Washington - The Cuban grandmothers of six-yearold Elian Gonzalez found him changed when they met him after he spent two months living with Miami relatives, a confidante of the two women said yesterday. The boy survived a shipwreck that killed his mother last November.
"The grandmothers are more concerned than ever that he come home and be with his father," said Ms Joan Brown Campbell of the US Council of Churches. The Immigration and Naturalisation Service, which has ruled that Elian should be returned to his father, ordered the reluctant relatives to bring the boy to meet his grandmothers.
The Dominican nun who hosted the meeting said yesterday he should stay in the US rather than go back to Cuba. "I'm going to take the side of what I feel the child right now needs and that is freedom," Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin said.
The boy's father, Mr Juan Miguel Gonzalez, told an INS supervisor that his uncle offered to pay him $2 million if he let the boy stay in the US. A US judge yesterday set a six-week timetable before hearing a federal lawsuit filed by Elian's Miami relatives, making it unlikely the boy would be sent back to Cuba before March.
District Judge William Hoeveler intends to set a full hearing on the lawsuit during the week of March 6th, an aide said.