Cubans’ Risky New Voyage Out

CARDENAS, Cuba â€”  In November, Nivaldo Fernandez Ferran walked away from his life: a decade-long marriage, a new house, a coveted job at a five-star resort, and solid roots in Cuba’s ruling Communist Party.

So did his girlfriend, 22-year-old Arianne Horta-Alfonso, who even walked away from her 5-year-old daughter. The single mother was so drawn to join the 33-year-old Fernandez on a voyage across the treacherous Florida Straits that she left little Estefani with the girl’s grandmother at the last moment.

Four days later, the couple were plucked from a Russian truck-tire inner tube off the coast of Key Biscayne. Shivering and near shock, they told Miami-Dade police investigators that they had paid $2,000 to join a smuggler of human cargo, his family and friends on a hand-fashioned, 16-foot aluminum boat here in Cardenas, their hometown.

When the boat was swamped, the passengers’ only protection was the three inner tubes towed behind it.

The second inner tube was found that same Thanksgiving Day, 20 miles to the north, with 5-year-old Elian Gonzalez clinging to it and with the drowned body of 60-year-old Merida Loreto Barrios tethered behind it.

The third inner tube was never found. Neither were the bodies of the alleged smuggler, Lazaro Munero, or his brother, Jikary, or Lazaro’s girlfriend, Elizabet Broton Gonzalez. Elizabet is Elian’s mother, whose disappearance and presumed death touched off a continuing international custody battle over the boy between his father in Cuba and his paternal great-uncle in the U.S., a case that has stretched the two nations’ estranged relationship to the breaking point.

These are among the few known facts and lingering mysteries of an illegal voyage that investigators on both sides of the straits say typifies what has brought thousands of illegal Cuban migrants to the United States during the past two years and claimed more than 60 Cuban lives in 1999 alone.

Fernandez and Horta, the only known adult survivors among the 14 passengers who set off at a swampy point on Cuba’s north coast Nov. 21, could not be reached for comment in Miami, where they reportedly are living with Horta’s aunt and avoiding publicity.

But from interviews with their relatives, friends and neighbors in Cardenas, with the family of Elian and others on board and with local, state and federal investigators in the U.S., a different picture emerges than that of persecuted Cubans fleeing President Fidel Castro’s Communist-run island for freedom in the U.S.

A reconstruction of their ill-starred voyage serves as a snapshot of relatively well-off Cubans now risking death as part of a growing for-profit smuggling trade that authorities in Havana believe has at least tacit support among the Cuban American community in South Florida.

More than 2,500 Cubans have illegally waded onto Florida’s shores since October 1998. In contrast to what has happened to the hundreds of Haitians and Dominicans who have attempted similar journeys, or the tens of thousands of Mexicans turned back at America’s southern border, U.S. immigration authorities have permitted the overwhelming majority of these Cubans to stay because of the official presumption under a 1966 law that all can be considered political exiles.

During the same period, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted more than 1,500 Cubans en route to Florida, but it sent most of them home under 1994 and 1995 agreements with Cuba informally known as “wet foot/dry foot,� which allows Cubans who touch U.S. soil to remain while those caught trying to do so are sent home.

By contrast, just 406 Cubans were picked up at sea during the 1997 calendar year, and only 125 made shore between October 1996 and October 1997.

Havana Treats Smugglers Harshly

The U.S.-based Cuban smuggling trade endures despite 46 criminal prosecutions in the United States last year and more than 53 pending cases in Cuba, where Castro has made such smuggling an offense punishable by up to life in prison.

Florida’s courts have been more lenient. In one typical case, a South Florida Cuban American was sentenced to 16 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to organizing a smuggling trip a year ago that left more than half a dozen migrants drowned or missing.

With so few deterrents, U.S. Border Patrol agents say the smugglers are operating with near-impunity, running speedboats and cabin cruisers with extra fuel tanks back and forth across the straits and charging Cuban migrants up to $8,000 apiece to be dropped within swimming distance of the Florida coast.

As living testimony: Dozens of Cubans have waded up to Miami Beach’s posh seafront hotels and nightclubs and the Florida Keys in the weeks since Nivaldo Fernandez, Arianne Horta and Elian Gonzalez were found.

Against that backdrop, Fernandez and Horta got what seemed like a bargain. But they got what they paid for.

In their initial statement to investigators, as they sat wrapped in blankets at Key Biscayne’s Crandon Park Marina soon after their rescue by two local fishermen, the couple described their transport as “a homemade boat with a 50-horsepower engine,� according to the official report on file with the Miami-Dade Police Department.

“The two males who built the boat and charged them $2,000 were among the people on the boat,� the report added. “No other individuals paid any money.�

Investigators, relatives and friends have since identified those “two males� as Lazaro Munero and his father, Rafael, who had both lived in the U.S. and returned to Cardenas to organize a journey principally to get the rest of their family out.

The younger Munero had paid a high price for his return. He spent several months in a Cuban prison after he was caught reentering the country illegally on a boat he reportedly stole in Florida--jail time that relatives and friends say only heightened his resolve to get his mother and brother out as well.

The other passengers’ motives were as different as their lives in Cardenas.

This Spanish Colonial-era garrison town about 80 miles east of Havana is a traditionally poor auxiliary port on Cuba’s north coast. But the quirks of its geography and Cuba’s emerging market economy have conspired to make it a prime exit for illegal emigrants.

It is located near the ideal launch point, where strong northerly currents make for the quickest sea route between Cuba and the Florida shores. It also lies just down the road from Varadero, the five-star resort-town centerpiece of a $1.4-billion-a-year tourist trade that has helped the island endure the collapse of its Soviet benefactor.

