BY ALBERTO IBARGÜEN

                    PUBLISHER & CHAIRMAN

 The failed, last-minute negotiations to bring about a nonviolent solution to the Elian custody dispute sent me back to a book I had not looked at in more than 10 years. It's called Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury, both professors at Harvard.

 The authors wrote that a ''basic fact about negotiation, easy to forget . . . is that you're dealing not with abstract representatives of the 'other side,' but with human beings. They have emotions, deeply held values and different backgrounds and viewpoints; and they are unpredictable. . . . This human aspect of negotiation can be either helpful or disastrous.''

 When Fisher and Ury published their book in 1981, they could not have known how true their words would ring in Miami in April of the year 2000.

 Last Saturday afternoon, I sat in on an off-the-record conversation between Attorney General Janet Reno and four prominent Miamians, some of them close friends of hers, with whom she had attempted just hours before to reach a nonviolent solution to the Elian impasse. They were University of Miami President Edward T. Foote II, businessman and UM Chairman Carlos de la Cruz, lawyer Aaron Podhurst and businessman Carlos Saladrigas. They had volunteered three days before because, in the words of De la Cruz, ''someone had to.''

 The attorney general had called Podhurst, who returned her call. I was allowed to listen in on the conversation, which was off the record. Wednesday, Attorney General Reno, at my request, released us from any obligation to keep it confidential.

 An essential element in reaching a successful conclusion to negotiations is that the parties understand each other's needs and values. In this one, those elements were tragically missing. Although the conversation I witnessed was frank and civil, it was clear that the parties were like ships passing in the night.

 Perhaps the most remarkable difference was the perception of the role of the attorney general herself. Reno spoke of herself as the broker, a mediator between two parties in a custody dispute. The Miamians had understood her to be the decision maker.

 Think about how different those roles are. One is the person who decides what's acceptable; the other is the person who takes a proposal to the decision maker. It may be hard to believe that smart and well-intentioned people could so greatly misunderstand each other, but it's true. On Saturday afternoon, the Miamians asked Reno if she would, with the child then at Andrews Air Force Base, consider implementing some of the elements of the last Miami proposal. Shared visitation rights and not allowing Cuban agents near the boy were prominently mentioned.

 She replied that that was the deal she had tried to broker the night before, and failed. Her response was met with amazement by people who had assumed that she had the power to impose a deal she believed in.

 She reminded the Miamians that she had said there was no deal until she said there was a deal. They understood that to mean that she'd decide when there was a deal; she apparently meant that they should not get hopes up too high until she confirmed with the other side that they agreed.

 Perhaps by the time the four Miamians joined the fray it was already too late. It may have been too late to do the things Fisher and Ury say that successful negotiations require: Framing issues as a joint search for objective criteria, openness as to standards and never yielding to pressure, only to principle. These take time to evolve.

 Even though Reno and the Miamians knew and trusted each other, they only had three days to work. Perhaps she knew that; they certainly didn't. From the Washington perspective, they'd been at this for weeks. From a Miami perspective, all developments were viewed as progress because the new negotiating team had such a short frame of reference.

 Fisher and Ury also write about the three big problems in communicating during a negotiation. In the first place, the negotiators may not be talking to each other but rather to third parties or their own constituencies. Second, the other side may not be hearing you and, third, there are problems of misunderstanding what is actually said. In this final round of negotiations, we saw all three.

 THIRD PARTIES

 Even that Saturday afternoon, the Miamians felt that they had been only inches away from the goal. They had gotten the family to accept, in principle, the inevitable surrender of the boy and had verbal acceptance of this from community groups that had, up to that point, been intransigent on the issue. They were elated by this and understood it as a major development.

 From a Washington perspective, what the Miamians wanted was illusory because the courts already had decided that the boy belonged with his father.

 They were speaking to different audiences. The Miamians were speaking with the local Gonzalez family and with many community groups and politicians; the attorney general was speaking privately with Juan Gonzalez's lawyer, her staff and, one assumes, with the president.

 In the end, Washington saw so many details still to work out that they lost hope, having placed comparatively little value on the movement of the previous three days.

 THE OTHER SIDE

 When Reno said she was running out of time, the Miami negotiators who had known her for years never seem to have taken her literally. Even when she said they had ''five minutes, not six,'' the response from Podhurst, in the conversation I witnessed, was, ''but you kept me on the phone!'' The Miami assumption was that she did not literally mean what she had said; that she was still negotiating.

 There were other areas of misunderstanding. Reno described this as a reunification of a child with his father. For the Miami negotiators, a major value was keeping the child in freedom and not returning him to a totalitarianism in Cuba where the state has custody of children.

 Misunderstanding was evident again when Saladrigas asked the attorney general who was with the boy at the time of the conversation. She answered that she didn't know. Saladrigas wondered aloud how she could guarantee that there were no Cuban operatives there, an issue of deep importance to the Miamians.

 For the attorney general this seemed to be a matter not just of less importance, but a matter that would in any event be up to the custodian of the child -- in her view, the father.

 There was enough good faith on both sides that Reno called her negotiating adversaries after the fact as if they had been negotiating partners in this failed effort. If good will alone had been sufficient, they would have succeeded. But it wasn't.

 Miami's tensions have rarely been more starkly highlighted. We will need to negotiate with each other to find common ground to go forward. As we do, let's remember to frame the issues as a joint search for shared, objective criteria, be open as to the standards we should use to make decisions and never yield to pressure, only to principle.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald