BY ANA ACLE AND MARIKA LYNCH

 Elian Gonzalez's cousin Marisleysis was so infuriated by what she heard on
 a CNN talk show Tuesday afternoon about the plight of the boy that she
 jumped from her dining room chair, ran across the street to the media
 camped on the sidewalk, and asked to join in.

 ``I want to go live,'' Gonzalez told CNN reporter Susan Candiotti. She was
 escorted by Miami City Commissioner Tomas Regalado, who was watching
 the broadcast with the Gonzalez family and encouraged her to act.

 The crew obliged, and bumped Miami clinical psychologist Dr. Raquel Marrero
 from the interview chair, replacing her with Gonzalez.

 ``It's very easy to be outside of a situation and talk not knowing what this little
 boy went through,'' Gonzalez said. The cousin often called Elian's surrogate
 mother was responding to comments by New York psychiatrist Dr. Preston
 Wiles, who said a boy as traumatized as Elian should be reunited with his
 father and grandparents.

 She asked how the psychiatrist could speak when he has never spoken to or
 treated Elian.

 ``It's like me, if I don't go to a doctor then how can he know what I have?'' she
 said. ``With all respect to the psychiatrist speaking, there have only been two
 psychiatrists who have seen him.''

 Dozens of cameras crowded around the CNN interview broadcast on Talkback
 Live, an interactive show out of Atlanta where audience members and Internet
 users ask questions of guests. Marisleysis' father, Lazaro, sat atop a neighbors'
 fence so he could see his daughter above the press. Elian, apparently oblivious to
 the commotion, played on a slide in the back yard.

 Marisleysis Gonzalez continued, now with tears in her eyes: ``Every time he
 hears that they might pick him up, he looks at me with open eyes and asks `Why
 are they doing this, when my mom is the one who brought me here?' ''

 She also said Elian used to speak on the phone with his father three and four
 times a day, but the conversations were cut to once a day at a certain hour
 because Elian wanted it that way.

 When questioned off the air by Candiotti, Gonzalez said the only way she would
 let Elian return is if his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, came here freely to pick
 him up and if Elian agreed to return with him.

 Michael Toppo, senior producer for Talkback Live, said producers had asked for
 interviews with family members, but they initially declined.

 He said he was shocked when Gonzalez asked to go on the air.

 ``Never happens,'' Toppo said.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald