Letter to the editor, the Boston Globe, April 28, 2001:

While Juan Miguel Gonzalez may be a "high-level figure in the Communist Party" ("Years after raid, Elian's kin describe 'an open wound,' " Page A3, April 22), he is most definitely a hard-working waiter in an Italian restaurant in the tourist area near Havana. (My friends tracked him down during our recent vacation there.)

He is certainly more fully employed than any of the Miami relatives cited. As for the assertion that Elian's family has been afforded more material goods than other Cuban families in the same neighborhood, since the United States is free of such favoritism, we are clearly within our rights to criticize it in other nations.

—Martha Byington
Boston

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