By Frances Kerry
MIAMI, Feb 3 (Reuters) - A war of words over Cuban boatwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez took a bitter new turn on Thursday as his Miami relatives reacted angrily to a grandmother's account of how she bit the boy's tongue and looked at his private parts during their meeting last week.
The relatives said in a statement they were ``shocked and disturbed ... very upset that the grandmothers used their precious moments with Elian to treat him this way.''
The accusations, the latest in a highly politicized two-month custody battle, erupted over what went on during the meeting in Miami last week between 6-year-old Elian and his grandmothers from Cuba. They were visiting the United States to press their case for him to be returned to his father in
Cuba.
The different interpretations of the incident, viewed in Cuba as affectionate teasing rather than abuse, underscored the angry divide between a family feuding on both sides of the Florida Straits for custody of the motherless child.
Paternal grandmother Mariela Quintana, describing the meeting with Elian on Cuban state television, said the boy was sad and timid at the start of the meeting at the home of a Miami nun. Quintana said that in an effort to get Elian to warm up to them, she teased by boy by biting his tongue and
unzipped his pants to ``see if it's grown.''
The episode raised no eyebrows among Cubans who watched the programme on Tuesday. In Cuba, mothers and grandmothers often tease their young sons and grandsons in this fashion and such actions are considered normal gestures of endearment.
But the clip from the programme, shown on local television networks on Wednesday, provoked a very different reaction in Miami, where many Cubans have quickly adapted to American ways. Elian's relatives in Miami have fought to keep the boy in the United States since he was picked up at sea Nov.
25, 1999, after a disastrous voyage in which his mother and 10 other people died.
A spokesman for the relatives, Armando Gutierrez, said the family was angry. ``Instead of kissing him and hugging him they are biting his tongue and taking his thing out? It's left me dumbstruck.''
Ninoska Perez, a spokeswoman for the Cuban American National Foundation that backs the Miami family's efforts to keep him, called the incident ``very disturbing.''
``I cannot understand that kind of behaviour from a grandmother with a 6-year-old child and in this country that's understood as child molesting,'' she said.
But to some observers in Miami the different views of the incident did look like a case of crossed cultural wires.
Uva de Aragon, a Cuban-born historian at Florida International University, said she did not believe that the incident was a case of abuse but probably reflected different cultural values, particularly since the grandmothers are from a provincial town and are not especially sophisticated.
``It would never occur to me to do this (behave in this way) but I can understand where they are coming from,'' she said. But de Aragon added that her American-born daughters would probably be ``flabbergasted'' by the incident.
Quintana's account of the incident came after the grandmothers were asked by a child psychologist on a Cuban television to describe how Elian cheered up in their company.
``We'd joked at the beginning about how he'd lost his tongue, so I got his tongue out of his mouth and I bit it, I started teasing him, I even opened his fly, I said, 'Let me look' ... at his parts ... 'Let's see if it's grown,' you know, teasing him to cheer him up. Because at that moment, we
felt so much pain,'' Quintana said.
As the Miami relatives fumed about the grandmothers' role in the meeting, Cuban President Fidel Castro's government, which has turned Elian's father's cause into a national crusade, heaped scorn on the nun, Jeanne O'Laughlin, who hosted the reunion and then came out in favour of the child
staying in Miami.
The Miami relatives have taken their case to federal court in an effort to stall an Immigration and Naturalisation Service ruling Elian should be sent back to Cuba.
20:40 02-03-00
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