Custody: Mambi's broadcasts mix fact with rumor, keeping tempers high over rescued youngster's fate.

           By ESTHER SCHRADER, Times Staff Writer

                MIAMI--The rumor poured out over Radio Mambi last Friday night: Immigration officials were en
           route to the home of Elian Gonzalez to snatch him away.
                Never mind that the report turned out to be false. Within half an hour, thousands of Miami's Cuban
           Americans had surrounded the house--testimony to the central role the 50,000-watt Spanish-language
           station has played for months in fomenting the standoff over the 6-year-old boy's fate.
                Under the direction of Armando Perez-Roura, the station's 70-year-old general director and
           anti-communist commentator who has been fighting an ideological war over Miami's airwaves for
           decades, Radio Mambi, WAQI, 710 AM, has used its formidable power in the Cuban exile
           community to keep tempers hot over the Gonzalez case.
                "The radio has a great deal of importance for our people," said Perez-Roura in an interview
           Monday in his office, its walls filled with memorabilia of the pre-Castro Cuba, where the young
           Perez-Roura got his start in radio.
                "It is a way for our people to hear history and news told with the voice of passion," he said. "On
           radio, words are not dead, they are alive. And our words have credibility. Our people know we have
           been fighting this regime and we will fight this regime until there is liberty for Cuba. And when we tell
           people to demonstrate, people listen."
                Radio Mambi--named for the Cuban rebels who fought for independence from Spain in the late
           19th century--is far from the only radio station serving the more than 780,000 people of Cuban
           descent estimated to live in Miami-Dade County. Five Spanish-language radio stations battle for
           listeners in the region with aggressive news coverage that sizzles with hate for Fidel Castro.
                But with more listeners than any other Spanish-language commentator in Miami, Perez-Roura is the
           undisputed dean of the airwaves here. And in the almost five months since Elian was pulled from the
           waters off Miami, Perez-Roura and the radio station he founded after he left Cuba in 1969 have not
           let listeners down.
                From its studios in the center of Miami's Little Havana, it broadcasts bulletins on the custody
           dispute ceaselessly. Perez-Roura and other broadcasters do not hide their contempt for the politicians
           they tell listeners are the villains of the story: President Clinton, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and the man
           they always refer to as "the vicious dictator Castro."
                Armando Gutierrez--spokesman for Elian's great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, and his Miami
           family--stops in daily. The office walls of the station are covered with posters depicting Elian as baby
           Moses and as the Christ child. In the lobby sit stacks of poems--odes to Elian and elegies to Elian's
           mother, Elisabeth Brotons, who died in the ill-fated voyage across the Florida Straits that the boy
           survived.
                At demonstrations outside the Gonzalez house, the radio station has a booth, and workers for the
           station walk through the crowd distributing bottles of cold water to protesters swaying in the heat.
                And behind the microphone, morning, noon and night, is Perez-Roura, dignified in a suit and tie, his
           silky on-air voice rolling the r's of his favorite words: libertad and patria.
                Perez-Roura has played such a key role in supporting the demonstrations against returning the
           Gonzalez boy to Cuba that the latest rumor swirling through the Cuban community is that the
           Immigration and Naturalization Service plans to block his broadcasts on the day agents storm the
           Gonzalez house to take Elian away.
                Why is the rumor swirling through the community? Well, it doesn't hurt that Perez-Roura repeats it
           on the air.
                Which is fine with the station's listeners.
                "This station has been here since the emigration began. It's the very heartbeat of the Cuban
           community. It's how we get our opinions and our views across," said Peter Fernandez, a songwriter
           waiting in the lobby of the glass-walled office building where Radio Mambi broadcasts, hoping that the
           station will agree to play a song he has written about the little boy.
                "This place gives us a Cuban point of reference, a place for our Cuban soul," he said. "Of course
           it's in the center of the battle over Elian. We wouldn't expect it to be anywhere else."
                On Monday, with all Cuban Miami waiting for the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that
           could move the Department of Justice to take action against Lazaro Gonzalez, Perez-Roura was at his
           hard-line anti-Castro best.
                At his microphone in a tiny studio whose scarred walls are adorned with a poster of Jorge Mas
           Canosa, the founder of the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation, Perez-Roura launched
           into his noontime commentary.
                "In Washington, the government waits for the green light to obligate the family of Elian Gonzalez in
           Miami to give up the child," Perez-Roura tells listeners, his voice deep with foreboding. "As you know,
           Clinton said sooner or later it has to happen.
                "The government of the United States keeps warning us to respect the law," Perez-Roura says, his
           voice rising. "It has to be said to the president of the United States that we Cubans know how to
           respect the law, and if he doesn't know that he should review history. It is Fidel Castro, Clinton's new
           compatriot, who does not respect the law."
                As Perez-Roura speaks, he leans into the microphone and clenches his fist. And for a moment the
           Cold War is alive and the Castro revolution that obliterated the Cuba of the old man's boyhood is a
           vivid, wrenching memory.
                "We battle not just for the liberty of little Elian," Perez-Roura says. "We battle for the liberty of
           Cuba."
                                                ---
                Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.