Cuba's Open Boats

...Thousands have made it...

...Added to Cuban youth's despair at the future has come a dramatic and dangerous worsening of conditions following the collapse of the Iron Curtain...

...The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act grants de facto residency (their status will be "reconsidered") to any Cuban citizen who has spent a year in the United States...

...According to the observer who saw them, their raft was so well built that it looked like a Zodiac...

...Finally, if shady backgrounds were the hallmark of the marielitos, youth and a desire to improve their condition seem to be the equivalent among the balserOS...

...more have died...

...Once the Brothers spot a manned raft, they notify the Coast Guard, which then sends a patrol boat to the site...

...This led to rationing for eggs, one of Cuba's main sources of protein...

...Other variables make escape more pressing than in previous years...

...In the past, frustrated balseros have been accused of "stealing" their jerrybuilt rafts, which are, like everything else in Cuba, "state property...

...But then Matias Rojas Bruce is a Chilean writer living in Cambridge,Massachusetts...

...M ost balseros make their attempts at night from beaches outside Havana...

...A main reason for Castro's laxity this past spring, according to the INS's Austin, is that "Castro has a history of opening the political pressure valve every eight or ten years, and he hadn't done it since the marielitos...

...Nonimmigrant visas have doubled in the past year, since Castro lowered the age requirement from 55 for women and 60 for men to 35 and 40, respectively...

...Countless private efforts have been launched by Cuban-Americans on hearing that a certain friend or family member will be trying his luck on a certain day...

...The smartest thing to do," says Luis Almaguir, one of Gonzalez's raft-mates, "is to wait for the American TV movies on Saturday nights...

...non-immigrant visas this year will "overstay their visas," as the State Department euphemistically puts it...

...At least we can deport Haitians back to Haiti, and set an example to those back home...

...Lazaro Colome Sandoval, who cast off from the Havana suburb of Playa Baracoa in early June, says that, of the fifty people who have left his town, "there are only two that we never heard from again—I'm sure the rest got across...

...Any such comparison of the balseros to the marielitos is unfair...

...There are endless stories of this sort, like the one about the Czech cooling fans, or the Hungarian buses, neither of which are delivered anymore...

...This year about three thousand Cubans will be admitted as refugees...

...No one knows their names, or where they were from...

...Late this spring, the Coast Guard itself started to run special rescue patrols, but Karonis stresses that their purpose is to save lives, not to encourage balseros...

...The flights last for as long as the gas supply—about four hours on the actual search route...

...Almost all the balseros I've seen are white...

...Colome's estimate is the most optimistic by far...

...All of them made it...

...According to Basulto, the first six rafts his group found were empty, meaning those aboard had most likely died...

...They'll have to take him out...

...I still had money left," he remarks...

...again, Colome's perception may be tainted by the fact that he is surely the luckiest balsero ever to leave Cuba...

...6 6 Tri he balseros are typically men in I their late twenties and early thirties," says Lizette Alvarez, immigration reporter for the Miami Herald "Only in the past couple of months have we begun to find some women and children among the people picked up...

...Our foundation offers the balseros as much help as they need with their paperwork," says Suarez, "and it would offer other kinds of help if they needed it, but the fact is that as soon as word gets out that so-and-so's cousin's niece's husband has arrived, the families rush to the detention center with food, clothes, and whatever else they can offer...

...The marked tightening up as the summer wore on may have been due to Fidel's obsession with the August Pan-American Games in Havana...

...Last Christmas, Cubans went without lechon asado, the roast pig dish that is to Cuban Christmas what turkey is to American Thanksgiving, after Fidel—suddenly turning animal-rights activist—declared an "amnesty" for the pigs...

...According to the Cuban American National Foundation, 35 to 50 percent of the approximately 57,000 Cubans who receive U.S...

...the funeral was a symbolic one...

...Gonzalez and his three brothers, who left before him, waited until their mother was safe in Miami on a tourist visa before they risked leaving the island...

...Beyond their age and race, however, it gets harder to generalize about them...

...On Tuesday morning Colome was picked up by Queen Elizabeth's yacht as it headed back to England after Her Majesty's state visit...

...His efforts, and those of other Cuban-Americans, yielded Brothers to the Rescue, dedicated to air-patrolling the Strait of Florida for balseros...

...When I interviewed him for this article he was already making arrangements to go retrieve his engine from the Coast Guard station at Cayo Hueso...

...According to Austin, "Unfortunately, Cubans are not like Haitians...

...Even though there were many legitimate refugees among them, Castro used the opportunity to throw in Cuba's most hardened criminals, psychiatric cases, and sex offenders...

...Gonzalez recruited some drunken youngsters partying on the beach to help him carry his raft...

