By PETER T. KILBORN

          MIAMI BEACH, Jan. 26 -- Two Cuban women and their
          6-year-old grandson, accidental players on the last front of the
          cold war, met privately today for the first time in the two months since the
          boy was rescued from the Atlantic Ocean, where his mother drowned.

          The women seek custody of the boy, Elián González, for his father in
          Cuba, while Cuban-American relatives want to him to stay here.

          After the meeting, the grandmothers left by helicopter without
          commenting and returned to Washington. The boy's Miami relatives, said
          they were elated by the discussions, although they had not been a party
          to them.

          "I feel great," said Marisleysis González, the 21-year-old daughter of
          Lázaro and Angela González, with whom Elián has been living. "I feel
          he's more to this side than to that side," she said, referring to his
          grandmothers.

          "They just came to him and they hugged him and they sat down at a table
          and they were seeing an album of pictures," Ms. González said.

          Right after the meeting, Jorge Mas Santos, a leader of the Cuban exiles
          who was in the car with Elián, spoke to a reporter for WSCV-TV, a
          Spanish station in Miami. Then Mr. Mas handed the telephone to the
          boy. "I will get my U.S. citizenship tomorrow," a little voice said in
          Spanish.

          None of the Miami family members were in the meeting with Elián, held
          at the home of Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, president of Barry University.
          Instead, the meeting included the boy, his grandmothers, Sister Jeanne
          and two other nuns. In a news conference afterward, Sister Jeanne
          indicated that the most important outcome of the meeting may have been
          a softening of hostility.

          "It was very touch and go for a long time," she said. "It was very
          definitely a family affair that has somehow turned into political agendas."

          Both sides arrived frightened and wary of trapdoors, she said. But, "there
          were no accusations or promises or trying to define the future."

          Since Friday, Mariela Quintana, mother of Elián's father, Juan Miguel
          González, and Raquel Rodríguez, mother of Elián's mother, have
          bounded from New York to Washington to New York to Miami to
          Washington and then back to Miami to plea for something that would be
          simple enough most anywhere else: Returning a motherless child to his
          father and his grandmothers, who had helped rear him from infancy. But
          their cause has been caught up in the fires that have scorched
          American-Cuban relations since the Cuban revolution 41 years ago.

          Acrimony between the grandmothers and the Miami relatives who want
          custody was such that the two sides did not have contact with each other
          at the meeting place. Sister Jeanne led Elián to the grandmothers, who
          were waiting in a second-floor room with toys and coloring books. The
          Miami relatives, who have taken care of the boy since he was found
          clinging to an inner tube on Nov. 25, stayed in other rooms.

          To smooth negotiations before the meeting, the Immigration and
          Naturalization Service had assured the Miami relatives that Elián would
          not be spirited away.

          There was little doubt about the reunion's symbolism and the passions
          that it has stirred. With Miami police providing security as intense as that
          for presidential visits, Elián came and went in his relatives' political
          consultant's Lexus, a tiny figure in a blue and red plaid shirt and dark blue
          trousers.

          A half hour after Elián arrived, and an hour after the scheduled 4 p.m.
          start of the meeting, his grandmothers arrived by helicopter from a Miami
          area airport.

          Anti-Castro demonstrators had gathered outside the home's iron gate,
          chanting, "Libertad! Libertad!" and "Elián, Miami is with you" in Spanish.

          One sign expressed a view gaining currency among Cuban exiles, that
          Elián's miraculous survival of two days in the sea has made him a sort of
          religious icon. It said, "3 kings, 3 children -- Moses, Jesus and Elián."

          As the visit began, all the combatants in the battle over custody of Elián
          assembled in their largest force yet. But the lawyers, publicists, officials of
          Cuban exile groups and officials of the National Council of Churches,
          which has chaperoned the grandmothers, were not allowed indoors.

          The meeting took place after the immigration service intervened on
          Tuesday and ordered the relatives to allow the grandmothers to meet
          Elián or lose their temporary custody while their appeals are heard in
          federal court.

          Elián's paternal great-uncle, Lázaro González, has sued in federal court to
          block Elián's repatriation, which the immigration service ordered and then
          delayed, and to hear their appeal for his political asylum.

          Meanwhile, in Congress today, a bill to grant the boy honorary
          citizenship -- a right offered only two other people then living, Winston
          Churchill and Mother Teresa -- struck some rhetorical shoals. "Should
          the U.S. Senate be a custody court?" asked Senator Chuck Hagel,
          Republican of Nebraska. "Let this young boy go home to his father."

          Such questions appeared to slow the momentum of citizenship legislation
          led by Senator Connie Mack, Republican of Florida, and supported by
          the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi.
 

                     Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company