By PETER T. KILBORN

          MIAMI, Jan. 29 -- About 200 women, mostly Cuban-American,
          dressed in black and white, with white ribbons attached to their
          shirts and carrying white roses, stopped traffic today in the heart of
          downtown Miami as they marched and prayed in memory of Elizabet
          Brotóns, who drowned while fleeing Cuba in November with her
          6-year-old son, Elián González.

          Eighty blocks north, along a poorer stretch of Biscayne Boulevard, nearly
          as many men and women demonstrated beside the Miami offices of the
          Immigration and Naturalization Service to urge the Clinton administration
          to wrest the boy from the great-uncle who is keeping him here and to
          return him promptly to his father in Cuba.

          Though the sizes of the demonstrations were similar, little else was.

          The marchers seeking the boy's repatriation were held behind barricades
          by about 50 police officers, to keep them off Biscayne Boulevard and
          largely out of sight beside a shopping center.

          Downtown, a half-dozen police cars blocked traffic to permit the
          marchers seeking to keep Elián in Florida to proceed unimpeded and
          relied on the women themselves to control their troops. No
          crowd-control officers were in sight.

          The Miami-Dade Police Department, asked about its different handling
          of the two marches, said today that no one was available this weekend to
          comment.

          María Cristina Ruíz, an advertising executive who organized and led the
          Mothers' March for Human Rights downtown, said the rally was not a
          political demonstration fanning the Cuban exile community's 41-year feud
          with the government of Fidel Castro but one "in honor of Elián's mother
          and any mother who has lost her children."

          "This is very American," Ms. Ruiz said over the blaring horns of the
          disrupted traffic in front of the Miami Intercontinental Hotel, a Biscayne
          Boulevard landmark. "This is a women's march."

          But anti-Castro posters peppered the air above the marchers, along with
          portraits of Ms. Brotóns, who was divorced from the boy's father, Juan
          Miguel González. A child in a stroller carried a sign reading, "Love is
          great. Freedom is greater."

          Lately, in demonstrations like these, the image of Elián as a refugee from
          tyranny has been evolving into a miraculous creature of God, described
          as having survived three days in the ocean because dolphins encircled
          him to protect him from sharks. Mothers and children held posters
          depicting Elián cradling a ceramic baby Jesus. "Elián knows Christ but is
          being denied," the words on it said.

          Far up Biscayne Boulevard, demonstrators favoring the boy's return to
          his father assembled by the Interreligious Foundation for Community
          Organization, which is also known as Pastors for Peace, wore lapel
          buttons with portraits of Elián. The picketers' mission was wholly
          different.

          Their target is neither Mr. Castro nor Lázaro González, the boy's
          great-uncle in whose house the boy is living here, but Attorney General
          Janet Reno and the Clinton administration. For more than a month, the
          administration has declined to enforce the immigration service's
          repatriation order so Lázaro González and the Cuban exile community
          can make a case in the courts to take custody of him here.

          "The guilt is in Washington," one sign said. Marchers chanted: "The
          I.N.S. needs to know. Send Elián home! Janet Reno needs to know.
          Send Elián home!" A poster read, "Rip child from father? This is family
          values?"

          On the picket line, Richard Becker of San Francisco, western region
          coordinator for the International Action Center, a liberal organization
          founded by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, said he believed
          most Americans shared his view that the government should both end the
          embargo on trade with Cuba and give custody of the boy to his father
          there.

          "It's very difficult for the majority voice of this country to be heard in this
          community," Mr. Becker said. "There's a minority here,
          Cuban-American, that uses tension and intimidation against those who
          want to see an end of the hostility and the blockade against Cuba. Those
          voices dominate despite the fact that they are extreme right wing."

          Another protester, Andrés Gómez, a Cuban-American who is national
          coordinator of a local anti-embargo group, said: "We want a
          normalization of relationships. We have been working for that for 20
          years."

          "Elián," said a poster, "is a metaphor for the madness of the embargo."

          In another protest, organized by the Miami-based Democracy
          Movement, which wants Elián to stay in Miami, more than 50 boats
          cruised around Biscayne Bay later in the afternoon as passengers waved
          Cuban and American flags and held signs reading "Elián we will fight for
          your rights."

          "We ask America to search for the truth," Ramon Saul Sanchez, one of
          the organizers, said. "We are oppressed and we want to be free."

                     Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company