CARDENAS, Cuba -- Cuban officials insist that Elian Gonzalez's mother undertook her fatal journey to the United States under threat from a brutal boyfriend with a long criminal record.
Cuban exiles in Miami insist she did it to bring her son to freedom.But some of Elisabeth Brotons' friends in her home town of Cardenas believe she left neither to pursue freedom nor because she was threatened. She just wanted to be with her boyfriend, they said.
"I can say she did what she did because of love," said Lisbeth Garcia, 28, who worked alongside Brotons as a hotel chambermaid.
What emerges from interviews in the couple's home province is a love story between a hardworking young woman in good standing with the Communist Party and an anxious young man who liked to buck the system.
The government has depicted the boyfriend, Lazaro Munero, as a violent felon, but residents' statements indicate that is likely an exaggeration.
"I would not categorize him as a criminal," said Seida Garcia, a former school official in the small town of Jaguey Grande, where Munero was transferred after misbehaving at another school down the road.
Munero and Brotons were killed along with nine other people when the boat they were riding in sank in the Atlantic. Clinging to an inner tube, Elian survived two days alone at sea until he was rescued on Nov. 25.
The boy is now living in Miami with his paternal great uncle, who is fighting to keep him in the United States, claiming his mother died trying to bring him to freedom.
Cuba's communist government has turned the case into a major national crusade, demanding that the boy be returned to his father in Cuba and insisting Brotons made the trip under "threats and violence" from Munero.
Brotons did not tell her friends of her plans to leave Cuba. Those who knew her said she earned about $50 a month as a hotel maid -- about five times the average salary in Cuba but possibly not enough to resist the United States' lure of plenty.
Yet she was a member of the Communist Party, and never spoke of any desire to go to the United States, her friends said.
To understand the story of Lazaro and Elisabeth is to understand life in Cardenas, where the Party controls most of daily life, where many people still get around by horse and buggy and where earning an extra buck through prohibited activities is common.
A big banner near the city's entrance reads: "Elian, your city awaits you!"
Much of what the Cuban government has said about Munero is true: that he once broke into a tourist's hotel room, that he was kicked out of a high school for dropping feces-filled cans into a courtyard, that he illegally used his car as a taxi and sold beer on the black market.
But it's also true that the Cuban government, which employs widespread surveillance, turned over virtually every rock in Munero's life looking for the dirt they eventually found.
U.S. immigration authorities earlier said that they believed Munero earned money by smuggling aliens and charged passengers for the fatal trip. Although the two adults who survived with Elian said they paid Munero $1,000 each for the journey, it appears unlikely that he made his living as an alien smuggler because he made only one other known previous trip to the United States.
Cuba's Communist Party daily Granma recently published a long expose describing Munero's "fines, convictions for armed robberies, felonies, swindle, the crime of buying and selling stolen goods, all sorts of illegal activities, alcohol abuse and others."
Several of Brotons' friends in Cardenas said they heard about Munero's violent personality in government news reports after the tragedy, but never actually saw him mistreat Brotons. In fact, some said he treated both her and Elian well.
"He was very good to the boy. Every morning, they would wait for Elisa to catch her bus and then Lazaro would take the boy to school," Lisbeth Garcia said.
Added 67-year-old Clemente Robaina, whose daughter is married to Brotons' brother Pedro: "To me he was a good person."
Other acquaintances echoed the government's position, calling Munero a bully and a thug.
Few were willing to speak well of Munero, which would mean contradicting the party line.
One man neighbors described as Munero's best friend refused to let his name be used or even speak about the case, saying he could get into trouble.
One of Elian's former neighbors said she thinks Munero got a bum rap.
"The dead don't talk. Who will defend him now?" she said, refusing to give her name because she said she could "go to jail for 20 years" for publicly disagreeing with the government.
The newspaper Granma said Munero, as an 18-year-old in 1993, was convicted for breaking into a hotel room in the nearby tourist mecca of Varadero and stealing from a German tourist.
The Cuban government says the conviction proves Munero was a crook. But Hector Reyes, the hotel's security chief, described the incident as minor.
"There's a long list of similar incidents from back then because there was no security or fence around the hotel. It was more to make trouble than any serious robbery," he said.
Garcia, the former school official, confirmed that Munero had been in trouble for dropping the feces-filled cans and for slightly injuring a fellow student with a sharp metal object during a fight.
She described him as a fun-loving kid who liked to dance but who was also "very conflictive." She said he wasn't her worst student or even one of her worst.
"He always wanted to be the center of attention," she said.