which it appears to have been totally
                  depopulated.

                  A truly mature suburban neighborhood is one in which no one ever drops by
                  a friend's house unannounced. That would be a social gaffe almost as bad as
                  saying you were a member of the NRA. The way friends get together is by
                  comparing calendars and scheduling an appointment and then, at the last
                  minute, canceling, and then repeating the process for three months until
                  finally there is no plausible way to avoid the encounter. The whole point of
                  becoming affluent in America is to achieve a condition in which you no
                  longer need your friends and neighbors for anything. You can just stay
                  inside, screening calls with the answering machine.

                  What I'm trying to say is that Bethesda is the anti-Cuba. Slap me if I begin
                  to exaggerate or generalize, but it is surely a fact that in Bethesda the only
                  really serious social problem is when Fresh Fields runs out of goat cheese
                  logs.

                  Bethesda is so tame that Thursday night there was hardly any ruckus, even
                  at the anti-Castro protest. The event suffered from severe Bethesdization.
                  This was the first anti-Castro protest in history that didn't wake neighbors.

                  It was, to be precise, a prayer vigil.

                  "We pray for another miracle," said one man in the bright beam of the TV
                  cameras. "As you protected Moses, oh God, protect this young boy."

                  The anti-Castro community is going to need to do a lot of praying. They
                  surely know the tide has turned, with the father on American soil. He
                  stepped out of the Learjet at Dulles Thursday morning and, lo and behold,
                  said the same thing he'd been saying all along. He said he wanted to take his
                  son back to Cuba. What he didn't say is that he wanted to defect on the
                  spot.

                  For months, people have said that they wanted to hear him speak while
                  standing on "free soil." That's happened. Now the Kreskins among the
                  anti-Castro forces are saying he is obviously not speaking his mind when he
                  opens his mouth, that he's a puppet of Castro, that he is subject to arrest or
                  worse if he doesn't follow Castro's script.

                  "The problem is, he has no choice but to agree with the government. If he
                  disagrees, he goes to jail," explained Israel Moya, a 39-year-old engineer
                  from Laurel who showed up at Thursday night's vigil with a banner
                  advertising a Web site,

                  www.NoCastro.com

                  "We're praying for Elian, we're praying for the father, because he's a victim,
                  too, a puppet of Castro," said Cristina Portuondo, a technical writer passing
                  out leaflets for a Mass to be held tomorrow. "We are praying that Juan
                  Miguel is somehow going to be given the opportunity to speak freely."

                  Yesterday morning, the father met with Janet Reno, and he continued to say
                  the same thing. Give me back my son. Apparently, that is all he wants from
                  us here in America. It's hard to imagine, but it may be that we have nothing
                  else that interests him.

                  Rough Draft appears three times a week at www.washingtonpost.com and
                  apologizes to those residents of Bethesda who have the courage to let their
                  yards turn into a jungle.

                            © Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company