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To: Lynn who wrote (29869)	4/2/2000 10:12:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 64865

It is true. You must not keep up with the news. Elian's grandmother's account of meeting dismays TV viewers In an interview aired in Miami, Mariela Quintana said she jokingly bit the boy's tongue and unzipped his pants. By Meg Richards ASSOCIATED PRESS MIAMI - Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives are outraged over his Cuban grandmother's account of how she playfully bit the 6-year-old boy's tongue and unzipped his pants during their long-awaited reunion. "The family is shocked and disturbed," Armando Gutierrez, spokesman for the Miami relatives, said yesterday. "That is not a Cuban custom." In an interview Tuesday on Cuban television, Elian's paternal grandmother, Mariela Quintana, said she had "played jokes" with the boy during a U.S. government-arranged meeting Jan. 26 at the home of a nun in Florida. Quintana said the boy was "reserved" at the start of the meeting, so she joked that he might have lost his tongue. "I took his tongue out of his mouth," she said, gesturing with her hand as if she were pulling her own tongue from her mouth. "I bit it." "I even opened up his zipper," she said, making an unzipping gesture. "I told him, 'Let me see, let me see . . . if it has grown.' " Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, at whose home the meeting took place, and Sister Lenore Esnard, who also was in the house at the time, were unaware of the exchange until Quintana's remarks were broadcast on Miami TV, said Barry University spokeswoman Michele Morris. Sister O'Laughlin is president of the university. In Cuba, few people found anything strange about Quintana's behavior, but a spokeswoman for the Spanish-language Telemundo affiliate in Miami said the station was flooded with calls from outraged viewers. "Everyone we have talked to, everyone who saw the tape, thought this was inappropriate behavior for grandmothers," said Maria Lewis, managing editor at Telemundo's WSCV-TV. Uva de Aragon, assistant director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, said that such behavior might seem odd to people in the United States but that she believed it was innocent. "The way the woman said it on national television shows it wasn't something perverted," de Aragon said. "She was joking with a little kid, trying to get him to respond, the same as if she were tickling him or trying to see his muscles."