He was banned from baseball in Cuba, but Orlando "El Duque"
Hernandez was going to pitch again – or die trying.
By Steve Fainaru and Ray Sanchez.
Boston Globe, March 20, 2001.
Over the past three years, Cuban defector Orlando "El Duque"
Hernandez has become a household name among American baseball fans, a key figure
in the latest Yankee dynasty. But in December 1997, El Duque was stuck in
Havana, his career all but over. Banned from Cuban baseball for consorting with
a Miami sports agent, he had not pitched in nearly two years. With the help of
friends and relatives, he desperately plotted his only hope of playing again:
escape.
The mastermind was a tall, barrel-chested man named Ocilio Cruz. He was El
Duque's great-uncle, but everyone - relatives and friends alike - simply called
him Tio, the Spanish word for uncle. Tio lived in Miami, where he was president
of Florida Patrol Security Detective Inc. A strapping private investigator, he
operated out of a two-room suite on Biscayne Boulevard. Tio was 66, but looked
about 15 years younger. He drank only whiskey because beer, he said, put the
weight on.
The foyer of Tio's office displayed a photo of him with Bill Clinton at a
fund-raiser for the Cuban American National Foundation, the powerful exile
group. "I hope neither of you are Republican," he said politely as Ray
Sanchez and I walked through the door. The security business was apparently slow
this hot afternoon. Tio sat behind his desk, bathed in air conditioning,
watching a Spanish-language soap opera on a corner television. He lowered the
volume as he turned to the subject of our visit: his plot to help El Duque
escape from Cuba. "These are the secrets of war," said Tio.
As Tio described it, his campaign to liberate El Duque had been like a
journey into Miami's Cuban-American underworld, a veritable Stop & Shop for
smugglers and spies. It was an environment with which Tio, with his security
connections, was not entirely unfamiliar. For the El Duque operation, he paired
up with a man who went by the nickname El Argentino (The Argentine). The one
time I met him, El Argentino introduced himself as Jorge Ramis. He said he was
an Argentine businessman who lived in Miami. Beyond that, he declined to
elaborate. El Argentino's role was to act as a liaison between Miami and Havana,
delivering messages and money during the preparation for El Duque's escape. In
return, he would be allowed to represent El Duque if and when the time came to
negotiate the pitcher's Major League contract.
Looking back from the perspective of three World Series (and counting), such
an arrangement seems perfectly logical. But at the time, in December 1997, it
was little more than a pipe dream. El Duque was a desperate man. He had just
turned 32 (although he claimed, even then, to be 28). He and his best friend,
Osmany Lorenzo, had tried several times to line up a boat, with disastrous
results. The pair combed the beaches near Pinar del Rio, El Duque wearing
sunglasses to hide his identity. They searched outside Havana. "The name of
one place we went was Boca Jaruco; we tried to leave from there many times,"
said Osmany. "You have to go around the mountains and cross a river to get
to the sea. But we never got the boat there. This was so hard. You have no idea
how hard it was. Everybody leaves Cuba in boats and rafts, and I couldn't find
one to get us out of Cuba."
Osmany had a standard line to keep El Duque's spirits up. "During all
of the attempts, every one, I used to tell Orlando, 'Don't worry, we'll be
munching at McDonald's in Miami in an hour,' " he said. El Duque feared his
window of opportunity was closing. At the beginning of November, he and the
catcher Alberto Hernandez had set out for Santa Clara. This time the players
were to be picked up at a safe house and then taken to the water for a midnight
voyage north.
Alberto kissed his wife, Zaily, goodbye, perhaps forever, and headed out. He
met up with El Duque at the prearranged location. "We sat there up in the
mountains, waiting for hours," said Alberto. "But it didn't happen. It
all fell through." The players crept back to Havana in the early morning
darkness. "When Alberto walked through the door, I couldn't believe it,"
said Zaily. "I thought he was gone."
In mid-December, El Duque and Alberto were summoned to Villa Marista, the
Havana headquarters of the Ministry of Interior. The players were taken to
separate rooms. Both were told that the government was aware of their plans.
