BY STEVEN GUTKIN
 Associated Press

 CARDENAS, Cuba -- Cuban officials insist that Elian Gonzalez's mother took her
 fatal journey to the United States under threats from a brutal boyfriend with a long
 criminal record.

 Cuban exiles in Miami insist she did it to take her son to freedom.

 But some of Elisabeth Brotons' friends in her hometown of Cardenas believe she
 left neither to pursue freedom nor because she was threatened. She just wanted
 to be with her boyfriend, they say.

 ``I can say she did what she did because of love,'' said Lisbeth Garcia, 28, who
 worked alongside Brotons as a hotel chambermaid.

 What emerges from interviews in the couple's home province is a love story
 between a hard-working young woman in good standing with the Communist
 Party and an anxious young man who liked to buck the system.

 The government has depicted the boyfriend, Lazaro Munero, as a violent felon, but
 statements from residents indicate that is probably an exaggeration.

 ``I would not categorize him as a criminal,'' said Seida Garcia, a former school
 official in the small town of Jaguey Grande, where Munero was transferred after
 misbehaving at another school down the road.

 Munero and Brotons were killed along with nine other people when the boat they
 were riding in sank in the Atlantic. Clinging to an inner tube, Elian survived two
 days alone at sea until he was rescued on Nov. 25.

 The boy is now living in Miami with his paternal great uncle, who is fighting to
 keep him in the United States, claiming his mother died trying to bring him to
 freedom.

 Cuba's Communist government has turned the case into a major national
 crusade, demanding that the boy be returned to his father in Cuba and insisting
 that Brotons made the trip under ``threats and violence'' from Munero.

 One of Elian's former neighbors said she thinks Munero got a bum rap.

 ``The dead don't talk. Who will defend him now?'' she said, refusing to give her
 name because she said she could ``go to jail for 20 years'' for publicly disagreeing
 with the government.