By Elaine De Valle. [email protected]. Published Wednesday, February 9, 2000, in the Miami Herald
The dispute over Elian Gonzalez took a new turn Tuesday when the Cuban government focused its attention on the past activities of Lazaro Munero -- who planned the November boat trip in which 11 of the 14 engers, including the boy's mother, perished.
In a long and detailed article that begins by lauding the life of the boy's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez -- who has publicly demanded his son's return -- Munero is attacked in an apparent effort to discredit him and those in Miami who believe Elian's mother wanted her son to grow up in the
United States.
The article in the Communist Party's daily Granma described Elisabeth Brotons Rodriguez as a timid woman bullied by a brutal boyfriend into making the tragic sea journey.
The two other survivors, Arianne Horta and Nivaldo Fernandez Ferran, and relatives of Munero's who live in Miami have repeatedly denied those allegations, saying the Cuban government only wants to weaken any argument that Brotons wanted her son to grow up here.
The article offered what it said were new details about Munero. It quoted friends and relatives who described him as a man who abused women physically and verbally and whom they believed regularly beat Brotons.
It cited Munero's uncle, Dagoberto Munero Molina, who said his nephew ``always treated his own family badly'' and spoke roughly with Brotons and his own father.
NEIGHBORS TALK
Ex-girlfriends, former teachers, a woman who had a son with Munero out of wedlock, fellow students going back to middle school and residents of Munero's hometown all ed a man who was constantly in trouble with authorities and whose past work consisted primarily of selling illegally
obtained cigarettes and liquor.
The article also said that Munero had been jailed even before his first escape from the island -- in 1993 when he and another man allegedly broke into the room of a German tourist at the Siboney Hotel in Varadero to steal ``whatever they could.''
Asylum claims filed by attorneys for the boy's Miami relatives do not mention the 1993 incident but say that Munero was jailed twice in 1998 for demonstrating against the Cuban regime, acts not mentioned in the Granma story.
Reached late Tuesday at his Flagami home, Jorge Munero, Lazaro Munero's uncle, said he was not surprised by the accusations in the Cuban paper.
``They're talking about things that don't exist but Fidel already said those things in a speech,'' Munero said. ``When the trial comes we'll know the truth about who my nephew was.''
DEFENDS NEPHEW
Jorge Munero said his nephew, who lived with him during his four-month stay in Miami before returning to Cuba, was an honorable, hard-working young man who spent his days pining for his girlfriend and her little boy. ``That's all garbage, that's all lies what they're saying,'' he said. The uncle
acknowledged that his nephew sometimes sold cigarettes and alcohol in the black market.
``But in Cuba everyone does what they have to to survive.''
The two adult survivors of the trip -- whose pasts also were questioned in the Granma article -- have said that they saw no evidence that Brotons was forced to make the trip.
Milagros Garcia, an aunt of Munero's who lives in South Florida, also said that the Cuban government's version of events are fabricated.
``For the love he had for Elian's mother, he risked his life, returned to Cuba and exposed himself to being put in jail,'' Garcia said in a press conference last month.
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