Alberto said a State Security agent warned him that he was now forbidden to set
foot in Santa Clara, the crossroads for a number of launch points on the
northern coast. He said the agent told him that he and El Duque could expect to
be watched so closely that Havana would feel like it was the size of a centavo,
a penny. El Duque said the low point came when a security agent told him flatly:
"You will never play baseball again."
"I told him, 'I'm going to play baseball again before I die, even if I
have to play in Haiti,' " said El Duque. "His response was the same
response they always gave you: an ironic little laugh and the face of victory.
The look of having defeated you, the enemy. But you cannot claim victory while
the enemy is still standing."
El Duque had never been very religious, but now, in his desperation, he
sought divine intervention. In Cuba, the dominant religion is Santeria, a
syncretic mix of Roman Catholicism and Yoruba dieties. The religion evolved as
African slaves combined the religion of their Spanish masters with their own.
Often mistaken for voodoo, Santeria combines the rituals of Catholicism with a
kind of gory mysticism so out of the mainstream it is often reduced to
stereotypes.
But to its millions of practitioners, Santeria is as real as the sun. The
initiation into Palo Mayombe, a form of Santeria, can vary, but certain rites
are universal. The ceremony is held over an iron kettle or terra cotta bowl
filled with sticks from the ceiba tree, pieces of wood, a crucifix, human bones,
and, often, dead animals such as goats or roosters. The caldron sits in a white
circle of pulverized eggshells, surrounded by candles. The ceremony is conducted
by the palero, or Santeria priest, who begins by invoking the spirit of
Zarabanda, divine messenger of the Palo Mayombe underworld:
O mighty spirit Zarabanda
I call your spirit from the north (he
taps three times in front of the caldron)
I call your spirit from the south
(repeats taps)
I call your spirit from the east (repeats taps)
I call
your spirit from the west (repeats taps)
The centerpiece of the initiation ceremony is the rallamiento - literally, a
scratching. "With the knife of the palero they draw your blood," said
Lazaro Montero, a Cuban expert in Santeria and Palo Mayombe. "It is to
strengthen you. In Palo there is a belief that through rallamiento you receive
special powers so you can go anywhere and not be seen. You become invisible."
El Duque never flaunted his religion or discussed it in great detail. But he
obviously gave great weight to its influence over his improbable life story.
Later, when he traveled with the Yankees, he erected makeshift shrines in his
hotel room to Chango, a Santeria deity. The shrines usually consisted of a
variety of offerings: candles, a sunflower, a burnt Cuban cigar, red wine, and,
always, a model of the Statue of Liberty.
Months after his escape, El Duque was sitting with Ray Sanchez and me in a
restaurant in San Jose, Costa Rica. El Duque was talking about his deliverance
from Cuba in spiritual terms. Sitting at the table, he rolled back his sleeve to
reveal his right shoulder, still bearing the dark, thin scars of the rallamiento
that he believed had propelled him from the world of the unjust.
Tio sent El Argentino down to Cuba with $4,000 in the fall of 1997. The
money was to be used to find a boat and a crew to carry El Duque out of Cuba. El
Duque, in turn, entrusted the task of finding the boat to his friend Osmany
Lorenzo, master of the underground economy. Osmany had a well-connected friend
in Santa Clara who went by the nickname El Chino. El Chino, in turn, knew a
fisherman in the northern port city of Caibarien. The fisherman was known, more
conventionally, as Juan Carlos Romero. He was a 31-year-old Cuban Navy veteran
and part owner of a 30-foot boat that he used to fish the waters off Villa Clara
every weekend.
Osmany and El Chino showed up at Juan Carlos's house unannounced one
afternoon. They came with a proposition. "They told me that if I got a boat
for them, they would guarantee that I and my family would get into the United
States," Juan Carlos said. "They also promised me a job when we got
there. Osmany was really like El Duque's mouth and eyes back then. He told me
that El Duque was trapped in Cuba and that he couldn't get out. He said he had
tried and tried many times, and he had always failed. He wanted me to help get
him out."
