Published Sunday, June 4, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Source: Cuban player arrives in Key West
From Herald Staff and Wire Reports
Andy Morales, a third baseman for the Cuban national team, arrived in Key West on Friday evening and plans to seek political asylum, according to the company that plans to represent him.
Gus Dominguez, a sports agent with Los Angeles-based Total Sports International, said INS officials confirmed Morales was picked up in Key West and is being detained by the Coast Guard.
Dominguez said he met Morales, 24, last year when the Cuban team played the Baltimore Orioles in an exhibition game at Camden Yards. Morales hit a three-run home run in Cuba's 12-6 win.
``I had a feeling he would [eventually] defect,'' said Dominguez, who said he was contacted about representing Morales by Morales' father-in-law, Carlos Castillo, who lives in Miami.
Gonzalez said Morales left Cuba on a raft and that family members in Cuba phoned Castillo to tell him. It was not confirmed if Morales arrived on the raft or was rescued.
Sailing through loophole in embargo, many U.S. boaters docking in Cuba
Herald Staff Report. Published Sunday, June 4, 2000, in the Miami Herald
BARLOVENTO, Cuba -- Larry Haertling began to cry as two dozen shrieking school children -- their limbs dusty, their shoes flapping -- leapt toward his new video camera and a fistful of peppermint candy.
The Cape Girardeau, Mo., man wasn't prepared for the tears that choked him in the yard of a dilapidated grammar school, La Coronela Lisa, in the suburbs of Havana. The students, tiny and expectant, were terribly grateful for the kinds of things most kids back in the United States take for
granted -- crayons, a couple of candies.
``The look on those kids' faces,'' he recalled, ``it was really satisfying.''
One day after docking his 28-foot pleasure trawler, the Cape Escape, in Havana's famed Marina Hemingway, Haertling, 60, his wife, Barbara, 51, and six other Americans ventured to the crammed school to distribute ``humanitarian'' aid: cardboard boxes packed with construction paper, pens, pencils,
tape and markers.
The donations -- and a permit from the Key West-based humanitarian group Conchord Cayo Hueso -- allowed Haertling and his passengers to legally skirt the four-decade-old U.S. embargo intended to keep American citizens from visiting Cuba and spending the coveted fula, Cubans' nickname for
dollars.
As Washington debates the embargo and the Elián González saga has prompted a public deconstruction of U.S.-Cuban relations, boaters such as the Haertlings have become unlikely ambassadors of American goodwill.
There is such a yearning among Americans to visit this forbidden island that many, like the Haertlings, are seizing upon a variety of old and new methods to undertake the visit legally. Their interest is being fed in part by a slight easing of the embargo over the past year, which has unleashed
a torrent of pent-up demand.
Americans aren't legally prohibited from visiting Cuba, though they are barred from spending money there unless they qualify for a license from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces the embargo.
The new regulations add those participating in ``people to people'' cultural, educational and research exchanges to the ranks of those already permitted to spend money in Cuba: diplomats, journalists, humanitarian workers and Cuban exiles visiting family.
Baseball teams, music bands, college classes and American business people on fact-finding missions have all found it easier to legally traverse Cuba in the past 18 months.
``If they get a license, that's all that matters,'' says John S. Kavulich II, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that provides information on Cuba to U.S. businesses. ``They can spend $185 a day. They can bring back $100 worth of
Cuban products -- cigars or rum.''
MORE VISITORS
Kavulich estimates that 174,000 Americans visited Cuba last year, both with permits and without, a marked increase from the 123,000 who made the trip in 1998.
Haertling, who heard about Cuba from an Alabama boater who regularly totes medical supplies to the island, distributed his 200-pound shipment without assistance from the Cuban government. Because the boaters didn't have a huge shipment, the Cuban authorities didn't hassle them or confiscate the
goods, which they sometimes do to keep merchandise from ending up on the black market.
Razors. Toothpaste. Tampons. Aspirin. Intravenous bags. The Haertlings and their companions stocked up on items, packed them in cardboard boxes and duffel bags, and handed them to anybody they could -- from the children in La Lisa, to doctors at a medical clinic, to teachers in the farther-flung
Pinar del Río province west of Havana. On the last day of his visit, May 21, Haertling brandished a black suit and presented it to a guard at the marina.
``I think we feel guilty. I feel I have so much compared to what they have,'' his wife Barbara said as she tried to unload a jumbo-size tube of toothpaste on another marina employee.
American boaters have been making the 90-mile trip from Key West to Havana for years. Proximity is part of the reason: By boat, the trip takes anywhere from three to 12 hours, depending on weather and engine power.
U.S. Coast Guard statistics reflect the rise in the number of Americans making the voyage by sea. The number of vessels seeking permission to pass through the Coast Guard's 24-mile-wide security zone -- which buffers Florida's shores -- rose from 552 in 1998 to 857 last year.
LITTLE TROUBLE
For the most part, as long as boaters don't flaunt a cache of Cuban goods on their return, U.S. Customs and the U.S. Coast Guard do not bother them.
When they arrive back in Key West, boat captains are required to notify U.S. Customs. It can take hours for a Customs agent to arrive dockside -- at which point, depending on whether the captain is licensed to visit Cuba, the boat may receive a quick once-over or a careful search. Returning
passengers must also complete a ``Statement of Travel to Cuba,'' specifying the purpose and particulars of their visit.
Boaters who want to avoid the scrutiny return to the United States after stopping off in the Bahamas, so the vessels don't appear to be coming back from Cuba.
``On a boat, I've been to Cuba at least 15 times,'' says Arkansas native George Eldridge, whose 26-foot, 300-horsepower vessel, The T-Bone, skates from Key West to the marina in a smooth four hours. ``U.S. Customs has checked my boat once.''
