‘Smooth Transition’ Sought for Elian

Nearing an end in their protracted game of chess over Elian Gonzalez’s future, federal authorities on Saturday moved to bring in a psychological team to ease the 6-year-old Cuban boy’s return to his father, but the boy’s Miami relatives gave no indication of whether they would agree to terms for the transfer.

Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, may meet with the psychological team as early as today to discuss ways of limiting the disruption that the transfer could cause for Elian, officials said.

Justice Department officials want the Florida relatives to meet with the team of three mental health experts Monday at University of Miami School of Medicine.

A lawyer for the relatives let the Justice Department know Saturday that Elian’s great-uncle in Miami, Lazaro Gonzalez, had received a letter sent by the department Friday detailing plans for the meeting. But the attorney did not indicate whether the relatives will agree to the plan.

“We’re just waiting to see if they’ll accept our proposal,” said a Justice Department official who asked not to be identified. “The panel is ready to go to Florida for the meeting, and we’re waiting to see if they’ll take us up on it.”

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained Saturday, the Justice Department urged the Florida relatives to cooperate in a “smooth transition” for Elian.

The psychiatric experts “have all advised that Elian should return to his father’s care as soon after his father’s arrival in this country as possible. They have also emphasized how important it is that Elian’s primary caregivers over the past four months both prepare the child in advance and accompany him at the time of the transfer,” the letter said.

The mental health experts chosen by the department are Dr. Jerry M. Weiner, professor emeritus of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical School; Dr. Paulina F. Kernberg, psychiatry professor at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College; and Dr. Lourdes Rigual-Lynch, a psychologist and director of mental health services at the Montefiore Medical Center’s community pediatrics division. Kernberg and Rigual-Lynch both speak Spanish.

One lawyer for the boy’s Miami relatives has suggested that meeting with the team would be a waste of time because the experts may have already made up their minds about what is best for the child.

Justice Department officials said they remain hopeful that there will be a “prompt and orderly” hand-over of the boy. They said they have no plans to forcibly claim the boy, even if his Miami relatives do not comply with the transfer terms.

One Clinton administration official who asked not to be identified said Atty. Gen. Janet Reno “spent a good part of the day” trying to determine if there was any truth to a Washington Post report that the department had a plan to use force, if necessary, to reclaim the boy.

Reno “determined that no senior official had been presented with or approved of any such plan,” and she was trying to find out whether any lower-level officials or those outside her department may have initiated discussions on the issue, the source said.

Juan Miguel Gonzalez’s attorney, Gregory B. Craig, said the relatives’ cooperation is critical to a smooth transfer of custody.

“The first thing that has to happen is Lazaro has to take Elian by the hand and lead him to his father,” Craig said Saturday. The quicker that can happen, he said, the better.

Federal officials hope to return Elian to the custody of his father as early as this week, effectively ending a four-month international custody dispute. Elian was rescued from an inner tube off the coast of Florida in November after his mother and 10 other people seeking to escape from Cuba drowned after their boat capsized.

Since then, his Miami relatives have fought to keep him in the United States because they say it would be wrong to return him to the clutches of Fidel Castro’s communist dictatorship. Relatives have refused to back down, but their hopes for keeping the boy appear to have faded with the arrival of Elian’s father Thursday.

Some of the relatives’ supporters in the Cuban American community now view Elian’s return to Cuba as a sad inevitability, and a much smaller group than usual--fewer than 100 people--gathered Saturday outside the Little Havana home in Miami where the boy has been living with his great-uncle.

In midafternoon, Miami city officials turned the street in front of the house into a showcase for exhibiting several makeshift rafts used by Cubans over the last few years to travel to Florida. The rafts--crude contraptions of wood, inner tubes and Styrofoam--were hauled out of the city’s historical collection “to show the world just how desperate Cubans are,” said Miami Mayor Joe Carollo.

In suburban Bethesda, Md., Sam Ciancio and Donato Dalrymple, the two fishermen who rescued the boy, tried to speak with Elian’s father at the home of the Cuban diplomat where he is staying.

But the fishermen said they were turned away, and they were angry over what they saw as a slight.

“The little boy would have been dead in the ocean. [Juan Miguel Gonzalez] owes it to us,” Dalrymple said. But there appeared to be a chance that the fishermen would meet with Gonzalez late Saturday or today.

Times staff writer Mike Clary in Miami contributed to this story.