Juan Carlos took Osmany down to the beach. The boat was bobbing in the
water, several yards offshore. It wasn't a yacht, but it wasn't a wreck, either.
Juan Carlos and two friends had bought the wooden fishing vessel for 50,000
pesos, about $3,000 at the time. The boat measured about 30 feet from stem to
stern and was powered by a 480-horsepower diesel engine that Juan Carlos said
had been made in either Germany or Argentina. An enclosed cabin, with room to
accommodate several people, dominated the deck. The cabin rose about 10 feet and
supported a platform from which the boat was steered. From the stern fluttered a
small red, white, and blue Cuban flag, mounted on a pole. The boat had already
made one voyage to Miami to drop off a group of rafters - far more arduous than
the journey to the Bahamas, where El Duque would transfer to another boat - and
had returned to Caibarien unscathed.
Osmany, suddenly a nautical expert, gave the boat the once-over. "When
do we leave?" he asked.
Juan Carlos spent the days leading up to departure monitoring the movements
of the Cuban Coast Guard. He knew that the boats patrolled at night and rested
during the day. He also had calculated that it took 10 minutes to ride his bike
from the launch point to his house. That information was critical: Juan Carlos
wanted to confirm that the coast, literally, was clear, then pedal back to the
house. The group would then set out for the boat en masse.
In the waning hours of Christmas Day, the National Highway was pitch-dark.
Unnoticed, the car slowly made its way through the warm night, careful to avoid
being stopped. No one spoke much. Everyone dozed. It was early morning when the
group stopped in Santa Clara to pick up a late entry: a 35-year-old hustler
named Lenin Rivero. Rivero knew one of the organizers and was eager to leave
Cuba, having recently done time for trafficking in dollars. He traded his '58
Oldsmobile for a spot on the boat. "I asked my friend, 'What if they send
me back?' " said Lenin. "He told me, 'Well, then you get your car
back.' So I said OK."
Lenin waited at a tourist stop on the side of the highway. The car pulled up
beside him. "When I got in the car, that was the first time I had met
everyone," said Lenin. "I mean, I had seen El Duque on TV many times.
But I had never seen him in person.
"It was very tense. I remember asking something, although I don't
remember exactly what. But they obviously weren't in the mood for questions. It
might have been something like 'Are you El Duque?' They ignored me like I wasn't
there. They must have been afraid. Then Orlando said something like 'Shut up,
don't ask so many [expletive] questions. Let's get out of here.' I didn't say
another word after that."
It was around 5 a.m. when the group pulled up to Juan Carlos's house. Juan
Carlos and his wife, Geidy Barreto, had been up most of the night, partying and
saying goodbye to their families. The group parked about a quarter-mile from the
house to avoid suspicion. Juan Carlos then hopped on his bicycle and rode down
to the launch point: a secluded campground called Conuco Cay. The boat was
anchored a few yards offshore.
Juan Carlos and a friend had arranged a signal. The friend, a fisherman,
agreed to watch for the Coast Guard that morning. If the area was clear, he told
Juan Carlos, he would fly the Cuban flag from his boat. Juan Carlos pulled a
pair of binoculars from his backpack. He stared out at the water. "I saw
the flag," he said. "When I saw it, I rode my bike back home. Geidy
was standing in front of the house. I left the bike, and we got in the car."
As they made their way toward the boat, El Duque and the others tried to
meld into the floorboards, their caps pulled over their faces. It was still very
early, and there was almost no one on the streets in the soft morning. At that
hour, Caibarien was a sleepy fishing village: low-slung houses, the smell of the
sea, the occasional clomping of a horse-drawn carriage on the buckled streets.
Conuco Cay was just outside of town. Occasionally, people camped there, but now
it was empty, a secluded knoll of palm trees and shrubs and heavy grass running
to the beach. The cars were able to drive up almost to the edge of the shore.
To get to the boat, El Duque and the others had to wade into the water. And
so, after some hesitation, into the water they all went: two of the finest
baseball players in Cuba's history, their friends and companions, and a few
others just looking for a way out of the historic malaise. At the last minute,
Osmany had decided to tag along, if only to see how it all turned out. He seemed
like the most relaxed member of the group. The others were tense, quiet, and
determined. Alberto, by his own admission, was petrified. It took him a few
moments to muster up the courage to wade into the great unknown.
