BY ALFONSO CHARDY AND JUAN O. TAMAYO

 Elian Gonzalez's father first told U.S. officials that his ex-wife's boyfriend was
 ``nice. Three weeks later, he told them the man had threatened to kill Elian
 unless the boy got onto the boat to flee Cuba.

 Juan Miguel Gonzalez also acknowledged asking an uncle in Miami to help
 Elian, but flatly denied the uncle's assertions that he had asked for the boy to
 be kept in Miami until the father could join him in exile.

 Gonzalez's comments were part of a 300-page Immigration and Naturalization
 Service filing in federal court Thursday that shows a family at first united in
 concern for the shipwrecked Elian, then descending into bitter feuding over
 custody of the child.

 SEEN AS CARING

 The documents paint Gonzalez as a caring father who called Elian his ``buddy
 and insisted on his return to Cuba from the very day he learned that his ex-wife,
 Elisabeth Brotons, had taken him on an ill-fated escape to Miami.

 Although Brotons had had custody of Elian since the couple's separation,
 Gonzalez is quoted as saying Elian ``spent most of his time in his home: ``He
 even slept with me and my present `wife' . . . because he's very close to me.

 ``It is this officer's observation that [Gonzalez] is deeply concerned for the
 well-being of the child. . . . He misses and wants his son back, wrote Silma L.
 Dimmel, chief INS officer at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, who
 interviewed Gonzalez Dec. 13 and Dec. 31.

 ``I saw no evidence of coercion or hesitation as he answered Ms. Dimmel's
 questions, wrote Jeffrey DeLaurentis, a U.S. diplomat who accompanied Dimmel
 on both interviews.

 Gonzalez, however, did change his description of Brotons' boyfriend, Lazaro
 Munero, initially telling Dimmel that Munero was a ``nice man who would often
 join Elisabeth in visiting Gonzalez's home for dinner and special feasts.

 In his second interview, Gonzalez said he had ``heard through the grapevine . . . I
 don't know it's a fact, that is what people say, that Brotons and Munero had a
 ``stormy relationship because ``he mistreated her.''

 DESCRIBES ARGUMENT

 ``People say . . . Elian did not want to go [on the boat] and was crying, and he
 told her with a knife in hand, `either you or I will shut him up,' ' Gonzalez told the
 Americans.

 Two survivors of the seaborne escape to Florida have not reported any such
 argument between Brotons and Munero, who both drowned along with nine other
 people when their boat sank Nov. 23.

 The INS court filings also showed a key dispute over assertions by Gonzalez's
 great-uncle in Miami, Lazaro Gonzalez, who is suing for Elian's custody, that the
 boy's father initially asked him to care for Elian here.

 The uncle was lying, Juan Gonzalez told Dimmel in both their interviews, when he
 asserted to other INS interviewers that Gonzalez had twice asked for U.S. visas
 and asked his Miami relatives to care for the child.

 Gonzalez said his father telephoned brother Lazaro on the day the Cuban family
 learned that Elisabeth had taken Elian on a boat, and asked the Miami relatives
 to keep an eye out for them.

 Lazaro called three days later, Thanksgiving Day, to say Elian had been found
 floating on an inner tube and was fine. ``He talked to my father and told him not to
 worry, that they would take care of Elian. As family, we did not need to tell him to
 watch over my son.''

 He added, ``At all times I asked that Elian be returned to me.

 Not so, said Lazaro Gonzalez, who issued a statement Thursday saying flatly
 that Juan Gonzalez had asked the Miami relatives to look after Elian until ``we
 reunite again in the United States.

 Juan Gonzalez was quoted as saying that in fact Lazaro had told Elian's Cuban
 family that he would like to return the boy to his father but could not because of
 ``community pressures from Cuban exiles in Miami.

 Instead, Gonzalez claimed, Lazaro told him that an unidentified church group was
 willing to pay him and Elian $2 million if he agreed to leave the child in Miami and
 join him here.

 ``That's when I got mad and threw down the phone, Gonzalez was quoted as
 saying. Lazaro retorted that the payment offer, first alleged by President Fidel
 Castro in an early December speech, was a complete fabrication.
 

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald