Published: 09/05/89
Section: LIVING TODAY
Page: 1C
The current, at times, is like a warm river that courses northeastward
along a route quite convenient for a Cuban refugee. On a summer day with a
stiff wind from the south, the Gulf Stream could propel a rustic inner tube
raft from the north coast of Cuba to the Florida Keys.
Indeed, nature is sometimes a rafter's best accomplice. But only sometimes. There have been rafts found floating empty or cradling a dead, sunburned body.
Two weeks ago, the currents brought Aida Lina Rodriguez, her husband, Jesus Hernandez, and their 17-month-old son to the waters off Islamorada. They spent 4 1/2 days at sea with six other refugees before the Coast Guard rescued them. Their story isn't rare.
This year, more Cubans have made the dangerous journey across the Florida Straits than any other year since the 1980 Mariel boatlift ferried 125,000 refugees to Key West. In August alone, 75 Cuban rafters were rescued off South Florida shores. In all of last year, the Coast Guard rescued 50; the year before, 44.
According to a recent letter signed by a group of Cuban political inmates in Havana's Combinado del Este prison, there is an increase in prisoners charged with trying to escape from the island. About "10 to 12 Cubans a day" are thrown in jail for trying to leave, say the prisoners. Their letter lists 78 inmates accused of "illegal exit."
At last count, 172 Cubans had arrived by raft this year. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service officials believe about half of those who embark on the crossing actually make it to Florida. The others are caught by Cuban authorities or drown. For the most part, those who do make it are picked up by the Coast Guard, processed at the Krome Avenue detention center and paroled to relatives.
Unlike most Haitian boat people and Cubans waiting in third countries for U.S. entry permits, the Cuban boat and raft refugees are allowed to slip into society with little hassle. As former INS district director Perry Rivkind once indicated, it is a reward for having endured such a perilous voyage.
The newest flux of raft people could be due to increasing political turmoil in Cuba, says Miami sociologist Juan Clark, who has studied the "escapee" phenomenon for 20 years.
For years, there has been an unconfirmed suspicion that rafters are dropped off by mother ships. And Cuban analysts say the Cuban government has permitted "escape valves" during hard domestic times in the past.
But recent arrivals express 30-year-old reasons for leaving their homeland -- continued political repression and economic problems.
"I thought to myself, 'I've been struggling in this system since I was 17 years old. How long am I going to wait? Until I can't move?' " says Rolando Leon Hernandez, 40, who arrived two weeks ago.
Today, for reasons of sheer mathematics, daring refugee
voyages -- like homicide -- have diminished in news value. It is a Miami
cliche: tormented Cubans escaping their homeland and appearing in between
leisure boats and wind surfers in their rough-hewn vessels. Sailing to
Freedom, the headlines say.
In November 1972, a Cuban medical student named William Domingo Albelo was the sole survivor of eight Cubans who floated for two weeks. The group included an elderly woman who had brought along her dog. Helpless as the wood and rubber raft broke apart, Albelo watched the others, including the dog, drown.
In September 1979, the Coast Guard found the body of 34- year-old Adelfo Giz Alfonso floating near Miami Beach on a raft made of Soviet truck inner tubes.
"You must want to get out of there pretty bad to make that trip," says Oliver "Buddy" Carey, a 71-year-old boat captain who has been plying the Florida Straits since 1937. "That is a very treacherous crossing, especially considering what they're coming in."
Coast Guard Petty Officer Third Class Richard Rodriguez has seen some strange vessels. "I would not go in a pool with some of the rafts I've come across," says the Key West-based Rodriguez, who interviews rafters. He recalls one middle-aged man who concocted a 15-foot burlap-and-rubber vessel. His inspiration: a picture in a 1950s issue of Popular Mechanics.
"A raft has the advantage of not being easily detected by radar," says sociologist Clark.
On some summer days, crossing the straits can be relatively easy, with the prevailing winds blowing in the direction of the Gulf Stream. But for the most part, the trip can be deadly. A raft leaving Cuba immediately enters waters 565 fathoms -- 3,390 feet -- deep. On rough summer days and throughout the winter, when the wind and sea currents clash, the seas can get "ungodly high," says skipper Carey.
Nevertheless, the enormous risk has never proven much of a deterrent. The following three stories, which span a generation of escapes, illustrate why.
When the first storm hit, the men tied Aida Lina Rodriguez and her baby son, Jesus, to the center of the raft to keep them aboard.
Two days later, having endured a hellish odyssey, one of the refugees waved the young boy's red shirt and caught the eye of an American yachtsman near Islamorada. The U.S. Coast Guard soon rescued them. The trip was planned months earlier. The aspiring refugees repaired and tied six 200-pound inner tubes and one 900-pound tube. They also made oars from a wooden fish box.
Passenger Walter Mas Gomez, a 29-year-old government driver, went to the shrine of San Lazaro outside Havana and whispered a promise -- he would shave his head for five years if he made it to Florida.
At 6:30 a.m. Aug. 17, the passengers met at a beach near Havana and hid their uninflated raft in nearby bushes. It was too early for bathers, and by the time the first beach-goers arrived, the group was already picnicking and swimming, as if they were just having fun. At 3:30 p.m., they disappeared into the woods, two by two, and met at the site of the hidden raft.
Six hours later, they were afloat in Cuban waters, guiding themselves with a compass. (The fortunate rafters have compasses; many do not. They hope the currents will carry them.) Their voyage would take them along the path of several ships that didn't see their furious waving. And there were two violent storms that blew them back near the Cuban coast.
"The waves were like mountains," says group member Rolando Leon Herandez, who plotted the escape.
But after the second storm came a strong southern wind that carried them toward Florida. They rowed through the third night, and in an instant of magic, watched a sea gull appear and circle the raft. The bird flew from shoulder to shoulder. The baby, charmed, stopped crying and vomiting.
The bird stayed with the refugees until they neared the Keys on Aug. 21. There was a mild southeasterly wind blowing 10 miles an hour, and the seas had manageable two- to three-foot peaks. At mid morning they spotted their savior, a yacht from Massachusetts.
In 1970 Lorenzo Calas constructed a raft of metal drums, took it to the cove of Manati in Cuba's easternmost province and prepared to escape. The Cuban police caught him and threw him in jail for 6 1/2 years.
Then, after years of living as an outcast, the sugar mill mechanic tried again. He built a raft, attached a small water pump motor to it, and drove it, disassembled, to the same cove.
Despite bad weather, Calas, four sons and a nephew set sail. He left his wife and two youngest sons behind. Storms washed away the men's provisions, and when their motor conked out, they simply floated.
After a week, a passing freighter rescued them.
Two years and five months later, the 55-year-old Calas still thinks about that journey. "It was the most important experience of my life -- and, in a strange way, the most beautiful."
He thinks about it when he drives his 1989 Cavalier to the beach, sets his picnic gear down and scans the ocean. He thinks about it when he drives to his job in an Osceola sugar mill, where he makes $13.80 an hour.
He was reunited with his wife and two youngest sons a year ago. The entire family lives in a four bedroom house Calas and his sons bought in West Palm Beach.
He has captured the evidence of his success -- the smiles, the house, the car, the Disney vacation -- in photographs he sends to Cuba.
The Cuban militia guards stood about 50 feet apart, scanning a stretch of a beach near Havana. From a dangerous distance, Angel Morell could see the red flicker of one guard's cigarette.
Shadows concealed Morell and his friend, Luis Enrique Urdaneta, and their raft on that summer night 21 years ago. The Havana kitchen helpers whispered a prayer and slithered to the sea, slipping between the oblivious guards into the surf.
Weak and dehydrated after six days at sea, Urdaneta drowned. Morell tried desperately to save him.
He spent the next three days semiconscious, under intense sun. Then, a merchant ship found him.
His body was so badly burned that he spent four days at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
On Sept. 19, 1968, The Herald told his story: "Nine days adrift in the Caribbean leave their mark on a man." A photograph depicted the burned, gaunt refugee.
Two decades later, that photograph remains precious to a 54-year-old Morell. It is framed and kept in a closet of his neat and breezy 11th floor apartment that overlooks the Orange Bowl.
In the early years, he worked as a kitchen assistant in Miami. But he hasn't worked in several years -- an asthma problem has kept him in and out of treatment, he says. On this afternoon, he is watching Latin soaps.
He doesn't like to talk about that trip -- "It's part of the past," he says.
But he is forced to remember it, for his body still bears the scars of the sun.
His dream, he told a reporter 21 years ago, was to bring his wife and two young children to this country.
"I've missed them so much these past few days. Maybe soon we'll be together," Morell said at the time.
But things didn't work out. They are still in Cuba.
© 1996 The Miami Herald.