Rafters' desperate journeys reshaped the exile experience

By Daniel de Vise and Elaine de Valle, ddevise@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Aug. 22, 2004 in The Miami Herald.

First of four parts

Ten years ago today, 1,500 Cubans who had cast themselves adrift in homemade rafts, bound for Florida and freedom, found themselves waylaid at a dusty military camp back on the island, sunburned and thirsty, captured pawns in a political standoff.

They were the first of 30,000 Cubans detained at the U.S. Navy base in Guantánamo, Cuba, in a migration crisis that would reshape South Florida.

Those balseros, and the 200,000 or so who followed legally in a visa program prompted by the rafter crisis, would rejuvenate Cuban Miami. Their sheer desperation -- for every three rafters who won this game of Cuban roulette, experts say, at least one lost -- also inspired rapid and far-reaching change in American immigration law.

''I'll just tell you one thing,'' said Isaias Alonso, a rafter who brought his family to Miami 10 years ago. "If I had to do it again, I'd do it again.''

When the crisis was over, Cubans had lost their exclusive status among American immigrants, no longer automatically welcome. And Miami's exile community was about to lose its unanimity as a political force, Fidel Castro no longer its singular focus.

The rafters ushered in a new generation of Cuban South Floridians, molded in the classic immigrant tradition, a group more interested in home ownership, SUVs and suburbia than in talk radio and trade embargoes. Consider: Among the dozens of exile political and social groups still active in South Florida, balsero membership is close to zero.

They are ''sort of allergic to politics,'' said Holly Ackerman, a researcher at the University of Miami who has studied balseros for the past decade.

If the old-guard exiles still fixate on Cuba, the balsero generation is obsessed with Cubans: wives and husbands, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers and aunts, uncles and cousins, all the people they left behind.

Ninety-five percent of immigrants from the balsero generation have relatives still on the island, compared with just over half of those who arrived in the dawn of the Castro government, according to a recent Florida International University poll.

This may be why, on questions of travel to Cuba or sending money and care packages, polls show the two groups sharply divided. The FIU poll showed 68 percent of immigrants who arrived since 1985 support unrestricted travel to Cuba, compared with only 28 percent of those who arrived between 1959 and 1964.

NOT ONE BLOC

As more balseros become citizens, register to vote and find their voice, Cuban America may look less and less like a monolithic voting bloc.

''They should just open the gates and let everyone visit Cuba and talk to the people there and show them what the world is really like,'' said Ricardo Hernández, 39, a balsero. He opposes both the embargo and the recent tightening of sanctions by the Bush administration.

The rafter crisis brought an influx of entrepreneurial, risk-taking Cubans to Clinton-era Miami. Nearly 80,000 Cubans, including the Guantánamo rafters and the first wave of post-balsero visa holders, came to the United States in 1994 and 1995, according to Census data. Two-thirds, 51,293, came to Miami-Dade, and 2,880 to Broward. The rest scattered around the nation.

They had worked under a communist system, and they arrived with skills that didn't necessarily transfer to the United States, particularly among the four in five balseros who spoke no English.

''At first I had to work construction and selling clothes in a retail store and in a warehouse,'' recalled Hernández, who had been a gym teacher in Cuba; now he is a personal trainer. "When you get here, you have to start your whole life anew. It's like being a baby in diapers.''

Many of the 3,000 balsero children entered the Miami-Dade public school system; at one point in early 1995, the district was admitting 400 Cubans a month.

Even as the balseros re-Cubanized South Florida, infusing the region with art and culture and inspiration, their exit seems to have helped the Castro government. The rafter crisis delivered Castro into a political compromise with the Americans that provided an escape valve for his disaffected countrymen: a quota of 20,000 visas a year for entry to the United States.

''That escape valve has been a crucial factor in the survival of the regime,'' said U.S. Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart, a Miami Republican. "Castro has basically converted Cuba into a place where people are dreaming about the possibility of winning one of the 20,000 visas. That is a very important control mechanism.''

LOOMING CRISIS

Anyone watching the Florida coastline in the early 1990s could see the crisis coming. Following the collapse of his Soviet communist sponsors, Castro and his government were flagging. In the towns of Cuba, where food and staples seemed scarcer than ever, discontent brewed.

Cuban rafters, who have been a phenomenon since the Kennedy administration, began to cast off in alarming numbers: from a few hundred rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1990 to 1,936 in 1991, 2,336 in 1992 and then 3,687 in 1993.

It was aquatic insurrection, and the Castro government closed in. On July 13, 1994, Cuban government boats sank a commandeered tugboat named the 13 de Marzo seven miles out of Havana Harbor. At least 39 people died.

On Aug. 5, outraged Cuban citizens watched the government retake a hijacked ferry in Havana Bay to thwart another escape attempt. Rioting erupted. People chanted anti-government slogans, carried signs that said ''Assassin'' and ''Down With Fidel'' and threw stones at police and shop windows.

Castro blamed the U.S. for encouraging hijackings and threatened to unleash another mass exodus. Then he drew back the Frontier Guard and forced the U.S. government into a bizarre and deadly game of chicken.

By inviting his citizens to leave, Castro launched a junkyard armada, sending 30,000 Cubans to America on vessels built from inner tubes, Styrofoam and rusted car parts.

Thousands more went to their deaths.

On Aug. 15, the Coast Guard rescued 282 Cuban rafters at sea, the most in a single day since the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

''We used to see patches of seaweed. Now we were seeing patches of human beings,'' recalled José Basulto of Brothers to the Rescue, the exile group that patrolled the straits by air to locate rafters.

On Aug. 19 -- as the Coast Guard set a new record with 745 Cubans rescued at sea -- President Bill Clinton announced that all intercepted rafters would be sent to the Guantánamo naval base, detained indefinitely or sent home.

Instead of stopping the rafters, the announcement encouraged them. A four-day raft voyage to Florida was now a day trip to the waiting American ships, a dozen miles off Cuba in international waters.

The Coast Guard collected 2,338 rafters on Aug. 22, and 2,886 more on Aug. 23.

''I knew we were going to be picked up. I knew it,'' recalled Alonso, whose family was spotted by a Coast Guard helicopter eight hours after their departure on Sept. 2.

Back in Miami, the heart of Cuban exile, the news was far more sobering.

Clinton's pronouncement, a decision colored by an era of backlash against illegal immigration, marked the first time that an American government would deny Cuban refugees entry to the United States.

Miami Cubans, burned by the Bay of Pigs disaster three decades earlier, lost another measure of trust for the government of their adoptive home.

''To send them to Guantánamo was tough for me,'' said Cesar Odio, Miami's city manager at the time, who would later quit the Democratic party in protest over Clinton's handling of the crisis.

There was also a palpable tension, as hundreds of South Florida Cubans awaited loved ones who never made it.

How many rafters died in August 1994?

Basulto's pilots found one empty raft for every three they found bearing live cargo.

Arturo Cobo, guardian angel of the rafters and founder of the now-defunct Transit Center for Cuban Refugees, filled out hundreds of 4x6 cards with notes from Cubans who called him looking for relatives who had left in rafts.

''I can tell you,'' Cobo said, "that 80 percent of the calls, they never showed up.''

Most who managed to survive the voyage endured the better part of a year at Guantánamo, living behind barbed wire in tents that felt like prison camps.

Not until May 2, 1995, would Clinton allow most of the detainees into the United States. About 500 Cubans with criminal records or physical or mental defects were sent home.

For many rafters, the difficult task was adjusting to life in the U.S. Books and documentaries portray some balseros chasing the American dream and others descending into drugs, prostitution and poverty.

Ackerman believes many rafters still suffer from post-traumatic stress. That could explain why several rafters contacted by The Herald did not want to share their memories of August 1994.

''I want to close that chapter in my life,'' said Guillermo Armas, who was featured in a cinematic documentary about the balseros. "That is something that is over. I suffered a lot. It was an incredible experience. I lived it.

