NURI VALLBONA/HERALD STAFF
 SAMUEL DEAN/HERALD STAFF

 GRANDMOTHERS' BIG DAY: The two women from Cuba, above, are shuttled to
 their meeting with Elian, who is cheerful hours later as he arrives at Little Havana
 home of his cousin Marisleysis and great-uncle Lazaro.

 REUNION WITH ELIAN

 Family still split after grandmothers' visit
 Hugs, pain mark brief meeting in Miami Beach

 BY ALFONSO CHARDY, SANDRA MARQUEZ GARCIA AND ANDRES
 VIGLUCCI

 Two months after they last embraced in Cuba, Elian Gonzalez's two
 grandmothers conducted a tense but emotional visit with their 6-year-old grandson
 Wednesday in the private and neutral setting of a Miami Beach waterfront
 mansion, attended by all the pomp and security of a presidential tour.

 By all accounts, the meeting between Elian and his grandmothers, Raquel
 Rodriguez and Mariela Quintana, was warm. Upon first seeing the boy, the
 women picked him up and hugged and kissed him, shaking slightly with emotion.

 ``It was a sacred moment,'' said Sister Leonor Esnard, a Cuban-American nun
 who witnessed the reunion at the home of Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, president of
 Barry University.

 Elian and the two women then met, supervised at a discreet distance by Esnard
 and another nun, around a table in an upstairs room. They chatted and pored over
 an album of family photos and sketches by his Cuban schoolmates that the
 grandmothers brought for the boy. Though initially quiet, Elian became more
 talkative as the visit progressed, at times laughing and smiling, the nuns said.

 But the tension that has surrounded the long-awaited meeting did not dissipate,
 nor did it seem to bring the two sides of Elian's warring family any closer together.

 After the two-hour visit, Elian's Miami relatives, who are fighting the boy's father
 and family in Cuba for custody, claimed that their ``side'' was winning the battle
 for the little boy's affections.

 ``I feel confident,'' said Elian's cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, whose father is the
 boy's great-uncle. ``Now I feel that he is more on this side than that side.''

 Directly after the meeting, Rodriguez and Quintana flew back to Washington,
 D.C., where they have been lobbying in Congress against proposals to grant Elian
 U.S. citizenship. They did not speak to the press or issue any statement, and
 they displayed no emotion publicly as they departed.

 CHILD EXCITED

 While driving away from the meeting, Elian flashed a V sign out the window and,
 in an interview broadcast over Spanish-language Radio Mambi, WAQI-AM, said:
 ``Tomorrow they're going to make me an American citizen.'' The proposal is not
 expected to come up for debate until next week at the earliest, however.

 O'Laughlin depicted the early stages of the visit as difficult and marred by mutual
 mistrust. By previous agreement, the grandmothers and Elian's Miami relatives
 were in separate sections of the sprawling villa during the visit, she said.

 The long-awaited meeting came a day after the U.S. Immigration and
 Naturalization Service ordered the boy's Miami relatives, with whom Elian has
 been living since his rescue on Thanksgiving Day, to make the child available.

 An attempt on Monday by Quintana and Rodriguez to visit Elian came to naught
 when the grandmothers refused to go to the family's Little Havana home. They
 said they were concerned by the presence of demonstrators. The Miami relatives
 refused to take the boy to a neutral place, expressing fears the INS would try to
 snatch him.

 OVERCOMING MISTRUST

 On Wednesday, O'Laughlin said she had to demonstrate to the boy's Miami
 family members that ``windows could not be opened, that doors would not be
 opened, that there were no disappearing trap doors.''

 She described Elian's great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, as ``honest'' but ``weary and
 frightened.'' She said the grandmothers, too, appeared scared, but ``truly showed
 their love'' for Elian.

 ``There was pain on both sides and hurt on both sides,'' O'Laughlin said, adding
 later: ``Today was about the future of a child and together we must all weep for
 the days of anguish and suffering that that child has had to endure.''

 The visit was also marked by a dispute over a cellular phone carried by one of the
 grandmothers. O'Laughlin said a nun at the house asked a police officer to take
 the phone away when it rang because it violated ground rules for the meeting.

