CARDENAS, Cuba (Reuters) -- Across the ocean from Miami, where the Elian
                  Gonzalez custody drama appears headed into its final act, a dusty town in provincial
                  Cuba is praying and preparing for the homecoming of its most famous son.

                  "It can't be long now," sighed 79-year-old Giralda Diaz Milian, standing on her
                  doorstep in the street where the 6-year-old shipwreck survivor's father and
                  grandparents live in Cardenas, an old-fashioned town on Cuba's northern coast.

                  Like virtually all of Cuba's 11 million inhabitants, Diaz -- mother of 10, grandmother
                  of 27 and great-grandmother of 24 -- longs for Elian to return to Cardenas and put
                  an end to the four-month-old feud over his future.

                  Following a Miami court's ruling in favour of Elian's repatriation, and growing U.S.
                  government pressure on his Miami relatives, Cardenas residents are more optimistic
                  than ever that they could be welcoming him back within days or weeks.

                  "In the block, we will hold a little party for him," said Diaz, staring at Elian's father's
                  modest home, which flags, photos of the boy, banners and a fresh coat of paint have
                  given a shrine-like aura.

                  "When he comes back, he'll quickly forget everything they've done to him there, he
                  will get better fast. He's a strong boy. He adapts well. It won't be difficult."

                  Cardenas residents, apparently, will not forget so easily.

                  Bitterness against Elian's U.S. relatives, and the Cuban- American community in
                  Miami, is palpable on the streets of this port town of some 100,000 people.

                  "They don't love the boy," housewife Zoraida Flores, 44, said of Elian's great-uncle
                  and other U.S. relatives who have been fighting for custody of the boy on the
                  grounds that he should not be returned to communism in Cuba.

                  "If the Mafia wasn't giving them money, they wouldn't want to keep the boy ... . They
                  are living off him now. Before they didn't even know him. This is his only true home."

                  Such comments underline just how much the Elian affair has increased decades-old
                  tensions across the 90 miles (145 km) of sea dividing Cuba from Florida, the heartland
                  of anti-Castro Cuban-American exiles.

                  Elian's mother died trying to cross from one community to another in a makeshift boat
                  that capsized during the night, sending her and another 11 illegal Cuban migrants to a
                  horrific death. Elian, then only 5, survived on an inner-tube for two days and nights
                  before being picked up by fishermen on Nov. 25.

                  What began as a family fight over his future quickly escalated into a major political
                  dispute. President Fidel Castro turned Elian's father's demand into one of the biggest
                  patriotic crusades Cuba has ever waged and hardline Cuban-American groups seized
                  on the case as a way of humiliating him.

                  Despite their fervent support for Elian's return, Cardenas residents are, however, only
                  too aware of the ironies of the situation. Many of them have relatives across the water
                  -- whose regular gifts of cash and goods keeps them economically afloat -- and know
                  of people still making the perilous voyage to Florida despite the tragic example of
                  Elian's boat.

                  "What people should also be asking in all this is why so many people are leaving
                  Cuba in the first place. Elian may return, but hundreds, thousands, of people keep
                  going," said one man, gazing out to water from a square on the sea-front.

                  In contrast to the glitz and fast life Elian has been seeing in Miami, Cardenas is a
                  typical, laid-back Cuban provincial city complete with peeling homes, potholed streets,
                  a languid but friendly atmosphere, and roads used mainly by horse-drawn carts,
                  bicycles and 1950s-era American cars.

                  Prior to Elian's fame, the town was barely noticed by foreigners, who would only pass
                  through it on their way to the Varadero beach-resort from the center of the Caribbean
                  island.

                  Outside Elian's former school in the center of Cardenas, children streamed out of
                  classes on a sunny afternoon and cheerfully showed a foreign reporter where the boy
                  used to play, and where an empty desk stands awaiting his return.

                  "Elian will be home soon, and I am going to help him catch up on his lost classes,"
                  said one schoolboy of Elian's age. "Fidel (Castro) is going to bring Elian back here, I
                  am sure."

                     Copyright 2000 Reuters.