"And I don't want to relive it over again.''

Herald Database Editor Tim Henderson contributed to this report, which was supplemented with data from

www.ipums.org

Rafters meld their lives into the Miami mosaic

By Ana Veciana Suarez, aveciana@herald.com. Posted on Mon, Aug. 23, 2004.

Second of four parts

Deep into the night, after his wife has gone to sleep and color beckons from the darkness, Sergio Lastres paints. He paints until his eyes can no longer focus. He paints until his limbs give out. He paints with fury, with grief, with all the nostalgia of a man who left his homeland behind.

His work is stacked up behind the furniture, lined against the stairs, hung from every available inch of wall -- a reminder, as if he needed it, that he is finally free to dream. In Cuba, he wasn't allowed to show his work, and if he was lucky enough to find paint or canvas, it was inevitably through the black market.

That is one reason he risked his life, leaving everything he had known behind: "In Cuba, I couldn't breathe.''

Lastres, 39, was one of more 35,000 Cubans who left the island in homemade rafts in the summer of 1994, in the largest exodus since the 1980 Mariel boatlift. He and his wife, Elsa, 47, spent eight months at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, eight months during which Lastres painted to his heart's content. Living free in South Florida, he spends every hour outside work in a corner of his tiny living room in Hialeah putting thoughts and feelings into images.

He was typical of the exodus -- young, male, dissatisfied with a system that allowed no dissent and gave him minimal control of his life. A decade after taking to the sea, some of the rafters have been very successful; others have struggled mightily to adapt to an unknown way of life. The majority have managed to settle into a middle-class existence consisting of work, family and an abiding hope that they can soon bring over relatives they left behind.

Jorge del Rio, 39, a geographer in Cuba who is now running an environmental consulting firm, finally feels at home in Miami. Enel ''Tito'' Puentes, 38, managing to put his life together after a run-in with the law, now wants to make up for lost time.

HOLDING FAST TO DREAM

Couple endured nomadic existence in first years in U.S.

Once merely a hobby, painting is now Lastres' passion. Over nine years, the self-taught painter has been part of 40 shows in the United States and abroad. He has sold paintings for several thousand dollars and managed to pique art collectors' interest.

''I would like one day to live off my art, to have time to devote myself entirely to that,'' he said. "I know it's a dream, but it is my dream.''

By day, he works for an interior design company painting murals and faux finishes. He likes his work, and he is elated finally to have an apartment he doesn't have to share with another family.

It wasn't always like this. When Elsa and Sergio arrived, they roomed with former neighbors from Havana. They walked to their jobs. Elsa studied to become a medical assistant. With savings, they bought an ancient Nissan that proved to be more bane than boon.

''One of the things we learned is that some people were taking advantage of the balseros who didn't know their way around,'' Sergio said, adding, "Our own people.''

Housing was more difficult. They bunked with friends, with fellow balseros, even with in-laws of friends. At one point, they were both living in the Florida room of a family they had met through acquaintances. The family's teens played video games into the night while the Lastreses tried to sleep on a sofa. With one landlord, Elsa helped clean houses but was never paid.

''You feel impotent; you feel like nothing,'' Sergio recalls. "You want to send money home to help your family, but you can barely survive here.''

The Lastreses tried to remain upbeat. ''After you survive in Cuba, anything else you do is comparatively easy,'' Elsa Lastres said. "We told ourselves we couldn't doubt.''

RESHAPING A LIFE

'One day . . . I realized this was the place for me.'

But doubt haunted the balseros early on, even those who eventually made it. Jorge del Rio's optimism about his future is contagious now, but there were times, at the beginning, when he wondered whether he had done the right thing.

A geographer in Cuba, del Rio is the senior environmental scientist at Walsh Environmental. He is hoping soon to buy the consulting outfit. ''Where else but here can this happen?'' he gushed.

Though born after the Castro revolution of 1959, del Rio remembers dreaming of the United States every time his relatives sent letters and photographs from abroad. It wasn't until college, however, that he became completely disillusioned with the communist system.