...But we keep getting messages from people in Cuba telling us they'll try anyway, that they can't live there any longer...

...We schedule the patrols based on certain criteria we reserve the right not to divulge" F or Duke Austin of the Immigration .I.' and Naturalization Service press office, the balseros could represent a particular problem...

...The nephew of the late Col...

...I can't really describe it...

...They were taken to Havana, where they remain imprisoned with what looks like a pretty uncertain future...

...In Cuba there is absolutely nothing," says Colome...

...With the exception of those who have black marks on their files, balseros do not really expect more than a reprimand and a fine if caught...

...This past June, the Cuban coast guard arrested two Miami Cubans aboard a private boat who had been searching for balsero relatives...

...Some months ago, when a single Soviet grain shipment failed to reach Cuba, hundreds of thousands of chickens had to be slaughtered for lack of feed...

...We were followed by a police spotlight almost from the minute we left the beach," he says, although there was no shooting, nor any other attempt to get them to stop...

...Of course, since they come from a country where paddling out to sea on a raft is itself a criminal offense, all balseros have criminal backgrounds...

...There are those who fear that if Castro goes down, he'll take Cuba with him...

...Tony de la Guardia—who was charged with drug trafficking and executed after a show trial in the summer of 1989—left for Miami in a sailboat with his girlfriend and some of his buddies...

...Balseros are not even close to the largest source of immigration from Cuba...

...The morning I flew with them, there were two Americans, a German woman, two Argentines, a cable-TV crew, and Ruben Gonzalez, who three weeks earlier had been the first balsero spotted by the fledgling group...

...From that far off the coast, however, they realized they were no more visible than the radio waves coming from Radio Marti's coverage...

...He left on a whim one Saturday afternoon aboard a 4 1/2x41/2-foot styrofoam board that a friend used for swimming off the beach...

...For all we know, these people might be dangerous criminals that require incarceration...

...he brought no food and no water...

...In the messages we send to Cuba through Radio Marti, we try to discourage them from trying...

...These private efforts can be highly dangerous...

...I realized that there would always be privileged ones, and I felt that in such a hypocritical society, I had no future...

...Commander Jeff Karonis, "The Coast Guard responds to the Brothers' calls as it would respond to any private citizen's report of sighting a raft...

...Gonzalez adds, "The engine was working just fine, and we had plenty of fuel left...

...the plane hired by their Miami relatives had yet to locate them...

...First, and obviously, the balseros are arriving on nowhere near the scale of the 125,000 who came during the boatlift...

...They are Castro's children, raised to become the future of Cuba's socialist paradise...

...Whatever the outcome, Cubans can hardly be blamed for their impatience, and for the foreseeable future empty rafts will continue to wash up on the coasts of southern Florida...

...Jorge Mas Canosa, chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, has said that Castro won't last the year...

...According to Suarez, at least three hundred Cubans of the very highest echelons have defected this year, most prominent among them trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, who asked for asylum in Greece while touring with Dizzy Gillespie's band, and whose new album is called "Flight to Freedom...

...At that point, Basulto says, "a group of us started talking about a more practical way of showing our solidarity...

...With Cubans, deportation is not an option, and we can't keep them in detention forever...

...Eight to ten and ten to midnight—that's when nobody is outside...

...Since May of this year, 150 people of a dozen nationalities have volunteered their private planes, their flying skills, or simply their time to serve as in-flight observers...

...An important point...

...Basulto was referring to the weekly flights he pilots in search of balseros, the Cuban "raft-people" who drift out of Cuban territorial waters on inner tubes, lashed boards, and pieces of styrofoam in hopes of washing ashore on the Florida Keys or being picked up by passing ships...

...Or, for that matter, balseros leaping off the Havana embankments in front of foreign TV crews...

...One cretinous U.S...

...He had hoped that the games would provide a showcase for "Cuba, the Island Paradise," boosting tourism and hard-currency revenue...

...Still, things have gotten a little tougher than a couple of months ago, when families were throwing neighborhood parties to celebrate those leaving the next morning...

...Later that day the Coast Guard picked up what was most likely this family (although, in some sort of last-minute crisis, they had replaced the children with the family dog...

...immigration papers in order...

...On the weekend of June 14, the Cuban-American community at Cayo Hueso raised money for the funeral of two balseros—a young man and a woman, whose bodies were found on different rafts...

...officials say it is unclear whether the boat was inside Cuban territorial waters, and whether the crew had their U.S...

...We tell them their chances are one in four at best, we tell them to wait, that Castro's days are numbered," he says...

...Almost to a man, the balseros cite desperation and disaffection as reasons for leaving...

...They called it the Flotilla of Cuban Solidarity and Brotherhood...

...Ruben Gonzalez gives him a year, tops: "It'll be the military...