 DAD ASKED FOR CALL

 The grandmothers may have been expecting a call from Elian's father in Cuba,
 Juan Miguel Gonzalez. In a letter to the grandmothers signed by Gonzalez and
 the child's grandfathers, published Wednesday in Granma, the Communist Party
 daily, Elian's father asked to speak ``freely'' with his son during the meeting --
 presumably meaning outside the presence of the Miami relatives.

 The Cuban version of the incident was that there was no prior agreement to ban
 cell phones, and that it would have been just and humane for the father in Cuba to
 speak to his son in Miami.

 The incident was only one among many that contributed to the
 less-than-conciliatory atmosphere.

 Exile leaders who are managing the Miami family's campaign to keep Elian
 repeatedly attempted to discredit the grandmothers, portraying them to the media
 as having been manipulated by the Cuban government. Family spokesman
 Armando Gutierrez and officials of the Cuban American National Foundation
 (CANF) issued assertions or suggestions throughout the day that the women,
 accompanying clergy or O'Laughlin were in contact with Cuban officials, and
 acting on their instructions.

 CANF officials who were sighted in the yard of the house next door to Sister
 Jeanne's -- where they said they had been invited by the homeowner -- were
 asked to leave, though it was unclear by whom. A Foundation spokeswoman,
 Ninoska Perez, said Sister Jeanne herself knocked on the neighbor's door and
 said the Cuban government had complained about the exiles' presence there. But
 a law-enforcement source at the scene said U.S. immigration officials who were
 at the nun's house may have asked the CANF officials to leave.

 Foundation leader Jorge Mas Santos, who accompanied the family to the
 meeting, also asserted that the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, the former general
 secretary of the National Council of Churches who escorted the grandmothers,
 was calling Cuba with her cell phone at the house.

 ORCHESTRATION?

 ``I think it is very obvious that Havana has been orchestrating the whole thing,''
 Mas said after the meeting.

 A group of about 50 demonstrators, kept by police at a distance from the home's
 entrance on Pine Tree Drive, loudly hailed Elian's arrival and produced a mix of
 cheers and jeers for the grandmothers whose attempts to rally support for the
 boy's return to Cuba during their six-day trip have made them the object of
 resentment from some Cuban exiles.

 The grandmothers' Miami visit ratcheted up media attention on the Elian saga,
 already at an intense pitch, to an even higher plane. All local TV stations
 interrupted daytime programming to carry the grandmothers' and Elians' every
 move live for hours.

 The events began as the grandmothers landed in Opa-locka at about 3:10 p.m.
 aboard a chartered private jet from Washington, almost two hours late. Although
 the meeting was set for 4 p.m., they did not depart for Miami Beach until 4:50
 p.m. The reason for the delay was unknown.

 As dusk fell over Biscayne Bay, Rodriguez and Quintana were whisked to the
 Beach in a helicopter, closely trailed by a half-dozen news helicopters as it
 swooped over the glistening green bay to Mount Sinai Medical Center's helipad. A
 three-car motorcade then delivered the O'Laughlin's home. There Elian awaited
 them, having arrived some 45 minutes earlier in a Lexus sedan with his Miami
 relatives and supporters.

 News helicopters also followed every yard of Elian's trip from Little Havana to
 O'Lauighlin's front gate.

 EMBRACE OF WELCOME

 As the women stepped out of a red Ford sedan upon their arrival, Sister Jeanne
 opened her arms wide and embraced them before escorting them into the house.
 Also there to greet them were officials from the INS.

 The ``neutral site'' was chosen after INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, who ruled
 earlier this month that Elian should be reunited with his father in Cuba, called
 former Miami Herald Publisher David Lawrence to ask his recommendation of
 suitable locations.

 Lawrence said he offered two possibilities: O'Laughlin's home and the Coral
 Gables home of Dr. Pedro Jose Greer Jr., founder of the Camillus Health Concern
 free clinic.

 ``The only thing I did was make the suggestions,'' Lawrence said.

 Herald staff writers Ana Acle, Mireidy Fernandez, Sonji Jacobs, Marika Lynch,
 Curtis Morgan, Roxana Soto and Juan O. Tamayo, and Herald translator Renato
 Perez contributed to this report.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald