Imprisoned Cuban haunted by memories of deadly smuggling trip he planned
By Jody A. Benjamin. Sun-Sentinel. Web-posted: 12:25 a.m. Mar. 6, 2000
ASHLAND, Ky. -- Most painful of all for Pedro Julio Guevara is that he can't undo any of it.
Can't ever put his family back together. Can't resuscitate the lives of strangers he tried to help. Can't even return to Cuba, a place he risked it all to leave -- and lost.
"I see the tragedy in my mind every night," Guevara said. "It tortures me. I can't sleep."
That tragedy, which Guevara unwittingly orchestrated, was one of the deadliest smuggling accidents in South Florida history. On Dec.17, 1998, 14 people drowned three miles off Elliot Key after an overloaded speedboat slammed into a wave, flipped and sank. It marked a disastrous end to
Guevara's plan to help his family flee Cuba.
Among the dead were his wife, Maida, and his sister-in-law. His 10-year-old son and 5-year-old niece survived the accident.
Now home is a squat red-brick low-security federal prison of 1,150 inmates perched high among the jagged hills and stripped coal mines on Kentucky's far eastern edge. Guevara is serving 16 months after being convicted of conspiring to smuggle aliens into the United States. When he completes
the time, he is scheduled to be deported. But because the United States has no diplomatic relations with communist-ruled Cuba, Guevara will likely sit in jail indefinitely.
Smuggling prosecutions like Guevara's jumped 200 percent in the past three years. From October 1998 to July 1999, the most recent fiscal year for which there are complete figures, the Border Patrol caught 2,374 people trying to enter Florida illegally by boat, double the amount in the
preceding year. The agency attributes the vast majority of illegal boat arrivals, 80 percent, to smuggling.
Complex and shifting
"We were seeing an increase in traffic and have made a concerted effort to respond to it," said Joe Melia of the Border Patrol.
But far from clear black and white, the portrait of smuggling can be complex and shifting. Refugees often are aided by family members in South Florida who are themselves recent immigrants. Frustrated with legal means to reunite their relatives, they turn to smugglers with small, fast boats
they hope will slip past U.S. Coast Guard radar undetected.
For many like Guevara, the line between familial love and financial profiteering gets blurred.
"I wanted my family together again. I was so emotional about it, so obsessed about it," he said. "I think it was my destiny to always be separated from them."
As he slouches into an orange plastic chair in the prison cafeteria for his first newspaper interview in prison, Guevara says he isn't eager to revisit the deadly incident. But soon memories flow quickly out of bearded inmate 59022-004, as if no time at all has passed since Dec. 17, 1998.
Although Guevara now says he knew he was breaking the law and feels remorse at the loss of life, he saw no other choice at the time. He spent four years trying to reunite his family through legal means. When he took matters into his own hands, disaster struck.
Border Patrol agents still question the extent of Guevara's dealings with profit-driven organized smugglers and point to inconsistencies in his story. Authorities continue to investigate the crash because they suspect the involvement of smugglers who are still operating, 15 months later.
"All the indicators (of other involvement) are there," said Vern Eastwood, special agent in the U.S. Border Patrol's anti-smuggling unit. He questions how Guevara, who worked in Tampa cleaning boats, came up with $13,000 in cash for the speedboat used in the smuggling incident.
"You take a perfectly good boat, beat it to death by overloading it, sail it in rough seas and you wind up with a terrible tragedy," Eastwood said. "But the motivation behind it all is clearly questionable."
Prosecutors never found hard evidence that Guevara sought to make a profit of the smuggling venture, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joan Silverstein. Still, she argued, "the recklessness was crowding everyone onto the boat."
No future in Cuba
For Guevara, fleeing Cuba by raft was nothing new. He had done it himself during the summer of 1994.
Repairing broken radios and TV sets in the tiny village of Vegas de Palmas wasn't earning him enough to support his family of three. He saw no future and decided to join the 30,000 Cubans streaming toward Florida that summer.
After working at a factory job in Key Largo, Guevara later moved to Tampa. But he never let go the idea of reuniting his family in the United States.
In Cuba, his wife applied to the U.S. Interests Section in Havana to emigrate through a lottery system that grants immigrant visas to a lucky 20,000 Cubans a year.
Meanwhile, Guevara returned to Cuba several times. He says those visits were merely to bring gifts to his family. But the U.S. Border Patrol thinks he used the time to arrange with smugglers to bring his family to the States.
In June 1998, Guevara's wife and son were among 30 people rescued from a smuggler's broken-down speedboat by the U.S. Coast Guard several miles off Miami Beach. The 30 Cubans were sent back.
A few months later, Guevara tried once again to visit his wife in Cuba. But this time, the Cuban government denied him a visitor's visa. No more trips to see his family. He said he became desperate.
"I said, 'I can't take anymore,'" he recalled during the prison interview. "I have to do something."