He was grossly overweight from the 14-month layoff during his and El Duque's
suspension, and when he went to climb onto the boat he tumbled awkwardly back in
the water. "This boat is a piece of shit," he said. He indicated that
he might not go. Noris Bosch, El Duque's girlfriend, looked back at him. There,
in the water, she offered up some hard words of encouragement.
"We've made our decision," she said. "Better to drown than to
turn back now."
Soaked from the waist down, El Duque, Noris, Osmany, and Joel Pedroso, the
pitcher's cousin,piled into the cabin and hit the floor. Alberto and Lenin lay
face down on the deck. Geidy took a seat out in the open with Juan Carlos's
anonymous partners. Juan Carlos climbed to the top of the cabin and began to
ease the boat away from Conuco Cay. To anyone who happened to notice, the boat
would have appeared to be heading out on a routine fishing expedition - a little
later than usual, perhaps, but not surprising on the groggy morning after the
first legal Christmas in Cuba in 28 years. "We took the same route that we
always took on fishing trips," said Juan Carlos. "I was roaming around
like we were looking for fishing zones." In the distance stood a Coast
Guard cutter, too far away to be threatening. Gradually, after about an hour of
phantom trolling, Juan Carlos maneuvered the boat in the direction of the
Bahamas.
"There was dead silence as we floated away," said Osmany. "No
one moved. No one said a word. We kept our heads down. I thought it was the last
time I would ever see Cuba. And I had to keep my head down. I couldn't look. It
was sad. That was the hardest part."
Just off Caibarien, a group of tiny islands, part of the Sabana Archipelago,
blocks the path to the open sea. Juan Carlos had to choose among several narrow
channels that run between the islands. It was low tide, and as he gingerly made
his way the boat struck bottom and became stuck. Climbing down from his perch,
he jumped into the shallows and gave the boat a push, jarring it loose. Within
minutes, the defectors had made it past the archipelago, past the critical
12-mile international limit, out of Cuba, heading north at speeds between 6 and
8 knots. The weather was unchanging: balmy and pristine, as if lifted from a
travel brochure. The water, in places, was bright aqua, with dark shadings of
coral mass. Occasionally, a marlin leaped into the air. "It was calma
blanca," said Juan Carlos. "The calmest navigational conditions there
are."
By the time he yelled that it was safe to come out, however, almost everyone
was too queasy to move. Packed onto the floor of the sweltering cabin for the
better part of four hours, El Duque and the others had gotten seasick. When they
finally emerged, it was to empty their stomachs over the side of the boat.
Alberto, too, was pale green after baking on the deck. "Imagine lying there
for four hours without moving," he said. As the players leaned over,
retching, Juan Carlos held them by the waist to keep them from tumbling
overboard. He sprinkled cold water over El Duque's and Alberto's heads. In
retrospect, it should have been a moment of relief, jubilation even, the
beginning of a new life. But the celebration was tempered by a tableau of
contorted faces and prostrate bodies scattered across the deck.
Within a few hours, everyone had recovered sufficiently to prepare for the
next stage: the transfer at Anguilla Cay. The boats were to meet at 5 p.m.
between the Santaren and Nicholas channels, not far from the uninhabited island.
Using navigational charts, Juan Carlos had given El Argentino and Tio precise
coordinates for the spot where the transfer would take place. The hardest part,
it had seemed to everyone, would be getting out of Cuba. Once that was
accomplished, it was a matter of loading everyone onto a speedboat and eluding
the US Coast Guard long enough to make a landing at Key Biscayne, off Miami.
Tio, who had poured $50,000 into El Duque's freedom thus far, stood by with
rented vans. He planned to take the group directly from the beach to the Krone
Detention Center, an INS way station where El Duque and his companions would
then be processed into the United States as political refugees.
Like clockwork, Juan Carlos maneuvered the boat near Anguilla Cay around 5.
