Elian’s Kin: ‘Everyman’ in the Spotlight

In Cuba he became a policeman like his older brother, and then studied to be a physical education instructor. After he, his wife and their two young children got visas to come here in 1984, he worked odd jobs--painting boats and doing body and fender work.

Lazaro Gonzalez was never political. He was no community leader. He made no news.

But right now the 49-year-old great-uncle of Elian Gonzalez is one of the most talked-about people in America. To the U.S. government he is a law-breaker who has defied several federal mandates, gone face to face with Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and refused to budge, and now is daring immigration officials to enter his house and seize the 6-year-old child in an action that many believe could explode into civil unrest.

According to Gregory B. Craig, an influential Washington lawyer, Lazaro Gonzalez has “not only broken the law, but emotionally damaged and exploited this most wonderful little boy.” Craig is representing Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian’s father, who wants to return with the boy to Cuba.

Surveys indicate that around the U.S., most people agree with Craig that Lazaro Gonzalez is flouting the law by refusing to hand over Elian, whom he has cared for since the boy was rescued at sea Nov. 25.

But that opinion doesn’t garner much support when translated into Spanish and offered up to the throngs on the street in front of the great-uncle’s Little Havana home. Here, Lazaro Gonzalez is a Cuban everyman, thrust almost at random onto a world stage and asked to undergo a test of personal integrity that has been magnified by global and exile politics. And to the vast majority here, Gonzalez is passing the test with flying colors--the red, white and blue of the American and Cuban flags.

“I think he is an excellent man, un hombre recto,” said Maria Machado, 60, who like hundreds of Cuban Americans stops by the house almost daily to lend support to the Miami relatives’ fight to prevent Elian from returning to Cuba.

“I wouldn’t say he is a hero exactly. He is just doing what any of us would do--the right thing.”

For weeks, Lazaro Gonzalez has made his position clear: He will not try to prevent U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officers from removing Elian from his home, but he will not deliver him into their hands either. That, said Gonzalez, would betray a promise he made to Elian, who the family says often expresses his desire not to go back to Cuba.

In Washington, where he has been waiting for 11 days to regain custody of his son, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, 31, is furious with Lazaro. Elian’s father has spoken bitterly of how he gave up his bed to his uncle when Lazaro and the family visited their hometown of Cardenas, Cuba, in 1998.

Now, the way Juan Miguel sees it, his uncle--his father’s brother--won’t give him back his own son.

Juan Miguel said Sunday on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” that he didn’t believe a video taped at the relatives’ home in which his son said he didn’t want to go back to Cuba.

“This is child abuse and mistreatment, what they’re doing to this boy,” Gonzalez said. “The way they’re abusing him, turning him against his father . . . he’s suffering more here among them than he suffered in the sea.”

Nonetheless, tensions eased a bit over the weekend before an expected ruling this week on the Miami family’s request to grant Elian an asylum hearing. But the pressure on Lazaro Gonzalez is unrelenting.

On Friday, the government formally revoked his temporary custody of Elian, and the 24-hour crowd in front of his house is more vocally supportive and more demanding. The flag-waving, sign-toting supporters want to hear from him, have their picture taken with him, even touch his hand.

The strain is showing. A square-shouldered man of medium height, Gonzalez is often seen leaning against the front fence, sucking on a Marlboro, head down, listening intently, while some lawyer, politician or celebrity offers advice.

According to those around him, Lazaro Gonzalez listens and then makes his own decisions. And at times those decisions run counter to his advisors’ suggestions.

The controversial videotape of Elian telling his father that he did not want to go back to Cuba, for example, dismayed some legal advisors, say sources.

Born in Cardenas in 1950, Lazaro is the youngest of nine children. He was 34 years old when he followed the path to Miami blazed years earlier by his older sister Caridad and his brother Delfin, who had been convicted of actions against the Communist government and jailed for 10 years. When Lazaro and his wife, Angela, arrived here on immigrant visas, their son William was 12, their daughter Marisleysis was 6.

Before Elian’s arrival, Lazaro Gonzalez was arrested twice for drunken driving, for which Armando Gutierrez, the family’s spokesman, said Gonzalez is sorry.

In the escalating verbal war between Cuba and the exile community over the Elian case, officials of the Fidel Castro government called Lazaro an “alcoholic” and accused him of sexually abusing students in Cuba. Gonzalez has countered those allegations with a 1983 Cuban government document certifying that he has not been sanctioned by any criminal court.

For years, Angela Gonzalez has worked in a clothing factory in Hialeah. Marisleysis, 21, who has welcomed the role of Elian’s surrogate mother, is a 1997 graduate of Miami High School. After three semesters of community college, she found work as a bank loan officer, a job from which she is on leave. William, married with a young child, lives elsewhere in Miami.

Since Elian’s arrival, Marisleysis has been hospitalized several times for stress and various stomach disorders. And Lazaro Gonzalez has had little time to work. Gutierrez said the family gets by on Angela’s income, along with some help from Delfin Gonzalez, 63, who has a business selling lobster traps.

The Cuban American National Foundation, a well-connected lobbying group, has paid for the trips to Washington that Marisleysis, Delfin and other relatives have made in urging an asylum hearing for Elian. But foundation spokeswoman Ninoska Perez said Lazaro Gonzalez has refused other offers of cash.

Government-appointed counselors who met with Gonzalez last week say the fishbowl existence in which Elian lives--with television cameras trained on the house constantly--is not healthy for the child. Nor for adults.

“He’s very volatile,” said psychiatrist Paulina Kernberg of Cornell University, who met with Lazaro Gonzalez for less than an hour last Monday. “You know, he converts to a kind of fighting, brassy persona. He would say one thing, and then he snatches it away. He’s been, I think, under too much pressure.”

Ironically, Gonzalez and his family made their journey out of Cuba with the one member of the family in Miami who does not agree with his stance on Elian. Manuel Gonzalez, 59, has supported Juan Miguel, and the brothers who live six blocks apart no longer speak.

Manuel Gonzalez has visited family in Cuba three times in recent years. He was there when Elisabeth Brotons was pregnant with Elian, he said in a recent interview; he was there when Elian was 2 years old, and again in 1998, when the boy was 4 1/2. That is the summer that Lazaro Gonzalez first met Elian.

After Elian’s mother, Elisabeth Brotons, and 10 others drowned and the boy was plucked from the sea, Manuel and his wife, Emilia, were in Spain on vacation. Had he been here, said Manuel, he might have been given custody.

And, he said, Elian might be back in Cuba by now.

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Miami and Associated Press contributed to this story.

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* A WARMING TREND

Despite recent rhetoric, the business climate in Cuba is improving for U.S. firms. C1