Pediatrician’s Comments on Cuban Boy Create a Stir

Out in the yard, Elian Gonzalez kicks around a soccer ball. On Tuesday, he played with a kite. And he clearly loves his new swing set, sailing down the yellow plastic slide over and over again.

From the outside looking in, a typical 6-year-old at play.

But a pediatrician advising the federal government has charged that the Cuban boy is being psychologically abused by his Miami relatives “and needs to be rescued.”

“Elian Gonzalez is now in a state of imminent danger to his physical and emotional well-being,” Irwin Redlener wrote Monday evening in a letter to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. While Redlener has not seen the boy, he helped select the three mental health experts who have interviewed the family.

Redlener’s opinions, which he repeated Tuesday on NBC-TV’s “Today” show, drew an immediate rebuttal from attorneys advising Elian’s Miami relatives, as well as from a group of Cuban exile pediatricians.

“I don’t see any danger here,” said Erik Juan, standing Tuesday outside the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, the great-uncle with whom Elian has been staying. “I see a lot of news media and friends, but no danger.”

This is just the latest salvo in the bitter custody battle over Elian, who survived a disastrous November boat trip from Cuba that claimed the lives of his mother and 10 others.

The government’s plan to reunite the boy with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, has stalled while a federal appeals court in Atlanta decides whether to grant Elian an asylum hearing, which his Miami relatives have requested. The same court is to rule on the government’s request to lift a temporary injunction preventing the child from leaving the United States.

And all the while, dozens of television and still cameras--and the eyes of millions around the globe--are trained on the house in Miami’s Little Havana section, where the boy lives. In the street out front are hundreds of people who shout out his name when he appears. He no longer attends school; leaving the house is just too much trouble.

“It has become a circus,” 38-year-old Rich Ramirez said Tuesday. The native Puerto Rican came here from Ocala, Fla., with his parents and 8-year-old son just to get a taste of the excitement. “It’s a real Catch-22. I think a son should be with his father. But he will have more freedom here.”

Redlener, the president of community pediatrics at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, N.Y., wrote that Elian “continues to be horrendously exploited in this bizarre and destructive ambience. It has gone on far too long.” And in recent days, he added, “the crisis has taken a profound turn for the worse.”

Juan Miguel Gonzalez has made similar charges, saying that Elian is “suffering more here among them than he suffered in the sea.”

Lazaro Gonzalez contends that the boy is as happy as can be expected and does not want to return to Cuba with his father.

And Jose Garcia-Pedrosa, one of several attorneys representing Lazaro Gonzalez, told ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” Tuesday: “I don’t know how one can reach decisions and express them in a language as strong as [Redlener has] without seeing the boy.”

In Havana on Tuesday, Cuban authorities showed off a onetime boarding school that was being prepared to house Elian, his extended family and several of his classmates when he returns to the island. Cuban psychologists said Elian could be housed in the complex, which has been equipped to resemble his former school in Cardenas, for a transition period of at least three months, officials said.

Cuban medical experts have expressed particular concern about the effects on Elian of the nonstop media attention. And Redlener said that under normal circumstances, away from the glare of TV cameras, Elian would have been removed long ago from the Miami home.

Little is known about Elian’s routine in the small, two-bedroom house he shares with his great-uncle, his great-aunt Angela and their daughter Marisleysis--or if he even has a routine.

At times he is up late. The controversial videotape in which he told his father that he did not want to go back to Cuba was made in the early hours of Friday morning, after he and his Miami kin had met with Reno in Miami Beach. But family spokesman Armando Gutierrez said that Elian gets plenty of rest, often ignoring the commotion of visitors and legal advisors, and is asleep by 8:30 or 9 each night.

Reno and Meissner did not have any immediate reaction to Redlener’s letter, but Justice Department aides said that it supports their position that the standoff should be resolved as soon as possible.

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Clary reported from Miami and Serrano from Washington.