His first attempt to flee ended in his arrest. He was successful in his second attempt, in August 1994, after surviving a terrible storm at sea.

After Guantánamo, he worked as a handyman while studying English and computers at Miami Dade College. His computer skills eventually got him his first professional job, and slowly he moved up the ranks of Walsh Environmental.

''I was willing to sacrifice the job and the money for a while so I had the time to study,'' he said. "It was the way to a better life.''

But the better life did not come easy. He lived in 15 places before finally buying a home in South Miami. During the first few years, he was often lonely for his family and the small fishing village where he had grown up.

''I missed the family very much, and everything I knew,'' he recalls, "but one day I realized that this was home. I realized this was the natural place for me. After a while, it became so much part of me that I could have been born at Jackson.''

Del Rio has managed to bring over his sister, his parents and his grandmother. His brother, also a balsero, lives here, too.

Last time he went to Cuba, "I was ready to come back after a few days. This is the place where an immigrant can start from zero and get somewhere.''

Along the way to somewhere, however, have been some stumbles -- figuratively and literally. Elsa and Sergio Lastres were finally getting on their feet after a series of low-paying jobs when an injury from a fall left Elsa unable to work. ''I'll come back from this,'' vows Elsa, who seems to wear a perpetual smile. "We've come back from worse.''

HARD LESSONS LEARNED

On the road to recovery after serious missteps

For others, the stumbles have been even more serious.

Puentes tried to leave Cuba a dozen times before he and his then-wife succeeded in August 1994. Once in Miami, he worked at a series of jobs -- as a courier, in a kosher food establishment, selling Carico pots and pans -- before self-publishing a 330-page book of his experiences.

Guantánamo Bay 94: Dos Caras de una Misma Moneda Coin (Guantánamo Bay 94; Two Sides to the Same Coin) brought Puentes an unexpected measure of fame and fortune. He quit his job and bought a house, he said.

''It was a big thing for me, but I wasn't prepared for it,'' he now says. "I didn't save, I didn't invest, and I spent it all.''

As the money began to run out, he gambled at the Miccosukee Resort and Gaming Casino in West Dade. When that didn't bring in enough cash, an acquaintance at the casino suggested another form of employment -- buying and selling luxury cars stolen in New York, their ID numbers altered, the cars shipped to Florida.

Accused of grand theft, among other charges, he said he worked out a deal in which he would make monthly restitution payments over a period of years. He was relieved at the opportunity to stay out of prison, but by then his wife had divorced him and his daughter, born in 1998, was growing up without him.

''It was stupid and unnecessary, a bad, bad mistake,'' he says, shaking his head. ''There are many legal ways to earn money here.'' A criminal record has proved to be a major stumbling block.

''One mistake, and the spot is there forever,'' he says, pressing his finger on a place mat for emphasis. "All I want is a second chance. Everybody deserves a second chance.''

Slowly, Puentes is rebuilding his life. He works as a construction subcontractor, is engaged to be married and recently put a down payment on a house in Kendall that should be finished by March. He is adamant about not looking back and insists he has never harbored any nostalgia for Cuba.

''I can't lose any more time,'' he says. "I'm ready for my new life. I still believe nothing is impossible in this country. You simply have to work hard at it.''

Exiles' rafts vanishing

Homemade rafts of Cuban exiles are extremely rare and floating away with them is a people's history.

By Daniel de Vise, ddevise@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Aug. 22, 2004

Nelson Novoa built a good raft, the best in his town: triangular wooden frame built from fence posts, fat Russian inner tubes, bamboo mast, a sail sewn by his wife.

'Everybody said, 'You want to go to China? You can go there,' '' Novoa, 55, recalled.

But Novoa was going to Florida.

Ten years and a day after the carpenter and six others set sail from Cuba, his raft, the Tio B, sits in a warehouse in North Miami-Dade, safe and dry, property of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida.

