By Karen DeYoung
                  Washington Post Staff Writer
                  Saturday, February 12, 2000; Page A02

                  The day Elian came into her life in November was "a miracle," says
                  Marisleysis Gonzalez. Motherless, traumatized by two days alone at sea,
                  removed from everything that was safe and familiar, the five-year-old son
                  of her first cousin in Cuba attached himself to her firmly, she says, and
                  hasn't let go since.

                  Elian Gonzalez, now 6, sleeps in her room in the two-bedroom house she
                  shares with her parents in Miami and confides in her. She comforts him
                  when he cries.

                  "When I go to the bathroom, he stands outside the door until I come out,"
                  she says.

                  And in the 11 weeks they have now been together, she says, "at no time"
                  has he told her he wants to go home to his father in Cuba.

                  These are the kinds of things Marisleysis Gonzalez, 21, says she would like
                  to tell Attorney General Janet Reno. They are, she believes, the kinds of
                  things that people who think they know what is best for Elian should hear.
                  This week, she returned to Washington for the second time to tell her story
                  to sympathetic members of Congress, whom she hopes will make Elian a
                  U.S. citizen and thus keep him away from Reno and the Immigration and
                  Naturalization Service and their efforts to send him home.

                  Marisleysis Gonzalez and another cousin, Georgina Cid, 27, spoke in an
                  interview yesterday at the Washington office of the Cuban American
                  National Foundation (CANF), the organization that has made Elian's case
                  a front-line battle in its long-standing war against Fidel Castro. The CANF
                  has paid their expenses, and senior organization officials sit with the young
                  women as they are interviewed, stopping them when they veer into legal
                  aspects of the Elian case, instructing them to sit up straight when photos
                  are taken.

                  Although her father Lazaro Gonzalez's name is on the lawsuit against Reno
                  and INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, and on a Florida court petition for
                  permanent custody of Elian, it is Marisleysis Gonzalez who has been the
                  most public face and voice of the Gonzalez family in Miami. Taking time off
                  from her job in a Miami bank, she has appeared alternately angry, sad and
                  tearful in describing the trials her family and Elian have gone through.

                  To many in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, she is a sacrificing young
                  woman who has turned her life over to her small cousin. To the Roman
                  Catholic nun who last month played host to a 90-minute meeting in Miami
                  between Elian and his grandmothers, she has become a surrogate to whom
                  the boy "has transferred his maternal love."

                  To others, however, she is a somewhat star-struck young woman taking
                  advantage of the fear and bewilderment of a young child she had never met
                  before Nov. 26. The Cuban government and media dryly refer to her as
                  "the 'cousin' kidnapper" and charge that she and her family have
                  "brainwashed" the boy.

                  The Elian controversy is being played out on at least two very different
                  levels. To the scores of government officials, lawyers and special interests
                  involved, it is a high-stakes legal, political and foreign policy conflict. But
                  the two cousins of Elian tend to leave the legal and political side to the
                  lawyers and politicians. For them, it is the personal battle between the life
                  they have chosen in Miami and the one they left behind in Cuba that
                  counts.

                  They are well-spoken young women whose long fingernails tap more and
                  more quickly on the tabletop as they respond to what they say are "lies"
                  and insults that have emanated from Cuba. They say Elian's father, Juan
                  Miguel Gonzalez, desperately wanted to flee Cuba for the United States.
                  He has strongly denied this allegation.

                  They are outraged by stories in the U.S. news media--most recently in this
                  week's New York Times--saying Miami family members are in trouble
                  with the law and may be unsuitable surrogate-parent material. Her brother,
                  Cid says, is not in prison as reported. Marisleysis Gonzalez says her father
                  does not have a drinking problem.

                  Asked what difficulties, if any, the family has had with the law in Florida,
                  they are interrupted by a CANF official. "The attorneys are saying there
                  are factual errors in the New York Times story," he says.

                  Marisleysis Gonzalez asks why "nobody has gone to see where Elian lived
                  in Cuba," where, she says she has been told, Juan Miguel Gonzalez's house
                  was specially painted by the Cuban government once the foreign journalists
                  started to visit.

                  "Elian tells me what a difference there is with school between here and
                  there," Marisleysis Gonzalez says. "There, the bathroom was so dirty. He
                  couldn't drink the water, because it was very dirty."

                  Elian, who Marisleysis Gonzalez says sees a psychologist twice a week,
                  talks to his father twice a day "after he comes home from school.
                  Sometimes, he doesn't even want to. We have to make him."

                           © Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company