That something was to approach Francisco Gomez, a friend from Cuba who also had left in 1994.
A $13,000 question
Together, Gomez and Guevara plunked down $20,000 in cash for a 30-foot Wellcraft Scarab in Fort Lauderdale. Guevara had contributed $13,000 of the money, according to court records. Neither ever fully accounted for where they got the money.
In Cuba, Guevara's brother Alexis would arrange to get the family as far as the Bahamas; from there, Gomez and Guevara would take over.
On Dec. 15, his son's birthday, Guevara called his family in Cuba.
"My father told me they were already gone," Guevara said. He had been expecting the news; he just did not know when. "I knew what to do. We had everything prepared."
He and Gomez left from Tavernier Key the next morning. It took four hours to reach their destination: Anguilla Caye, Bahamas, a deserted rock about 50 miles north of Cuba.
When they arrived, they say they were surprised to find an additional 16 people waiting with Guevara's wife, son, brother, sister-in-law and niece. The Scarab was designed to hold no more than 12; seven spots already were taken.
Guevara and Gomez initially refused to take anyone except family, but the other refugees begged the two men not to leave them behind. Guevara said he relented after a desperate few scrambled for the speedboat, forcing themselves on board.
"Bringing my family into the country I knew was illegal, but I was prepared for that much," he said. "But bringing so many other people? They did not realize how difficult that would be. I felt much more responsible."
The trip back was quiet, Guevara said. At about 10 p.m., after a grueling 13 hours, the group saw land. They were just off Biscayne National Park's Elliot Key, about eight miles east of Homestead. A lighthouse shined on neighboring Boca Chita.
"You could see the lights. Everything was happiness," Guevara said. "Everyone was finally reaching what we had dreamed about: getting to the United States, arriving in the United States."
'I kept calling for her'
The glee was short-lived. A crack in a front seam of the boat had developed and spread. In the darkness, no one noticed water trickling into the boat until there was a flood and it started to sink.
Twenty-three people found themselves grabbing for the eight life vests on board. Some fell into the sea. The bodies of others were found the next day inside the boat's cabin.
In the chaos, Guevara screamed his wife's name.
"I kept calling for her. Calling. Calling. And there was no answer," Guevara said.
"Where is Mama? Where is Mama?" asked his son Yasel, 10.
"I had no response for him," Guevara said. "But a child of that age understands. This was very, very hard."
Prosecutors argued that Guevara and Gomez acted recklessly in overloading the boat.
"The very situation that the law is designed to prevent from happening took place," said Silverstein, who argued the case in court. "They smuggled people in an extremely dangerous way that put lives at risk. Ultimately, it cost some of them their lives."
Guevara initially faced up to five years in prison. But the court reduced his sentence because of the unusual circumstances.
Had Guevara and Gomez left the other refugees on the deserted island, they might still have perished, U.S. District Judge Donald Graham said. He also found that the refugees had a hand in creating the danger by insisting on boarding the Scarab. And Guevara tried to help others after the boat
capsized by diving underneath the surface to retrieve a rope they could hold onto.
Now, in prison, Guevara's biggest hope is to someday be moved to a prison in Florida so his son, who lives in Lake Worth with a family friend, might be able to visit. Father and son communicate through letters but Kentucky is too far and too expensive a trip for the boy to make. Now 11, the
boy has had psychological problems, Guevara said.
"Of course everyone wants to have their family together, but it comes at a high price," Guevara said. "Something like this affects you. There is no hope for anything."
Jody A. Benjamin can be reached at jbenjamin@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4530 .
Elián's surrogate mother hospitalized for exhaustion
By Luisa Yanez. Sun-Sentinel. Web-posted: 11:30 p.m. Mar. 5, 2000
MIAMI -- The pressures over the custody fight for Elián Gonzalez have taken their toll on his closest ally, Marisleysis Gonzalez, according to family spokesperson Armando Gutierrez.
Gonzalez, 21, was hospitalized on Saturday apparently suffering from nervous exhaustion, he said. She was expected to be released today.
The young woman has become the surrogate mother for the 6-year-old boy and also his staunchest supporter in her family's efforts to keep him in the United States. She is the daughter of Elian's great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez.
"The stress and harassment by the Cuban government has affected her," Gutierrez said. "They want to take Elián back, and she wants to protect him to the end."
Last week, Marisleysis Gonzalez made a tearful appearance at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., pleading for help in keeping the boy in the United States. The boy's father in Cuba, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, wants his son back. U.S. immigration officials have ordered Elián be sent
back to the island.
On Thursday, a Miami federal judge will begin hearing arguments on a lawsuit brought by the Gonzalez family to block the order to send the boy back. The hearing is viewed as crucial to the case.
Elián was rescued off Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving Day after 11 others in his group died in the voyage from Cuba to the U.S. Elián's mother was among those who perished.
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