MIAMI.
IF THERE is anyone who reacted in horror at the frightened face of Elian Gonzalez during Friday morning’s raid, it was his grandmother Mariela Quintana.
“Of course, I didn’t like seeing him like that,” Quintana said from her home in Cuba.
“It bothered me, but there was no other way that they were going to get him out of that house.
“I didn’t want it that way,” she said, recalling how she gasped when she saw Elian’s frightened face on TV.
But she was able to put the incident into perspective.
“For two to three minutes, he was frightened and he cried. But that’s minor compared to the months he has suffered inside that house with that family.”
Of course, the Miami relatives showered the boy with gifts and love.
But their manipulation caused Elian to suffer when he was subjected to the relatives’ desperate attempt to keep him in Miami.
It’s the same type of game-playing right-wingers inflicted on Janet Reno for applying the long overdue use of force to remove Elian.
These are the same pro-family types who advocated the separation of a son from his father because they don’t agree with the politics of Cuba.
They were joined by Mayor Giuliani, who himself is quick to use strong-arm tactics to crush law-breakers.
But what Giuliani and the other politicians seizing the moment to rap Reno don’t know is about ground zero – and people like Willie Lopez.
Lopez, a 44-year-old former private eye and repo man, took over the back yard of a lady named Mary Gills, 83, who lives right behind Elian’s former Little Havana home.
Lopez, with Gill’s permission, led a 16-man, 24-hour-a-day volunteer security force that “protected” the rear of Elian’s home from any invasion by federal agents.
For the two weeks prior to the raid, this unarmed team of volunteers stayed outside Gill’s home, “all night long, that’s why the cot is out there,” the homeowner told me.
The volunteers had walkie-talkies donated by a local sporting goods store. Their job was to alert the Miami relatives to “give them enough time to get into the house, close the doors and do what they have to do,” Lopez proudly recounted yesterday.
Several hours before the raid, Miami cops from the Special Intelligence Section, using flashlights, checked the rear of Elian’s relatives’ home for trip wires.
“We were planning on putting trip wire,” Lopez said.
The volunteers scrawled their name on the back of a cardboard pizza carton, posting a notice that said “Patrolled by F-Troop a k a The Cuban Alamo.”
Armed government agents used pepper spray to subdue the four volunteers, including Lopez, to secure the perimeter during the operation that removed Elian.
Giuliani, as well as any other law-enforcement officer, knows that walking into an unknown, possibly hostile environment requires a show of force. Giuliani’s cops employ similar tactics when faced with potentially volatile gatherings in New York.
On the other hand, Mariela Quintana knows as much about law enforcement as Elian knows about the politics of the country in which he was born.
Since the raid, Quintana has spoken to her son Juan Miguel and her grandson Elian three times.
The boy asked about his friends back home, she said.
“It was the first time since this whole thing started that I had a conversation with my grandson without interruption,” said an excited Quintana. “He was talking freely, he was expressing himself freely.
“In my heart, I was so happy because we finally got our first glimpse of hope that he would be reunited with us.”
About the images of her son pictured with her grandson she said: “It was the first time in months that I have seen a glint of happiness in their eyes.”
She didn’t ask Elian about the experience of facing an armed federal agent – leaving that image to be exploited by critics who care more about politics than family values.