...We flew one twin-engine and two single-engine planes back and forth along pre-arranged routes, at about 350 feet above the water...

...According to Coast Guard spokesman Lt...

...official even said: "It might be a case of self-deportation...

...The morning I flew with the Brothers, we received notice that an entire family had left Havana the previous Saturday...

...In May of last year, a group of Cuban-Americans sailed dozens of ships and boats to Cuba's 20-mile territorial limit, at about the same longitude as Havana...

...Back in Cuba, in addition to his regular job, he handcrafted plastic jewelry to sell on the black market, earning enough to buy a brand-new Yamaha fishing engine from a foreign sailor in Havana...

...1:1 "We tell them their chances are one in four at best, we tell them to wait, that Castro's days are numbered...

...Attempting to leave the island is still a criminal offense, and stories abound of early-day balseros being washed ashore on Cuban military bases and not seeing the light of day for the next five years...

...At that rate, this year's total will be easily five times the 467 rescued last year, and about forty times the number rescued in 1988, the year the statistics began to pick up...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 13...

...There is a wide range of estimates on the odds of making it alive...

...Desperate relatives hire private planes and fishing boats to search the strait for their people...

...The conditions are such that all it seems to take to jump on a raft and head for Miami is youthful recklessness...

...Since most of the Cubans who have immigrated to Miami in the past three decades have been white (Cuba was about one-third white in 1960 and is about one-tenth white today), this would indicate that many balseros have relatives in the United States—an indication that Diego Suarez confirms...

...Second, the balseros came of their own volition, unlike Castro's hand-picked marielitos...

...Most balseros were born after the revolution...

...People like Austin worry that the wave of balseros could turn out to be a reprise 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 of 1980, when, after a number of Cuban dissidents took refuge in the Peruvian embassy in Havana, President Jimmy Carter announced he would accept any and all Cubans Castro would permit to emigrate...

...sego Suarez, immigration expert LOP at the Cuban American National Foundation, agrees with Basulto's estimate...

...Other numbers thrown around in the Miami news media put the odds at about one in ten...

...When I was in the Service," Gonzalez says, staring out the window of the plane at the coast he left only weeks before, "I realized that the revolution was a bunch of bull...

...At that height, with the airinside the closed cabin at a muggy 85 degrees, even the most experienced pilots get airsick...

...Now Cubans are sweating it out and pedaling their bikes to work...

...Just a few minutes with the soft-spoken Gonzalez gives one the feeling that he came to the right country...

...Miami (Tr ry to imagine," says Jose BasulI to, "that you've been away from your country for thirty years, and then, when you finally see it, you can't go there...

...In the following three months, 125,000 Cubans emigrated from the port of Mariel in private boats...

...A report from the rescue effort...

...Even relatives of the party elite have left...

...But the Cuban elite by and large prefer safer methods...

...He and three other raft-mates were forty miles north of Cuba when a Brothers plane spotted them...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Matias Rojas Bruce CUBA'S OPEN BOATS As Cuba's society collapses, desperate islanders are paddling out to sea in hopes of reaching southern Florida...

...But we keep getting messages from people in Cuba telling us they'll try anyway, that they can't live there any longer...

...We are not signaling where we are going to be...

...Depending on the seasonal conditions, I would say one in three to one in four probably make it...

...Back in Havana," he says, "every single young person I know wants to leave, but not everybody can...

...At least we are sure that people coming in with visas don't have a criminal background...

...It wouldn't look very good," says Colome, "if there were protests spoiling the horizon...

...But very few of the balseros reaching Florida in the last year report having trouble leaving the island...

...D uben Gonzalez, 26, with a wife and two daughters in Cuba, was trained as a construction technician, and had attended night school to become an architect...

...His father, a doctor, had been a captain in the Sierra Maestra and the head of a Havana military hospital...

...Many Juventudes Comunistas (Castro Youth) have chosen the risks of a raft over a future in the party leadership...

...The balseros' ordeal has generated a great deal of sympathy...

...Coast Guard...

...Each evening the six o'clock news has a fresh story about a group or two of fortunate ones salvaged by the Coast Guard, but the empty rafts are simply too ubiquitous to allow Floridians to ignore the obvious: most balseros do not survive the crossing...

...There is evidence that some of these [balseros] might have criminal backgrounds...

...By mid-June of this year, 1,143 balseros—men, women, and children—had been rescued in the Strait of Florida, according to the U.S...

...Many balseros are factory workers, though there are among them a very significant number of experienced technicians, university students, and professionals...

...Whatever the odds, Basulto calls it "Cuban Russian Roulette...

...Empty rafts wash up on beaches, are spotted from planes, or discovered by horrified sports fishermen and weekend sailors...

...We lack everything—from soap to breakfast food to tractors...