BY JASMINE KRIPALANI, PAUL BRINKLEY-ROGERS AND FRANK DAVIES

 While federal officials continue to emphasize that they want to see a peaceful end to the Elian Gonzalez case, one acknowledged Saturday that they are planning actively for the possibility of a forced entry to retrieve the boy from his Little Havana home.

 They view it as a last resort. But if it were necessary, federal marshals and immigration agents would conduct the operation in daylight and ''it would in no way be a surprise raid,'' said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

 The plan has the support of U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder and INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, and it has ''the grudging support'' of the White House, the official said.

 But federal officials are hopeful that Elian's Miami relatives will cooperate in turning Elian over to his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who arrived in Washington, D.C., last week. Gonzalez wants to take the boy back to Cuba; his Miami relatives are fighting to keep him in the United States.

 Reno sent the Miami relatives a letter Friday asking that they meet at Jackson Memorial Hospital with a psychologist and two psychiatrists chosen by the government to discuss how the transfer will take place.

 Lawyers for the Miami family met over the weekend to consider a response both to the meeting request, and to Reno's declaration on Friday that federal officials will move to transfer Elian to his father in the next few days.

 STRATEGY TO EMERGE

 Gonzalez family attorney Roger Bernstein said the strategy would probably become clearer today.

 Saturday was a day of symbolism in the flag-bedecked street in front of the Gonzalez home in Little Havana, as Cuban-American activists continued to protest the likely return of the boy to Cuba.

 Miami Mayor Joe Carollo appeared at the home late Saturday morning and expressed doubts that Elian's father really is speaking from the heart in Washington, where he met Reno and other officials on Friday to demand to be promptly reunited with his son.

 ''If Juan Miguel comes to Miami, we would treat him like he was the head of state,'' Carollo said, talking about the invitation to the father from his Miami relatives -- an invitation Juan Miguel Gonzalez has turned down.

 ''You don't know what pressure the Castro regime is putting on these people,'' Carollo said of Gonzalez.

 DISPLAY OF RAFTS

 Street theater came to the neighborhood at 3:15 p.m., when a city of Miami truck pulled up in front of the house.

 A couple of city employees unloaded four makeshift rafts and a deflated inner tube -- craft actually used by people who have left Cuba -- and placed the objects in front of the crowd, hoping to send a message about the desperate situation in Cuba.

 Demonstration leaders said the inner tube was like the one to which Elian was clinging when two fishermen found him at sea on Thanksgiving Day.

 ''The message is that we can see the desperation that the people of Cuba feel because of the lack of freedom that forced Elian's mother to risk her life,'' Carollo said.

 Late Saturday, Gonzalez family spokesman Armando Gutierrez released an Aug. 15, 1998, letter from Elian's grandmother, Mariela Quintana, in Cuba that he said thanked the Miami relatives for sending money -- evidence that family relations were not always so hostile.

 Herald writers Mireidy Fernandez and Diana Marrero also contributed to this report.