They were 11 or 12 miles from shore when the raft sprang a leak and began to sink. Through the night they swam, each taking a turn resting as the others pushed the flimsy vessel back to Cuba. At dawn on Sunday the exhausted men came to within a half he film to Playbhey lived. But before heading home they walked more than four miles along the beach and found the guy who’d sold them the raft – and got their money back. “It was nuts,” says the young man of his sudden flight. “I don’t know how to explain it.” But he intends to try his escape again soon. His wife understands. “I’ll wait until he calls,” she says, knowing that they may be separated for years. “I’ll wait for him to send money with the tourists.” It’s all part of what Havana street talk calls un paseo de muerte – the death march.
As the week goes on, bolas – rumors – light up Havana. There are bolas about Cubans fighting each other with machetes on the high seas for passage on better boats. There are bolas about great white sharks that attack rafters and spit out pieces of chewed corpses that wash up on Cuban shores. And there are bolas about detainees at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay who will be recruited and trained by Florida exiles to infiltrate Cuba and overthrow the government. Cold facts, on the other hand, go down hard. Like thousands of other people building rafts, Julio Fonso, 32, still can’t believe the United States will shut its doors and send him back to Cuba. “They’ll have trouble with us if they do, just like Fidel had trouble here weeks ago,” says Fonso, who spent two years in the slammer after he tried in 1991 to leave Cuba illegally. The weather turns rotten late in the week. But groups of rafters litter the beaches waiting out the heavy rains in makeshift tents made of twigs and blankets and looking for a sign to go. “You have to believe God will see you through,” Fonso says.
From havana to miami, from the refugee camp at Guantanamo to the White House, the Cuba crisis plays out in wrenching scenes. In a small jet, Defense Secretary William Perry flies low over the Straits of Florida, bound for Guantanamo. Hundreds of rafts and boats rise and fall in the azure swell. The balseros (rafters) signal with anything they have – mirrors flashing sunlight, smoke flares, shirts waving. “It just tore my heart to see those people bobbing down there,” Perry later recalls. “It was a desperate situation.”
The White House feels some desperation, too. Fidel Castro’s human wave keeps coming, and coast guard planners are saying privately they can continue their rescue operation for a month at most, or up to 120,000 Cubans. As President Clinton heads off on vacation, the crisis simmers.
The first civil disturbance erupts not in Guantanamo but in a tiny, ornate room in the U.S. Capitol. Morton Halperin, the National Security Council’s point man on Cuba, and an assistant secretary of state try explaining Clinton’s new policy to half-a-dozen senators, who aren’t having any. “You’re talking too much to the Cuban community in Florida,” complains one. “Why don’t we talk to Castro?” Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan explodes. “What is this administration trying to prove?” he asked. “That it’s tough? This administration isn’t tough with anyone. Look at Bosnia.”
The “migrants” keep arriving at Guantanamo – 11,500 by Friday. The USS Taylor, a guided-missile frigate, unloads the last of the 635 rafters it scooped up near Key West. “It was an amazing sight,” says Cmdr. Christopher McNamara. “It’s quite apparent they were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.” He enjoyed their company, serving his guests coffee and blasting salsa music over the PA system. “We danced, too,” he admits. They bounded down the gangplank, first the women and children, then the men, screened by a metal detector before getting into the school buses that bring them to the camp. “Anything that’s sharp, we take it away,” drawls a tobacco-chewing marine. “Sometimes they have knives or screwdrivers or somethin’.” Before them spreads the ersatz city, row upon row of khaki tents, broken up by pastel-colored Porta Pottis.