It is a rare survivor among the thousands of rafts that crossed the Florida Straits in the balsero exodus of August 1994.

Balsos, Cuban rafts, have been known since the dawn of the Castro regime in the 1960s. Balsero ingenuity knew no bounds. Rafters used tractor inner tubes for flotation, lawn mower motors for propulsion, hand-stitched sails to catch the wind. One group traveled with a firefly to light their compass at night.

Rafts once seemed as numerous as rafters in South Florida. They decorated restaurant patios and Lincoln Road fountains, filled museum exhibits and art galleries. A used-car salesman kept a collection of 400 rafts in an airplane hangar.

Now, all that is gone.

How many Cuban rafts -- from any era -- remain in museum warehouses, public spaces and private collections? Perhaps no more than a dozen.

The Smithsonian has one. Arturo Cobo, the legendary rafter advocate, has four. East Martello Museum and Gallery in Key West has one. The historical museum has three. Rafter researcher Juan Clark has one. One sits at Crandon Park on Key Biscayne, another in a concrete warehouse.

''These are the rafts that I keep for my memories,'' said Cobo, one-time director of the old Transit Center for Cuban Refugees. He keeps a raft in the driveway and three others around the side of his Pinecrest home, beneath a rain-soaked tarp.

Ten years after the peak of the balsero phenomenon, there seems little doubt that these desperate, dangerous, oddly ingenious crafts ought to be preserved.

''They're so incredible,'' said Felicia Guerra, author of the 1997 book Balseros. "If you don't see them in person, it's hard to believe they could have brought so many people to Florida.''

Built from scraps and fortified just enough to survive a single journey, the rafts were doomed from the moment they left the Cuban shore.

Rough seas broke them apart. Water and gravity dragged them, along with their passengers, to the inky depths. The Coast Guard sank them to clear the straits of flotsam.

Decay and indifference condemned the rest.

Humberto Sanchez, a passionate exile, dismantled his unrivaled collection of nearly 400 rafts in the late 1990s when he could no longer afford the storage. Creeping damp had destroyed much of the collection, and no one stepped forward to salvage the rest.

'It comes to the point where you say, 'How much longer am I going to keep collecting these, and how long am I going to keep them?' '' Sanchez said.

Among the surviving rafts known to Sanchez and local museum officials, only one can be traced with certainty to the mass exodus of August 1994.

It is the Tio B.

Nelson Novoa built the triangular vessel over five hectic days at his home in the Havana suburb of Guanabacoa and named it for a Cuban television character who was chatty, like him. He'd witnessed the riots in Havana on Aug. 5 and watched Castro open the gates to citizens who wished to flee. He'd already built and discarded two other rafts, dissatisfied with his handiwork. He knew his time had come.

His group departed the evening of Aug. 21. They carried bread, water, salted coffee to restore lost sodium, extra inner tubes and a hammer to keep the craft in one piece.

The bread and water were spoiled within hours. The rafters drifted for 2 ½ days without nourishment, submerged to their waists in water they could not drink. On the third day, they rowed into a storm and captured rainwater on a stretched nylon tarp. They drifted past sharks, and past corpses: a boy of 10; a man with no legs.

A Coast Guard helicopter spotted the raft at midday on Aug. 25, 70 miles from Cuba. The rafters were taken to Guantanamo.

As the helicopter lifted, Novoa watched his Tio B shrink away.

The raft kept going, completing its voyage to Florida.

Two Lincoln Road business owners found it Sept. 1 on Soldier Key, south of Miami Beach. They set it up in a fountain outside World Resources Cafe on Lincoln Road, where it sat for weeks as a symbol of the balsero endeavor. Restaurateur Steve Rhodes later donated it to the historical museum, where it remains.

An article about the Tio B reached Novoa at the Guantanamo refugee camps. Only on Friday, though, was he able to see his creation again, in a North Miami-Dade warehouse near his home.

''Oh my god,'' he said, breathless as he glimpsed his raft. "My Tio B.''

PRINTER FRIENDLY