Elian in Uniform Stirs Charges of Indoctrination

                  By Karen DeYoung
                  Washington Post Staff Writer

                  Elian Gonzalez is largely out of sight these days, sequestered in a gilded
                  guest house on the Eastern Shore. But he certainly is not out of mind--at
                  least for those on the front lines of the simmering, low-intensity conflict
                  over his fate.

                  The latest skirmish began Tuesday when Granma, Cuba's Communist
                  Party newspaper, published four photographs of Elian "at the little school
                  organized at Wye Plantation, Maryland." Elian banging two sticks together.
                  Elian joking around with the four first-grade schoolmates sent from Havana
                  to keep him company. Elian sitting on a chair while mothers of the
                  schoolmates shake maracas to entertain them. Elian sitting at a table doing
                  schoolwork. Nothing controversial there.

                  Except that in each picture, Elian is wearing red shorts, a white T-shirt and
                  a blue kerchief tied around his neck. The kerchief that every Cuban
                  schoolchild wears to class every day, denoting membership in the
                  Pioneers, the party youth organization. The kerchief they wear when
                  singing the Cuban national anthem, saluting the Cuban flag and pledging
                  each morning to "be like Che."

                  Elian's Miami relatives were outraged at the photos, one of which was
                  reprinted across nearly half the front page of El Nuevo Herald, the Miami
                  Herald's Spanish-language sister paper, with the headline "The Pioneer
                  Elian in Washington."

                  "We're very troubled," Kendall Coffey, the relatives' attorney, told the
                  Herald on Tuesday. "He's being paraded as a trophy in the garb of the
                  Communist Party. It's happening even more rapidly than our worst
                  expectations."

                  The relatives have repeatedly complained that Elian would be
                  "brainwashed" by his father--the same charge that Cuba made against the
                  relatives during the boy's five-month stay in Miami, when he was paraded
                  before anti-Castro demonstrators and videotaped pointing his finger and
                  telling his father he didn't want to go back to Cuba.

                  Coffey said the relatives would protest the Pioneer garb to the Immigration
                  and Naturalization Service.

                  The INS, however, seemed unperturbed. "It's not INS's business what
                  Elian wears on a daily basis," said spokeswoman Maria Cardona. "Those
                  issues are up to his father."

                  "I don't see what the problem is," Luis Fernandez, spokesman for the
                  Cuban Interests Section in Washington, told the Herald. "It's normal.
                  Children go to school in a uniform--just the way they do at private schools
                  in the United States."

                  But the photos were the last straw for Rep. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.),
                  already troubled by the U.S. government issuing visas to Elian's classmates
                  and teacher, and allowing them to set up a first-grade classroom "where
                  we permit indoctrination to take place." Where is the justice in allowing
                  Elian's young mind to be influenced by communist education, Menendez
                  asked, at the very time a U.S. court is considering whether he can apply
                  for political asylum here?

                  "The thrust of my concern," Menendez said yesterday, "is that here we
                  have in . . . the official newspaper, the school set up at the Wye Plantation.
                  There's Elian in a Pioneer suit . . . and what I assume is being taught . . . is
                  [what is] taught in Cuba--indoctrination into Marxist-Leninist ideology."

                  Menendez said he was writing to the State Department, the INS and
                  President Clinton, and circulating a "Dear Colleague" letter on Capitol Hill
                  to see if others "support the view that we gave visas to individuals to
                  conduct classes in indoctrination."

                  Yesterday, Cuba struck back, mixing animal metaphors to ridicule the
                  relatives as a "pack of hounds" in the "Miami chicken coop." Elian and his
                  classmates would far rather be in their own Cuban classroom, said
                  Granma, but were forced to study in their makeshift school to keep them
                  "not only from the claws of imperialism and the Miami mafia, but also from
                  the claws of ignorance, egotism and lack of culture."

                  As if that were not insult enough, Havana also this week proudly showed
                  off what it said were copies of Mother's Day postcards sent by Elian to his
                  grandmothers and great-grandmother, each with a childishly drawn red
                  flower and each signed "Your grandson, Elian" . . . neatly written in
                  cursive!!! One of the issues before the appeals court is whether a
                  block-letter, all capitals "ELIAN" at the bottom of a political asylum
                  application, submitted on his behalf by his Miami great-uncle, constitutes
                  the 6-year-old's witting signature.

                  "Anyone," Granma noted loftily, "can compare the signature of our boy . . .
                  with that 'scratch' submitted as his 'free signature' on the English-language
                  asylum application before the 'illustrious' American court."

                  As all sides nervously await the court's ruling, similar skirmishes are
                  breaking out all over. In response to a Justice Department offer to set up a
                  meeting between the Miami relatives and a government-hired psychiatrist
                  seeing Elian, attorneys for the relatives sent a series of demands for
                  telephone contact with Elian, and for agreement that he would be seen not
                  only with them, their lawyers and physicians, but also with a Miami
                  Catholic priest they identified as the boy's "spiritual adviser." Questioning
                  the purpose of a meeting with the psychiatrist, they asked the government
                  to confirm that it was to "sensitize" them as to the best way to approach
                  Elian during their "reintroduction."

                  In its own letter Tuesday, Justice countered that the only purpose in seeing
                  the psychiatrist was to help facilitate a meeting between the relatives and
                  Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who would then decide whether they
                  could meet with Elian.

                  Letters, photographs and audio and video tapes to Elian were welcome,
                  Justice said. "We invite you to send such items to Elian in care of his father,
                  Mr. Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at 154 Carmichael Farm Road, Queenstown,
                  Maryland 21658. . . . The determination about what materials will be
                  shown to Elian will be made by his father."

                  Visits by others to Elian? "Such persons can convey their written requests
                  to Mr. Gonzalez at the above address or to his lawyer. . . . Mr. Gonzalez
                  will determine who should and who should not visit his son." Telephone
                  calls? "Telephone access to Elian should be determined by Mr. Gonzalez."