“Please write my name down – Dulce Maria Sanchez Veitia,” pleads a thin woman with frizzy black hair. “None of us wanted to come to Guantanamo, never, never.” Veitia, a 62-year-old English teacher from Havana, spent three days immersed in the Straits of Florida. She shares a tent with 17 others, who slowly gather around her cot as she shows worn photographs of her home and family. “My mother in Cuba is 90 years old!” she sobs. “And my daughter is six months pregnant! Tell the public about us because we’re going crazy. And if possible, please, have them tell your government to send us some cigarettes. Because we’re all very nervous and all Cubans smoke.” A small crowd gathers. Everyone tries to pass a message to Miami relatives, scribbling on paper scraps, cardboard, even the back of a film box. Through the moist hot air rises a defiant chant: “Miami! Miami! Miami!”
A small but edgy crowd pushes against the glass doors of the Spanish Broadcasting Station in Coral Gables. They make an odd composition: elbows jockeying for better position, fin-gers running down the long list of names below the two handwritten signs – krome, a detention center west of Miami, and guantanamo. There are no shouts of recognition. Everyone knows that the roster of would-be refugees is incomplete. But that’s small comfort to Aurora Diaz Menendez. Fist clutched to her mouth, she tries not to cry. This is her second trip to the radio station since she found out that one of her sons and two cousins fled Cuba by raft. “They left on Friday or maybe Saturday and there is still no word,” she says, giving in to tears. “I tried to tell them not to. Oh, how I wish they were in Guantanamo.” A man standing off from the huddle tries to comfort her. “Don’t worry. I’m sure they’re recovered by now,” he calls out. Aurora’s nephew Louis Quesada, born in America and decked out in Miami Dolphins gear, can’t suppress his anger. “I even voted for Clinton,” he snaps. “Never again.”
In the living room of a Miami Beach condo, three children of the Cuban revolution’s aristocracy feast on espresso and brie – and fantasize about Fidel’s downfall. “He is a coward,” says Ileana de la Guar-dia, whose father – Col. Antonio de la Guardia, a veteran Cuban covert operative – was executed after a 1989 show trial of top military officials. “He’ll go to Galicia in Spain, people will come from all over the world to talk to him.” Her cousin Hector, a painter who fled Cuba on a sailboat in 1991, nods emphatically. “He’ll fly away.” And what of Castro’s legendary bravery? “It’s easy to be valiant with other people’s lives,” says Ileana’s husband, Jorge Masetti, an Argentine who trained in Cuba and fought in Nicaragua to topple Somoza. “Who was the first to run away at the 1953 attack on Moncada? He got rid of his weapon. A soldier never gives up his weapon.” The conversation turns, inevitably, to the question of how to punish Fidel. “Castro is engaging in a provocation,” says Masetti. “So I would have to say that a blockade is justified.”
At Miami’s Caballero Woodlawn Funeral Home, Rafael Gamez, 34, lies in an open casket draped with a Cuban flag. “We thought we would be at sea for three days at most,” says his brother Pedro, a lean and weary 38-year-old. But strong winds blew them off course, and by day five they had finished the last of the water and condensed milk – and had grown delirious. Waking on the sixth day, Pedro found his brother dead, and waited for the coast guard. Now more than 300 people from Little Havana have come to help him mourn and to pay tribute to 41 empty caskets – one for each of the people whose tugboat sank after it was chased and allegedly rammed by Cuban vessels in July. Some mourners seize the chance to advance their own causes. “This is not between Fidel and the U.S. but between Fidel and the Cuban people,” says Unidad Cubana vice president Jose Perez Linares. “We want our right to fight.”
The next morning, goaded by Radio Mambi, Miami’s most influential Spanish-speaking station, thousands of people meet at the funeral home; they march 20 blocks to the Graceland Cemetery to bury Rafael. News of resumed talks between Washington and Havana makes little impression on the crowd. Above the roar of “Libertad! Libertad!,” Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart calls for a tougher stance against Fidel. “A blockade will save Cuba,” he cries. Little Havana feels, at last, that its moment has arrived.
They set sail toward freedom–and end up shuttled to refugee camps.
Cuban refugees intercepted
Totals Mariel boat lift 125,000 (4/21-9/26 1980) August 1994 16,970 (as of 8/26)
