Melanie Luke was pounded on the back. She was kicked. Her hair was pulled.

 She was pummeled and bruised on the street in front of the Lazaro Gonzalez house,
 and a small hand-lettered sign was ripped from her hands.

 It was as if she had scribbled some ethnic slur across her placard.

 Her sign, the insult that could not be tolerated Sunday afternoon on the streets of
 Little Havana, stated: ''Reno did the right thing.''

 ''Communist whore!'' someone shouted.

 ''Who paid you to do this?'' asked another, as if such an opinion could only
 originate 90 miles south.

 But just 20 miles north, that sentiment represents a preponderance of opinion.
 The drive up I-95 from Miami into Broward County crosses the greatest ethnic
 chasm I've seen since the O.J. Simpson verdict.

 The American majority was dumbfounded and disbelieving when O.J. was found
 not guilty. But all that incriminating DNA and so much circumstantial evidence
 against Simpson diminished in the eyes of an ethnic minority with a complex
 history and so many hurtful dealings with white cops. Blacks, by a percentage
 the inverse of whites, found the O.J. verdict reasonable.

 An opinion gap of the similar magnitude seems to separate the Cuban exile
 community and its ethnic neighbors in South Florida, aggravated by warring
 perceptions of Elian and what occurred Saturday morning.

 The other side -- myself in particular -- has failed to grasp a hurt so painful in the
 exile community that it trumps the family bond between a father and a son. We
 can see the feeling, the fervor on the streets. But the experience that shaped
 such fervor remains, for an uncomprehending majority, in another cultural
 dimension.

 We harbor, on the other side, that radical notion that Janet Reno did the right
 thing -- perhaps not soon enough, but the right thing. But we know, unhappily,
 that suggesting support of the U.S. attorney general, or the President of the
 United States, can get you roughed up in Little Havana.

 For weeks, Bill Clinton and Janet Reno have been slandered and demonized
 along Northwest Second Avenue in Miami. Even while the majority view, at least
 north of the Miami-Dade County line, was that Clinton and Reno had been too
 hesitant, too tolerant of exile intransigence, to enforce the law in Little Havana and
 extract that child. This nonstop clamor contained no recognition that the very man
 likened to Hitler and described as a Castro lackey received Florida's electoral
 votes the last presidential election. Hey, he's our prez.

 There's no demand here that the president should be above criticism, or ridicule,
 just a reminder that some close neighbors harbor honest divergent opinions. Even
 about the president. While folks in Broward County might not elect Bill Clinton to
 take the baby-sitter home, he'd probably still get more votes in the county than
 either George W. Bush or the ubiquitous Donato Dalrymple.

 A security guard, hired to watch over a television news team's equipment, rushed
 through the angry crowd Sunday afternoon, grabbed Melanie Luke, led her three
 blocks through an angry gauntlet.

 The guard flagged down a passing van to take her and her unwelcome views away
 from Little Havana, to the far side of a mighty cultural chasm.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald