By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday , April 15, 2000 ; A01

When he stepped off the plane from Havana at dawn last week, Juan Miguel Gonzalez seemed grim but defiant. Soon, he said,
he hoped to be embracing his son Elian for the first time in more than four months. His wife and infant child beside him, he
declared, "This is Elian's true family."

Eight days later, as television cameras tracked him yesterday visiting Washington National Cathedral, climbing into and out of a
tinted-window van, and waiting to be let in the front door of his temporary Bethesda home, he seemed only sad.

Those Washingtonians who have spent time with Gonzalez have described him as increasingly depressed and alternating
between anger and bewilderment as the days pass and he sees no clear sign of when he will be reunited with his son.

But the lowest point, several visitors said, has been the videotape. "Daddy, I don't want to go to Cuba. . . . If you want to see
me, you come here," a fidgeting, intense Elian said as he pointed a finger at the handheld camera. The video, broadcast over
and over since it was made and released in Miami on Thursday morning by Gonzalez's paternal relatives, "has had a devastating
impact on him," his attorney, Gregory B. Craig, said yesterday.

Gonzalez has tried repeatedly--and unsuccessfully since late last week--to reach his son on the telephone, according to Craig,
who said the Miami relatives hang up on Gonzalez's calls.

Craig said Gonzalez had pressed to make sure that, if and when federal officials enter the Little Havana home of his uncle
Lazaro to remove Elian, they take a cell phone so he can speak to his son. But "today, [when] I told him I had worked it out,
he just looked at me and his eyes filled with tears and he said, 'I don't know what he's going to say to me,' " Craig said.

A team of child psychiatrists enlisted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to interview Juan Miguel Gonzalez and his
Miami relatives concluded early this week that his relationship with his son, during the nearly six years before Elian left Cuba
last November, had been warm and loving. But they warned the father not to be surprised if Elian greeted him now with anger
and withdrawal.

"We don't know what the boy has been told" during the months he has spent with the Miami relatives, said Jerry M. Wiener, a
George Washington University professor of psychiatry. Now that Elian knows his father is in the United States, the team
recommended, the two should be "immediately and unambiguously" reunited, lest Elian think that, in addition to losing his
mother at sea, he also has lost his father.

The Miami relatives have largely limited their case for keeping Elian to political arguments about repression and the lack of
freedom and a future in communist Cuba. At a congressional hearing last month, Lazaro Gonzalez's daughter, Marisleysis,
described Juan Miguel Gonzalez as a good father who loves his son, saying, "I can't wait to see Elian's face the first time" he
sees his father.

As their possession of the boy has become more tenuous, however, the relatives "have tried to attack him personally," Craig
said. "And now they're using the boy to attack him."

Gonzalez has questioned the resolve of the U.S. government to return his son to him. "What he really wanted to know was did I
think the INS had the resolve to carry this through," said local immigration lawyer Michael Maggio, a Spanish-speaker who
said he met with Gonzalez alone this week to answer immigration questions about his son's situation. Maggio said he told him, "I
think they will. They have to."

"He is very frustrated," former senator Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) told CNN after he visited Gonzalez on Thursday. "He came
here under the message that was clearly delivered by his lawyer that the Justice Department was going to . . . facilitate a
reunion."

Most of Gonzalez's time since he arrived in the Washington area has been spent in the Bethesda residence of Cuba's chief
diplomat here, Fernando Remirez. Before the Gonzalezes arrived, Remirez, his wife and their two children vacated the house
and moved to a nearby apartment. A cook and a translator are there full-time. Montgomery County police stand guard outside,
and federal security agents accompany him when he leaves. Cuban diplomats are frequently in the house.

Gonzalez spends time with visitors, who have included members of Congress, sympathetic Americans with some informal or
official connection to Cuba, and Cuban Americans who disagree with the position of their Miami countrymen. When there are
no visitors--and sometimes when there are--Gonzalez is said to be glued to the television, watching the demonstrators outside
Lazaro Gonzalez's house, the reporters trying to cover fast-breaking events, and Elian walking in and out the front door, waving
to the crowd, playing on the backyard slide.

Sometimes, he plays dominoes or takes his 6-month-old son, Hianny, out on the enclosed terrace behind the house.

Gonzalez's outings have been carefully selected by Craig and by Cuban diplomats. He has made several trips to Craig's office.
He attended a reception for sympathetic Cuban Americans at the Cuban Interests Section's offices on 16th Street NW and had
another meeting there with Randall Robinson, the head of TransAfrica. And yesterday he visited the cathedral.

"He does not want to seem like a tourist, and appear as if he's having a good time while his son is being held," Craig said.

Those who oppose returning Elian to Cuba have criticized Gonzalez's reclusiveness and charged that the Cuban government is
controlling his movements.

A spokeswoman for Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), one of three Cuban American House members who invited him to a
private lunch and said they didn't receive an answer, told the Associated Press that it is impossible for Gonzalez to speak or
visit freely "when he is surrounded by people who we believe intimidate him, and I'm sure have done something to scare him."

Gonzalez did, however, accept an invitation to dinner, along with his wife and son, with Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.), a
conservative who has said he does not support congressional efforts to keep Elian in the United States. The dinner, at which no
Cuban officials were present, was held at a private location chosen by Largent.

Researcher Robert Thomasson contributed to this report.

                                 © 2000 The Washington Post Company