In this paper, we study the problem of reasoning in description logics with variables. More specifically, we consider refreshing semantics for variables in the context of the EL description logic. We investigate a particular reason- ing mechanism, namely weak subsumption, in presence of terminological cycles. Weak subsumption can be viewed as a generalization of matching and unifica- tion in presence of refreshing variables. We show that weak subsumption w.r.t. greatest fix-point semantic is EXPTIME-complete. Our main technical results are derived by establishing a correspondence between this logic and a specific form of variable automata.