As Fidel Castro’s Cuba slowly collapses, a growing human tide is washing north across the 90 miles of the Straits of Florida. Apart from the 1980 Mariel boat lift, when Havana allowed 125,000 Cubans to go to the United States, Castro kept his borders tightly sealed; during most of the ’80s, an average of 40 people a year managed the Cuban equivalent of jumping the Berlin wall. But with economic conditions deteriorating drastically in Cuba, the numbers of refugees have been skyrocketing. The coast guard already counts more than 600 arriving balseros, or rafters, this year-up 40 percent over 1992, when a record total of 2,553 came to shore.
The refugees travel on a wing, a prayer and a vessel fashioned from whatever they can scavenge or buy on the black market. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things we’re seeing,” says Key West coast guard spokesman Donald Godfrey. “They’re coming on anything that floats.” Over the past three years one Miami Cuban exile has filled his yard and a nearby storage space with more than 300 balsas. His “museum” ranges from a few guava branches tied across an old Soviet inner tube, to an aluminum-frame sailing outrigger built by an engineer. One celebrated high-tech exception to the balsas was the MiG-23 that former Cuban Air Force pilot Orestes Lorenzo flew across in two years ago; he returned to rescue his wife and kids in a Cessna last December.
Once they’re on the high seas, the refugees’ best hope is a passing ship. A Miamibased volunteer group called Brothers to the Rescue flies the only regular search missions. Since the group started three years ago, its planes have spotted more than 650 Cubans in the straits. “It’s Cuban roulette, you have to be crazy,” says founder Jose Basulto. “But you can’t just leave them out there alone.”
They are the lucky ones: an estimated half of all Cubans who set out die in the process. Off Cape Canaveral, a NASA recovery ship searching for spaceshuttle booster rockets found the lone survivor of a 10-day inner-tube voyage. Another homemade raft recently bobbed near tourist-jammed Miami Beach, with only empty food containers aboard. And at a Miami cemetery, distant cousins buried a woman who washed ashore just north of Palm Beach, six days after she, her husband, their three children and four others left Havana in a 17-foot boat-and sailed straight into March’s “storm of the century.” The other bodies were never found.
Havana officials say Washington’s opendoor policy encourages Cubans to risk their live&-and the Americans don’t disagree. Radio Marti, the U.S.-government funded station, beams regular warnings to would-be balseros. But the broadcasts haven’t stopped anyone; Basulto predicts that last year’s record numbers will at least double. More than 1,500 people have passed through Key West’s church-backed Transit Home for Cuban Refugees since it opened last fall. Officials at the home plan to handle 5,000 people in 1993. Should Castro really lose his grip on Cuba, that will only be the start of a flood.