The nearby resorts have been a cash cow for Cardenas, offering state-controlled jobs with access to dollars to anyone with the right connections, such as a Communist Party affiliation. They also have been a powerful magnet that has fueled a new upward mobility in Cuban society, driving many Communist Party stalwarts to give up low-paying professions such as medicine, engineering and teaching to become bartenders, maids and bellhops.

But prosperity is a relative concept in Castro’s tightly controlled society, where taxation and an array of regulations are designed to limit personal wealth. Even Cuba’s better-off must struggle daily to put meat on the table. And for them, as well as the poor, the U.S. is the logical next step up the economic ladder, although those with access to dollars have a distinct advantage: They can better save the assets needed for the smugglers’ price of passage.

Lazaro Munero’s girlfriend, Elizabet Broton Gonzalez, was among the more privileged. She had married into a Communist Party family in the mid-’80s and, despite her divorce nearly four years ago, had kept her job as a maid at Varadero’s Paradiso-Puntarena all-inclusive resort, where she had worked since it opened in 1991.

Then, several months ago and apparently without the knowledge of ex-husband Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elizabet agreed to join Munero on his journey north and resolved to bring along Elian.

Trips, Though Illegal, Are Rarely a Secret

Though clearly illegal and under increasing scrutiny by Castro’s internal police, such journeys are rarely a secret among family and friends. Elizabet’s best friend, co-worker Lilka Guillermo, knew all about it, and she decided to go along.

Then there was the Rodriguez family. Juan Manuel Rodriguez and Elizabet were cousins, and Rodriguez’s son, Orlando, had successfully negotiated the 90-mile straits on a motorboat in July 1998.

The entire Rodriguez clan--Orlando’s mother, father, two brothers and a sister-in-law, who also worked with Elizabet at the Paradiso--decided to join Munero’s voyage.

Nivaldo Fernandez and Arianne Horta were, in fact, the only two gathered among the mangroves before dawn on Saturday, Nov. 20, who were not somehow related to Munero or his girlfriend. Although it remains unclear how the two learned of the journey, U.S. investigators say they are certain of the couple’s role: to finance it, and at a tidy profit for the Muneros.

On the face of it, Fernandez had little more reason to leave than his equally well-employed fellow passengers. He and his wife had just pooled their earnings from the Varadero resorts and bought a new home, relatives here say. Fernandez’s mother, Antonia Ferran, is a legal U.S. resident, having left Cardenas 10 years ago to join her sister in Chicago, and she had returned every year since with gifts and cash to add to the Fernandezes’ income.

What is more, the family had planned an elaborate 10th anniversary ceremony for the couple to renew their vows Dec. 13. Yet, without a word to his wife, family or friends, they say, Fernandez suddenly left three weeks before the party with his girlfriend, Horta, and her 5-year-old Estefani, and together they set off toward the U.S.

Then, soon after they left Cuba, their boat’s engine broke down. The 13 adults decided that the two 5-year-olds should be paddled to shore. And while the Muneros fixed the engine, Horta brought Estefani to her mother’s three-room home, fearing that the journey was too dangerous for the child. But Elizabet apparently had more faith in her boyfriend’s handmade craft; she kept Elian on board.

When the would-be migrants finally left Cuba for good a day later, they did not go unnoticed. A Cuban coast guard patrol spotted them at sea and gave chase, calling out through bullhorns for them to stop. Cuba’s policy is to avoid using force to stop these boats, which often have women and children aboard.

Rather, the Cuban patrol pursued Munero’s rickety boat to U.S. territorial waters and then faxed its position and heading to the U.S. Coast Guard, which asserts that it searched for the little craft without success.

According to accounts that Fernandez and Horta gave investigators after they were fished from the sea, the boat was swamped by rainwater and all 14 passengers were forced overboard “a few days into the journey�--presumably near the Florida Keys, investigators said.

Three-and-a-half hours after the couple were found, two Fort Lauderdale fishermen discovered Elian lashed to the second inner tube, where the U.S. Coast Guard also found the body of Orlando Rodriguez’s mother, Merida Loreto Barrios. An autopsy revealed that she had died from “drowning and compression of the neck by rope,� and the medical examiner ruled her death an “accident,� apparently surmising that she got tangled in the rope that tied her to the inner tube.

For the next three days, the U.S. Coast Guard searched 5,000 square miles of sea with 20 aircraft and ships and found six more bodies strewn along the Gulf Stream--some as far north as Fort Pierce, nearly 100 miles from where Fernandez and Horta first spotted the lights of Key Biscayne. Among them: most of the Rodriguez family.

But the Coast Guard gave up. Still missing and presumed dead along with the Munero brothers and Elizabet is Orlando Rodriguez’s father. Also, the Coast Guard never found the boat’s wreckage or the third inner tube, which Fernandez and Horta told investigators deflated when the boat overturned.

Had Lazaro Munero survived, Border Patrol agents say, they would have charged him with smuggling and perhaps even murder. But, as U.S. immigration authorities debate the fate of Elian Gonzalez--now 6 and a political poster child in both countries--the case of the voyage that started it all is officially closed.

“If Lazaro Munero turns up in Cuba or the Bahamas or [Miami’s] Little Havana, we’ll be happy to interview him and prosecute him to the extent of the law,� said Dan Geoghegan, spokesman for the Border Patrol in Miami.

“But until then, we’ve got to worry about the next boat that’s coming in.�

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Cubans in Flight

The sharp increase in illegal Cuban migration to Floridas shores stems partly from the U.S. wet foot/dry foot policy. INS figures for Cubans who stayed are for fiscal years (Oct. 1-Sept. 30).

Source: U.S.Coast Guard