MIAMI, Florida (Reuters) -- With cries of "Freedom, freedom," a small group of
                  Cuban exiles gathered on Saturday to mark the anniversary of a dramatic raid
                  by federal agents to take Cuban shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez from
                  the home of his Miami relatives and reunite him with his father.

                  Armed agents swooped before dawn on April 22, 2000, to take the then
                  6-year-old boy from the modest Little Havana house, effectively ending a bitter
                  struggle by the Miami relatives and their supporters among the city's Cuban
                  exiles to keep the motherless boy from being returned to live with his father in
                  communist Cuba.

                  Elian was flown that day to be with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, near
                  Washington. Two months later, the pair went home to Cuba after the U.S.
                  Supreme Court put an end to the Miami relatives' legal efforts to keep the child in
                  "freedom" in the United States.

                  On Saturday evening, a crowd of several dozen people gathered outside the small
                  home where Elian lived for five months, waving Cuban flags and posters of a
                  photograph showing an armed agent bearing down on the child.

                  The crowd prayed, sang, denounced Cuban President Fidel Castro and recalled
                  the raid that shocked the city and was followed by a day of street protests by angry
                  Cuban exiles. Some in the crowd said they planned to return to the house early on
                  Sunday to be there before dawn and mark the exact moment when the federal agents went in.

                  Lazaro Gonzalez, Elian's great-uncle and head of the household that took Elian in
                  after he was rescued at sea and then tried to keep him in Miami, spoke briefly,
                  referring to the raid as "an infamous dawn" and saying it had taken Elian to a
                  place "where there is no freedom."

                  Then Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the raid after Lazaro Gonzalez and his
                  family defied a government order to hand Elian over to be reunited with his
                  father, who had come to the United States to try to get him back.

                  The April 22 raid -- agents whisked the child out in the dark past protesters who
                  had begun staging an almost nonstop vigil in the street outside the home -- was
                  the most dramatic moment in the tense seven-month Elian saga.

                  The child was plucked from the ocean off Florida on November 25, 1999, after
                  surviving a disastrous migrant voyage from Cuba in which his mother and 10
                  other people died.

                  He became a poster child for both Miami exiles, who wanted to keep him in the
                  United States, and Castro, who wanted him back. The U.S. government decided
                  early in the tug of war that the father's wish to have the child back in Cuba
                  should be respected, but the case dragged its way through the courts up to the
                  Supreme Court.

                  The Elian case divided Miami -- with the city's Cuban and non-Cuban population largely
                  baffled by each other's point of view -- and mesmerized the rest of the country as a sad
                  family soap opera, dramatized by four decades of hostilities between Castro and the exile
                  community.

                  While Elian was in Miami, the Little Havana house was almost always surrounded by media
                   and supporters of the Miami relatives, and the boy lived in the spotlight. He has been kept out
                   of it for the most part since he went home to live and attend school in his native Cardenas in
                   northern Cuba.

                   Lazaro Gonzalez, a car mechanic who became well-known in Miami as local politicians and
                   Cuban exile celebrities flocked to his home to pay homage to a child whose rescue was seen
                  as miraculous, said on Saturday that nobody in his family had managed to speak
                  to Elian since the day the child left Miami.

                  He said it was not for lack of trying on his part and blamed the Cuban
                  government for the lack of communication.

                  Marisleysis Gonzalez, Lazaro's daughter, was a key figure in the drama, making
                  passionate and often tearful pleas for him to stay in the country.

                  She was not present at Saturday's ceremony, and Lazaro Gonzalez declined to
                  say why.

                     Copyright 2001 Reuters.