Struggling to deal with a marked increase in drug- and alien-smuggling operations, agents from Customs and the Coast Guard admit they don't really have the manpower to do much more than a cursory vetting of boats returning from the island. ``[The traffic is] going gangbusters, and from our
standpoint it's impossible to enforce [the embargo],'' said a federal official who requested anonymity.
In Washington, bureaucrats assigned to regulate the spending of dollars in Cuba say they are aware that many travelers are flouting the rules, but insist they can enforce only the violations that come to their attention.
Said one high-ranking Treasury official, who asked not to be identified: ``You don't know what's out there that you don't see.''
TWO PURPOSES
For Haertling and the others who accompanied him on the voyage, the trip had a dual mission.
The humanitarian assistance ``is just a method for getting here,'' admits Bill Green, a 59-year-old engineer among the crew of the Cape Escape. ``To say that's why we are coming is not true. But we can also do some good.''
School and clinic tours melded with evenings at the Tropicana cabaret and excursions through Havana Vieja's crumbling splendor. Haertling and his wife slept on their boat, while others stayed in a decaying hotel, El Viejo y el Mar -- The Old Man and the Sea -- located at the foot of the marina's
guarded entrance.
Her husband anticipated ``a challenge, an adventure,'' but Barbara Haertling was initially hesitant to make the trip. By the end, however, she wasn't ruling out a return.
``I didn't want to go,'' she recalled. ``I thought that with the whole Elián crisis, they would hassle Americans.''
Instead, the Haertlings discovered a truism of Havana: Locals welcome Americans, not least because they tend to be effusive tippers.
DOLLAR OUTPOST
They also discovered occasional expatriates who have turned Marina Hemingway into a duty-free, dollars-only outpost.
The Trashy Lady. Maralinda. Relentless Pursuit. Yards away from the impressive vessels -- some of which cost more than an average home and sport satellite television, gourmet galleys and $1,000 fishing rods -- a gaggle of red-faced American men lounge each afternoon, soaking with their beers in
a sprawling pool next to the dock.
``Boaters are bored,'' says David Seidman, senior editor of Boating magazine. Seidman visited Havana recently to research a story on fishing in Cuba. ``This is someplace that is close by and it's been forbidden, and the fact that it's forbidden makes it enticing.''
Local officials are more than willing, for a price, to provide whatever documentation the visitors need to assure U.S. Customs agents that they had spent no money at all.
Some boaters bore letters from local Cubans vouching that they were ``fully hosted'' and presumably not spending any money here. Others joined the marina's ``Club Náutico,'' where $150 and $300 annual membership dues procure a signed form letter explaining in English that the club
sponsored their trip and no dollars were spent.
A mostly American bunch docked in the marina during Haertling's visit for a four-day, booze-soaked fishing contest, the Hemingway Marlin Tournament.
LOCAL DISTRACTION
By Day 2, however, many of the well-heeled revelers -- who paid as much as $1,500 a day for a Key West-based boat and crew -- set their sights on another sport. By Day 3, most had retired their metal hooks altogether.
Their distraction: teenage women in bikinis who congregate daily around the tiled ``Pickup Pool,'' stroking the cheeks of men still wearing wedding rings, running bright-painted toenails along flabby American legs.
Most of the men don't habla español, and the women aren't terribly fluent in English either. But over the course of the ``tournament,'' they paired off in a swift exchange of body heat, fragmented life stories and odd domestic rituals, such as grocery shopping for tucked-away Cuban
families at the marina's dollars-only supermarket.
``There's a big, international saying here,'' said a captain hired to navigate a Florida-based fishing boat for the tournament. ``What happens in Cuba stays in Cuba.''
Embracing the Cuban migration to Miami
Cuban Miami
Robert M. Levine and Moisés Asís
Rutgers. 145 pages. $32.
By Marta Barber . mbarber@herald.com. Published Sunday, June 4, 2000, in the Miami Herald
In South Florida, books on Cuba and Cubans are as inevitable as death and taxes. The proximity to Cuba, a country that has seen its share of political turmoil, has made this area the logical settlement to those escaping oppression. In the last 41 years, Cubans, in relentless emigration patterns,
have made Miami their capital, shaping its cultural landscape.
In recent years, putting politics aside, a flurry of coffee-table books showing the highly photogenic beautiful, crumbling buildings and vintage U.S.-made cars in Cuba has touched a nostalgic local nerve.
Also putting politics aside is Cuban Miami by Robert M. Levine and Moisés Asís, which follows that migration, settlement and its subsequent economic empowerment. Many South Floridians will connect with the book's photos. Pre-Castro visitors, for example, will remember the Villa
d'Este Hotel in downtown Miami where so many Cubans stayed. Many photos are heartwarming, such as a marrying couple with a mantilla spread over their shoulders.
Cuban Miami embraces Cuban Americans and their impact on the city. It never seriously challenges any negative aspects of the migration, nor questions its darker sides. It presents the social, racial and educational differences between the ``worms,'' Cuba's earliest exiles, the rafters, Cuba's
latest immigrants, and all those who came in between, with a sympathetic eye. For those who arrived in Miami from other parts of the States without a hint of who Cubans are and what has been their impact, Cuban Miami chronicles the community's history in simple text and photos. It opens a window to
many idiosyncrasies that are often points of misunderstanding: the corner stand for Cuban coffee, the sale of shrimp and lobster from the neighborhood truck, the excess of cars parked on the lawns of fairly expensive houses.
For those willing to cross it, Cuban Miami is a bridge to a colorful community. It recalls a past many remember and reveals a present many refuse to see.
Marta Barber is an editor in The Herald's features department.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald |