BY TERE FIGUERAS NEGRETE AND LUISA YANEZ

Sitting in the crowded courtroom, her hand cupping the headphones that fed the translator's words to her ears, Elena Perez watched the back-and-forth of lawyers with restless eyes.

''Mentiras,'' she blurted at one point, raising a hand urgently to catch the judge's attention during a hearing this week.

Lies.

The child at the center of an international custody dispute, which has pitted a Cuban farmer against a prominent Coral Gables foster family, is Perez's daughter.

But Perez, whose attempted suicide was the catalyst for the removal of the girl from her care -- and the subsequent custody battle -- has largely been a spectator to the sometimes-heated legal wrangling over the child's fate.

She has been adamant that she would prefer the child, whose name has not been revealed by The Miami Herald to protect her privacy, be returned to her father in Cuba. Although she said Friday that her ''greatest hope'' is that her daughter be returned to her, she has been an ally of her ex-boyfriend and the girl's birth father, Rafael Izquierdo, who wants to take his daughter back to Cuba.

''If she can't be with be me -- her own mother -- then she should be with her own father who wants her,'' said Perez, 35, who came to the United States in 2005 with her daughter and son.

Anything would be better, she said, than to have the girl remain in the United States, where she is under the care of Joe Cubas, a well-known former sports agent who rose to prominence helping spirit Cuban baseball players away from the island.

Cubas and his wife, Maria, have cared for the girl for more than a year and have formally adopted the girl's 13-year-old half brother. The boy has told his birth mother that he wants to remain with the Cubas family, and Perez said she has resigned herself to that fact.

Perez says she regrets ever leaving the small town of Cabaiguan. There, she said, her children were happy.

''I know it goes wonderfully for some people, but I'm very disenchanted in this country,'' said Perez, who arrived with the children in December 2005 along with a new husband, Jesus Melendres -- who she says abandoned her soon after landing at Miami International Airport. As a jilted newlywed, the former pharmacy worker's life soon began to unravel.

''My experience here has been abysmal. My two children and I experienced nothing but hard times,'' said Perez. She left Miami for a time to try and rebuild her life in Houston, where friends say she was frequently despondent and often neglectful of her children. She eventually returned to Miami.

''One horrible night, I decided that my kids would be better off without me and did something stupid,'' she said. ``I'm not crazy. I have been depressed and tense and had many sleepless nights, but I'm fine.''

Her kids were taken away in March 2006, and put first with one foster family before the Department of Children & Families placed them in the Cubas household.

She had never heard of the former sports agent who made a name for himself -- and earned a measure of criticism in some quarters -- by helping nearly a dozen baseball players defect and sign multimillion-dollar contracts with Major League teams.

Perez said she thinks the system has favored Cubas because of his wealth and prominence.

Cubas, speaking outside the courthouse this week, said he is not getting special treatment. ''She needs to look in the mirror,'' said Cubas, referring to Perez's role in her daughter's ordeal.

State caseworkers, who are arguing that the child should remain with Cubas, have maintained that the birth father failed to protect his daughter from an emotionally unbalanced Perez. In court documents, the state's attorneys quote family friends who say Perez's reputation in Cabaiguan was that she was ''crazy,'' and that Perez told them that Izquierdo beat her, noting that bruises were often visible on the woman's body.

While in the states, Perez has denied that Izquierdo was abusive.

Izquierdo says he is puzzled and distraught over his former lover's predicament. ''It hurts to see a woman, who was a good woman, change from day to night, destroyed and without her children,'' he said.

Izquierdo that says even if Perez is not the child's legal caregiver, she would remain in the girl's life. ''I'm not going to be so strict,'' Izquierdo said. ``I'm never going to keep her from her mother.''

Perez, for her part, is eager to return to Cabaiguan -- under one condition:

``I won't leave Miami until my daughter does.''