In total, the trip had taken about 10 hours. The passengers surveyed their
surroundings. Nearby was the island - islands, actually, an uninviting strand of
rocks rising out of the sea. The main island was a sliver, perhaps 2 miles long
and several hundreds yards wide, carpeted with palmettos and dull brush. Along
the edges were intermittent patches of white sand, small beaches, but it was
hardly Club Med. Anguilla Cay was a desolate speck rising in the middle of a
void. Wind-lashed, exposed, it looked like it might easily disappear in a heavy
storm. But where was the other boat? Juan Carlos pulled out his binoculars and
stared toward Miami, a good 70 miles away. What he saw was a desert of vacant
sea. As the afternoon passed, the crew became fearful that something had gone
terribly wrong. They had not prepared for this. Confident that Tio would easily
complete the back end of the Cuba-Anguilla-Miami double play, El Duque had
packed little more than his cigarettes. He wore jeans, a dark shirt, and tennis
shoes. Noris wore a Yankee jersey that Ray Sanchez had given El Duque as a gift.
She, too, carried little else. Osmany had brought two cans of Spam. The
best-prepared crew member was Juan Carlos Romero, who had the presence of mind
to cart along 10 pounds of sugar and a tank containing several gallons of
drinking water. That and Osmany's Spam represented the entirety of their
provisions.
It was getting dark now, and Juan Carlos's partners needed to get back.
Soon, people would notice they were missing. They wanted their return to Cuba to
be as inconspicuous as possible. The crew decided to wait. It could not be long
now. The boat drew next to a beach on the south side of Anguilla Cay. Once again
everyone piled into the water. Juan Carlos grabbed the sugar, the drinking
water, a few blankets, and a tank of diesel fuel and set them on the sand. His
two partners remained on the boat, waiting, hoping they would not have to
abandon the group. After an hour, however, they reluctantly headed back. Slowly,
the fishing boat disappeared into the immense darkness. El Duque and the others
sat on the beach, listening to the engine trailing off, until the only sound
they heard was lapping surf. Now they were totally alone.
Knowing that the transfer might take place in the dark, Osmany had brought
along an unsophisticated beacon: a 35-mm camera with a built-in flash that a
tourist had given him as cab fare. Now, with everyone clustered on the sand,
squinting to locate the tardy rescuers, Osmany aimed the camera into the night.
He snapped at every odd sound or movement he detected, or thought he detected.
Everyone chimed in, shouting, "Osmany, over there! Over there!" For
hours, Osmany flashed the camera at ghosts until finally, after midnight, the
wind kicked up, the starlit sky glazed over, and it began to rain. Osmany
flashed with greater urgency now. He raised the camera and fired off dozens of
trigger-happy blasts that picked up the rain like a strobe. "I was
desperate," he said. "We were stranded. ... I just wanted somebody to
see us."
"Hey, Osmany, don't play around with the camera," said El Duque,
crouching in the sand. "We're gonna need that camera. You're gonna break it
if you keep flashing so much."
Osmany kept shooting. The boat had to be out there somewhere, he figured,
searching in the dark. The last thing he wanted was for it to turn back. That
would be even worse. Flash! Flash! Flash! Then, as El Duque was warning him yet
again, Osmany snapped off a shot, and the rain-slicked camera slipped from his
grasp, tumbling into the sand at his feet.
"It got all wet," said Juan Carlos. "There was sand all over
it, and it just broke. The flash wouldn't work anymore. ... Now we had no way to
signal a passing boat."
"The camera was the only instrument we had to generate light,"
said Osmany. "Everyone had been telling me to leave the camera alone, don't
use it too much. As soon as they warned me, it broke. Orlando was yelling, 'You
are so ... stupid!' "
"Joel was cursing Osmany, too," said Geidy. "And we were all
trying to fix the camera. But we couldn't bring it back to life."
"Everybody took turns tapping it, trying to shake the sand out of it,"
said Juan Carlos. "But there was nothing. No flash." When the
bickering finally ended, the group fell silent and stared into the dark. The
rain eventually stopped and, one by one, everyone fell asleep on the tiny beach
at Anguilla Cay.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company |
