“This boy ought to go home and be with his father,” the Democratic senator Chris Dodd said, adding that he thought the legislation was “pathetic”.President Bill Clinton has sided with the INS and the Justice Department, which have said Elian should go home. But there was no question of the grandmothers taking the boy away with them. “I have everybody’s word that the child will not be taken away,” Sister Jeanne said.Although they return to Cuba this week, the grandmothers may have succeeded in eliciting sympathy for Elian’s father in the US as Congress prepares to consider legislation that would confer citizenship on the boy. His mother, the lover and others died when the boat capsized Elian survived for two days clinging to an inner tube. He was taken in by his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, who has been trying to gain permanent custody, but the authorities in Cuba said his father, Juan, was still there and wanted the boy returned.A visit by Elian’s grandmothers to Miami on Monday ended in failure when Lazaro Gonzalez said the meeting had to be in his home in Little Havana and not at a neutral location, as the women wanted.On Tuesday the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) wrote to Mr Gonzalez, demanding that he agree to such a meeting, which led to last night’s reunion. It was the first between the boy and any of his relatives from Cuba since he was rescued on 25 November.Miami relatives who are seeking to keep Elian in Florida were ordered on Tuesday to accede to the reunion by immigration authorities.

As the grandmothers arrived for the reunion last night, they were greeted by anti-Castro Cuban Americans chanting their opposition to his repatriation.His odyssey began when he accompanied his mother and her lover as they tried to flee Cuba. On Tuesday they pleaded with members of Congress.The meeting yesterday was on neutral ground at the home of Jeanne O’Laughlin, president of a Catholic University and a nun. In another day of high emotions in the Elian Gonzalez custody saga, the Cuban boy shipwrecked off Florida eight weeks ago was rushed through the streets of Miami last night for a two-hour reunion with his grandmothers from Cuba.
The grandmothers, who have been on a mission to the US since Friday to lobby for the six-year-old’s return to Cuba and to his father, flew to Miami from Washington yesterday. A female commentator, infuriated by his late arrival for a political function and by no means a supporter, wrote just last week that she would have ‘crawled on her knees’ wherever he asked after hearing him speak. Nor is she alone.Mr Clinton’s diehard ideological enemies aside, very many Americans – young and old, rich and poor, black and white, have been similarly charmed.More and more now you hear people saying, often out of the blue: ‘You know, I’ll sure miss Clinton when he goes’. His presidency has plumbed depths of indignity and attained a few peaks of distinction, but Americans like him, and they had fun.

And, as Mr Clinton will remind them this evening, it is not over yet.. In another day of high emotions in the Elian Gonzalez custody saga, the Cuban boy shipwrecked off Florida eight weeks ago was rushed through the streets of Miami last night for a two-hour reunion with his grandmothers from Cuba. But not one has Bill Clinton’s combination of intellectual sharpness, command of the issues and political savvy, leavened – now more than ever – with self-deprecating humour.His capacity to charm, moreover – arguably the quality that has got him into so much trouble over the years – is undiminished. Most of the candidates now on the campaign trail possess some of his qualities, several also have impeccable character credentials.

What was doubted – justifiably, as it turned out – was his ‘character’. Even Mr Clinton’s enemies concede that, compared with the crop of presidential candidates – not a bad crop by any means – Mr Clinton is both ‘very, very smart’ and a consummate politician with an almost unerring sense of how subjects ‘play’ with American voters.Those qualitiies were already in evidence when he was running for the Presidency: no one questioned his intellect and all admired his political flair. Now seasoned in office, Mr Clinton looks and sounds the part. He acquired the requisite gravitas early on, but recently he has also relaxed to the point where he can also banter and joke and just muse out loud.Asked this week, for instance, whether he would veto a Congressional bill to grant the Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, US citizenship, he paused before saying, ‘I don’t know’ and launching into a disquisition about the human and legal complexities of the case. Bush, has even had the temerity to tell his supporters that his victory at the Iowa caucuses on Monday marked ‘the beginning of the end of the Clinton era’.Each stage of the election campaign, and each public appearance by Mr Clinton, gives people a new opportunity to judge the calibre of the would-be successors and the qualities of the outgoing President. People are reminded of his next January departure almost daily by the accelerating contest to succeed him The front-running Republican, George W.