MEG LAUGHLIN

 The mother is running toward the fence at Guantanamo, trying to get out of Cuba with
 her two toddlers. She trips and pushes her two-year-old to the right, her three-year-old to
 the left. With this seemingly inconsequential gesture, their destinies are set.

 The 2-year-old gets over the fence in the arms of a cousin and makes it to Miami to grow up.
 The 3-year-old is captured with mother and returned to her father in Havana, where she
 grows up. The mother goes to prison in Cuba for five years.

 Two children. Two countries. Two opposing ideologies. Two lives that tell, from both sides,
 what the future might hold for six-year-old Elian Gonzalez -- the little boy whose fate,
 after a harrowing rescue at sea, hangs between cousins in Miami and his father in
 Havana.

 On that night of panic in 1969, Estrella Galvez had signed onto a desperate plan: Along with
 100 others, she and her children would ride in the bed of a huge government truck that would
 ram the fence at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo and ultimately whisk them to
 freedom. But the truck crashed in a ditch, caught fire. Everyone made a mad dash for the
 fence as Cuban police ran after them. One child made it over the fence; the other didn't.

 Within a month, two-year-old Estrellita Galvez left Guantanamo to live with her great aunt and
 uncle and their five sons in a one-bedroom apartment in Hialeah.

 Her three-year-old sister, Vivian Galvez, went to live with her father, his new wife and their
 baby in a rambling four-bedroom house in suburban Havana.

 ``I was the lucky one. I got freedom. I got opportunity,'' says Estrellita, now 32.

 ``That is my sister's opinion, not mine,'' says Vivian, 33.

 Aunt and uncle gave little girl everything they possibly could Estrellita Galvez -- now
 Estrellita Carvajal -- was given everything her great aunt and uncle in Hialeah could give her.
 Her uncle sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door and jewelry at the local flea market. Her aunt
 worked long hours in a Hialeah textile factory, sewing suit jackets. They sent the little girl to
 Catholic school, their own sons to public school. They bought her beautiful new
 dresses, while their own sons wore hand-me-downs. They sent her to after-school
 day care while their own sons went unattended.
 
 ``Because of the circumstances that brought Estrellita to us, we saw her as special and
 wanted her to have more,'' says Lucila Rodriguez, the great aunt who raised her.

 Estrellita remembers feeling very protected and loved in her great aunt's modest home.
 She remembers the holiday pigs, the Christmas lights, the dresses she wore to Mass,
 the walking door-to-door to sell vacuum cleaners. She still calls her great aunt
 ``Mother,'' her cousins ``brothers.'' (Her great uncle, whom she calls ``Dad,'' died
 a few years ago.)

 ``We were very poor,'' she says, ``but we had a lot of warmth.''

 Estrellita remembers being questioned by psychologists, when she was 6. Her father
 had sued for custody years before and wanted her returned to Havana. At last, the
 case had made it into family court in Miami. The decision: The child was to stay in Miami.

 When she was 11, her mother, out of prison for two years, moved to Miami and
 wanted Estrellita to live with her. But the child wept for the family she had known
 for the past nine years, so her mother settled for Saturday nights and holidays.

 ``I could not replace the parents she had known,'' her mother, Estrella Nurquez,
 recalls.

 In high school, Estrellita became sweethearts with a Miami-Dade college student,
 Ray Carvajal, who later went to medical school in the Dominican Republic. Her
 adopted family could not afford to send her to college, but Estrellita and Ray
 married, and he became a doctor. A few years ago, Estrellita got a nursing
 degree and now works with her husband.

 The Carvajals live in a large two-story house on a lake in Pembroke Pines with
 their two little boys. They have high ceilings, a huge pool, cushy furniture and
 antiques. Estrellita's mother and stepfather visit often. And now Estrellita's sister,
 Vivian, who grew up in Havana, also visits.

 Vivian Galvez, whom her mother calls ``the child left behind,'' moved to Miami
 when she was 27. She is amused by the suggestion that she was ``left behind.''

 ``In Cuba, I had a wonderful family, an excellent education -- a childhood filled with
 love and opportunity,'' she says. ``How does that add up to being left behind?''

 In elementary school, she studied sound engineering. In high school she learned
 about agriculture and irrigation. She went to college and became a civil engineer.
 Both of her parents (her father and her stepmother in Cuba) were professors at the
 University of Havana, her alma mater. They both speak English and Russian, as
 well as Spanish.

 Six years ago, she came to the United States as an adult to meet her sister and
 to visit her mother. She decided to stay: ``to have something besides intellectual
 satisfaction to show for what I learned in school.''

 Now, she lives in a three-bedroom townhouse in Kendall with her six-year-old son,
 her husband and father-in-law. She is project director for a civil engineering firm
 that builds water and sewer plants.

 ``She is a superb engineer -- so smart, so creative in her thinking,'' says her boss,
 Dagoberto Castillo, owner of Daca Environmental Corp.

 Vivian Galvez says the combination of being returned to her father in Havana as a
 child and coming to Miami as an adult gave her the best of both worlds: ``I got my
 father, a close, loving family, and an excellent free education in Cuba, and I got
 the opportunity to make it count for something here.''

 Her mother disagrees: ``Vivian doesn't fit in with us. She came too late.''

 Vivian says she hopes this will change; she would like them all to be a family. To
 this end, she keeps meeting with her mother and has tried to talk Estrellita into
 writing their father. But Estrellita is reluctant, even though her father has written
 her.

 Estrellita can't find the letters from her father, which she says ask her to forget
 the past. But Vivian has a pile of letters from him: ``I love you and your son and I
 also love your sister, her son and her husband,'' Gustavo Galvez wrote in Spanish.
 ``It grieves me that none of you are now in my life.''

 On the phone from his home in Havana this week, he says, ``The dilemma over
 the little boy Elian brings it all up again and makes me sad.''

 Six years ago, when Vivian left Cuba and joined her sister and her mother in
 Miami, she did not hear from her father for three months. Then, she got an
 eight-page letter from him, neatly printed on legal paper with a fountain pen. He
 told her he had been crushed by her decision to leave Cuba. But, he said, he had
 realized something important and had come to terms with her departure.

 He wrote: ``My father also lost his beloved child when I was about your age. My
 dad was an officer in Batista's Army. He was bitterly opposed to the Revolution.
 But I joined the Revolution because I wanted what we did not have. I wanted
 things to be more equal here. But you, who grew up under the Revolution, also
 want what you did not have. You want material things. It is this way from
 generation to generation. We want what our parents did not have.''

 When Vivian opened the letter, a photo of her dad in a military uniform fell out. On
 the back, he'd written: ``This is who I am. I am your father. Do not be ashamed of
 me.''

 As Vivian reads the end of the letter, she fights back tears. It reminds her why
 she is convinced that the battle for Elian Gonzalez should have nothing to do with
 nations. Her father's 1994 letter concludes: ``I respect your decision to choose
 your own destiny. What is most important for us is not politics. It is that we love
 one another.''

                     Copyright 1999 Miami Herald