By April Witt
                  Washington Post Staff Writer
                  Friday, April 7, 2000; Page A01

                  Sitting in their elegant, art-filled Bethesda living room, with a throng of
                  international reporters milling about down the street, Lourdes and Angel
                  Clarens y Figueredo said yesterday that the fate of Elian Gonzalez is not
                  merely a neighborhood curiosity to them. It is a strange, sad coda to their
                  lives.

                  The couple, who fled Cuba four decades ago when Fidel Castro came to
                  power, now live four doors away from the Cuban president's top diplomat in
                  the United States, a coincidence they find unfortunate. Early yesterday
                  morning, Elian's father became their newest communist neighbor.

                  The Clarenses don't wish to be rude, but they made plans yesterday to join
                  fellow anti-Castro exiles in an evening vigil to demonstrate their belief that
                  Elian should not go home to Cuba.

                  "It's a crime to take him from the United States," Lourdes Clarens said. "His
                  mother died to bring him here."

                  For months the emotional battle for Elian Gonzalez has played out in the
                  Miami neighborhood of modest stucco and cinder-block homes and
                  chain-link fences known as Little Havana. Washington orchestrated the
                  diplomacy of the taffy-pull over a 6-year-old, but as so often has been the
                  case in the Cold War and its aftermath, the capital city seemed distant and
                  immune from the human drama.

                  That ended yesterday, when the little boy's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez,
                  arrived here and took up temporary residence with the head of the Cuban
                  Interests Section in Washington, who lives in a Bethesda neighborhood of
                  crisply manicured lawns and substantial brick homes.

                  By nightfall, anti-Castro demonstrators had followed. About 45 people,
                  mostly residents of the Washington area who came here from Cuba,
                  gathered for a candlelight prayer vigil, kept about 100 yards from the home
                  where Elian's father was staying.

                  There were prayers in English and Spanish and some singing. The event was
                  peaceful, and the demonstrators departed around 9:30 p.m. Gonzalez's
                  arrival in Kenwood Park, a stable neighborhood that epitomizes capitalist
                  success, transformed it.

                  Television microwave towers and satellite trucks sprouted among the tulips
                  as hundreds of reporters, police officers and Secret Service agents flooded
                  to the quiet block of homes valued from $400,000 to more than $1 million.

                  Two nations and all parts of the world susceptible to satellite feeds watched
                  yesterday as a gleaming black sedan carried Gonzalez--for the moment the
                  world's most famous communist father--to Fernando Remirez's split-level
                  brick suburban home, disappearing inside with the flick of a garage door
                  opener.

                  There, Gonzalez will wait in hopes of reunion with the small boy he last saw
                  before his ex-wife fled Cuba with their son aboard a small boat last
                  November. When his mother drowned and rescuers delivered Elian to
                  relatives in anti-Castro Miami, his personal tragedy grew into an international
                  dispute.

                  Kenwood Park is home to a cosmopolitan mix of lawyers, doctors, business
                  people, journalists, scientists and diplomats. Most springs, the splashiest
                  event on this stretch of Millwood Road is retired Army Reserve Gen. Lewis
                  Helm's planting of a vivid display of cascading petunias.

                  "They are a real show-stopper," Alice Helm, vice chairman of the Kenwood
                  Park Civic Association, said proudly.

                  But yesterday, the roar of police motorcycles drowned out songbirds.
                  Television reporters primped in the streets, checking their reflection in the
                  windows of parked sport-utility vehicles. Montgomery County police erected
                  garish plastic barricades to keep the press--and anti-Castro protesters--100
                  feet away from Remirez's house and out of his neighbors' tastefully
                  landscaped yards.

                  "This is fun," Ashok Subramanian, 15, said, noting that his father has begun
                  walking the family's golden retriever past Remirez's block in hopes of being
                  interviewed by a journalist. "He wants to be in the action.

                  "People want glamour to come to this neighborhood like they see in
                  Hollywood. Now it's here." In Kenwood Park, as throughout the nation,
                  neighbors debated yesterday whether Elian should remain in the United
                  States or return to Cuba with his father.

                  Maraline Trager, a commercial real estate manager, is rooting for Gonzalez
                  to take his boy home. Placing politics above parental rights is a dangerous
                  precedent, she said. As a recently divorced mother, Trager is adamant that
                  her children see their father regularly and she wants no less for Elian.

                  "To keep my children, any child, from their father would emotionally scar
                  them," she said. "Elian's father has a right to raise his son, and Elian has a
                  right to know that his father fought for him--and won." Mimi Anis, who lives
                  around the corner, agreed. She said all the neighborhood commotion over
                  Gonzalez's arrival is worth the trouble if Elian is reunited with his father and
                  sent home.

                  "Madam, to save the life of that child, I don't mind this," she said as she
                  walked her small white fluffy dog past police barricades. "I hope [Elian]
                  stays sane and safe and away from this cinema." For all the angst over
                  Elian's fate, the real theme of the day on Millwood Road yesterday was
                  lawns.

                  "I hope our lawns don't get ruined," Lillian Abensohn, who lives across the
                  street from Remirez, said as she eyed news photographers and cameramen
                  jockeying for position in her front yard. "Washington people are okay. But
                  people from other places may not be as aware of how invested we are in the
                  appearance of our property."

                  Abensohn darted into her front yard repeatedly shooing journalists off her
                  grass.

                  "A day or two of this is all right," she said. "But the idea of this becoming a
                  long siege does not sit well."

                  Lewis Helm said that despite conflicting news reports, he knew with
                  certainty on Wednesday that Elian's father would be coming to his block as a
                  guest in Remirez's home, and that the cameras would soon follow.

                  "It was very obviously going to happen," said Helm, assistant secretary for
                  public affairs at the Health, Education and Welfare Department during the
                  Nixon administration. "The guy cut his grass."

                  Staff writer Allan Lengel contributed to this report.

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