Published Monday, March 27, 2000

CUSTODY CONTROVERSY

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Justice Department said today that the Miami relatives caring for Elian Gonzalez had failed to comply with a government demand that they promise to surrender him for return to his father if they lose a court appeal.

Meantime, the relatives filed a court appeal designed to meet a government deadline, and the 5-year-old Cuban boy described in his first TV interview how the boat bringing him and his mother from Cuba sank. He said he doesn't believe his mother is dead.

Although the relatives asked a federal appeals court to set an expedited schedule for hearing an appeal, their letter to Attorney General Janet Reno did not meet the other demand she made Friday night.

``We do not consider them in compliance with Friday's letter,'' said Justice spokeswoman Carole Florman. ``They have not agreed to provide written assurances they will comply with Immigration and Naturalization Service instructions if they do not prevail in the appeals court and cannot obtain a stay from the Supreme Court.''

Florman said the Justice Department had responded in court to the family's request for an expedited appeal that was not so swift as the government had hoped and that a new letter would be sent to the family laying how the government proposed to proceed from here.

Florman would not describe the government's next steps.

But in Friday's letter, Reno said that if the family did not comply, it should be available for a meeting Tuesday to discuss Elian's future and that the government might change his status in this country by Thursday, which could mean INS would try to move him to different custodians while the appeal is heard.

Also today, about 100 people gathered outside the Little Havana home where the 6-year-old boy has been staying. The Democracy Movement, a Cuban exile group, has called for people to form a human chain around the home of Elian's great-uncle in case the government tries to remove him and send him back to his father in Cuba.

Elian was kept home today and won't return to school out of fears that Cuba might try to force him back to the island, family spokesman Armando Gutierrez said.

In the interview broadcast on ABC's ``Good Morning America,'' Elian drew crayon pictures of the voyage in which his mother and 10 other people drowned.

He first drew a wavy line representing waves, then a leaping dolphin _ he has told people that dolphins protected him from sharks and boosted him up when he slipped down into the water from an inner tube.

He drew himself as a stick figure on the inner tube, and then sketched a boat with people inside. He told of the boat having engine trouble and slowly sinking, and of attempts to bail it out.

Asked what happened to the boat, he said softly: ``Water came in.''

He drew the waves higher and higher, covering the boat.

Elian insisted his mother survived.

``My mother is not in heaven, not lost,'' he said in Spanish through his cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, who is raising him. ``She must have been picked up here in Miami somewhere. She must have lost her memory, and just doesn't know I'm here.''

Marisleysis Gonzalez gently reminded him that he knows what really happened to his mother, and he gazed downward.

Facing a noon deadline, Elian's Florida relatives filed a motion for an expedited appeals process to sort out the international custody dispute.

The motion asks the federal appeals court to set a schedule for arguments in the family's appeal of a federal judge's ruling affirming the INS decision to return Elian to Cuba.

A judge could set the schedule as early as this week, court officials said. It could be weeks before the case is resolved.

``The court of appeals is in the best situation to determine what is fair and what this appeal needs to be heard fairly, not the Department of Justice,'' attorney Linda Osberg-Braun told reporters this afternoon.

Osberg-Braun said Elian's relatives had also agreed to comply with a Justice Department demand asking them to turn over the boy to the INS if the family loses its appeal and fails to obtain a stay of the INS order from the Supreme Court.

Since his arrival last November, Elian has been under the constant glare of cameras, typically seen playing in the front yard of his great-uncle's home or walking to school, but the ABC interview was the first time he had directly talked to the media.

In a speech Sunday in Havana, Cuban President Fidel Castro said subjecting Elian to the interview was ``monstrous and sickening.''

Castro confidently declared that Elian's Miami relatives had run out of legal challenges.

But he warned that, rather than allow the boy's return, Elian's Miami supporters, Cuban-American exiles, might kill the child or take him to a third country.