HAVANA (AP) -- If Fidel Castro seems to be taking the case of 6-year-old Elian
                  Gonzalez personally, it may be because he was party himself to a custody battle
                  involving his first-born son more than four decades ago.

                  Like Elian, Fidelito Castro Diaz had parents with very different visions of their
                  child's future. Then, as now, the situations underscore the politics and passions
                  that for more than two generations have torn apart Cuban families living on
                  both sides of the Florida Straits.

                  While Castro recently blamed "the extremist and terrorist mafia of South Florida"
                  for keeping Elian in Miami and blocking his return "to his legitimate family and
                  homeland," the battle over Elian is not between the Cuban and U.S. governments.
                   It is a fight within the Cuban family -- one that has even touched Castro's.

                  According to biographers, Castro's first wife, Mirta Diaz-Balart, filed for
                  divorce in the mid-1950s, when he was imprisoned in Cuba for an attack on a
                  Santiago military barracks that launched the Cuban revolution.

                  Before the divorce was final, Mirta Diaz left for the United States with
                  Fidelito, who was then 5.

                  During the divorce battle, the mother was granted custody, but Castro insisted
                  that the child be returned to Cuba, Tad Szulc writes in "Fidel: A Critical
                  Portrait," a biography published in 1986.

                  Castro's wife's brother, Rafael Diaz-Balart, was an official in the government
                  of President Fulgencio Batista, which Castro was trying to overthrow. Castro
                  worried about the influence the Diaz-Balart family would have on his son.

                  "I refuse even to think that my son may sleep a single night under the same
                  roof sheltering my most repulsive enemies and receive on his innocent cheeks
                  the kisses of those miserable Judases ... To take this child away from me,
                  they'll have to kill me ... I lose my head when I think about these things,"
                  Castro wrote in a letter to his elder half-sister, Lidia.

                  After leaving prison, Castro continued to fight for custody, saying that if he
                  lost in court "it would reaffirm my principles and my determination to fight until
                  death to live in a more decent republic."

                  After being released from prison, Castro went to Mexico to prepare for a
                  guerrilla war against the Batista government.

                  While there, Castro persuaded Mirta Diaz-Balart to send him the boy for a
                  two-week visit. He never sent him back, Robert E. Quirk writes in the 1993
                  biography "Fidel Castro."

                  Instead, Castro turned the boy over to a couple in Mexico he trusted, with
                  instructions to sign him up for piano lessons.

                  Later, when Castro's sisters visited and took Fidelito for a stroll in Mexico
                  City's Chapultepec Park, three armed men jumped from a car and grabbed the
                  boy, Quirk wrote. Then Mirta Diaz-Balart flew to Mexico to pick the child up.

                  Despite protests from Castro's sisters, the Mexican government said the
                  mother had custody rights to the boy.

                  By then, Castro was in eastern Cuba, fighting against Batista's troops. After
                  his successful 1959 revolution, the boy returned to live in Cuba with his father,
                  studied nuclear science in the former Soviet Union, and lives in Havana today
                  with his own family. He is 50.

                  Most of the Diaz-Balart family eventually emigrated to Miami, with the
                  exception of Mirta Diaz-Balart, who was last known to be living in Spain.

                  Her nephew, U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., has been instrumental in
                  the battle to keep Elian in the United States.

                  "It's ... ironic that Castro's talking about having the interests of a small child at
                  heart when he kidnapped even his own son from his mother who had custody
                  in 1956," Diaz-Balart told CNN on Sunday.

                    Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.