The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  “I hate the sea because it took away the only thing I had after living so long in Cuba—the hope of leaving it,” the young man, Roberto, tells dissident journalist Contreras. “Drowning doesn’t scare me much. By merely living here in Cuba you’re drowning in a sense. We live in a jail-cell but with bars of salt water and sharks.”

  “The sea had already swallowed his girlfriend and only brother,” explains Contreras; the journalist has spoken with many foiled rafters who tell of the enormous waves, of the constantly-circling sharks, of terror almost unimaginable, before their “rescue” by the U.S. Coast Guard which then returned them to Cuba as mandated by a treaty President Clinton signed with Castro in 1994.

  “You’re playing Russian roulette when you paddle off from here in a raft,” the boy tells Rafael Contreras. “But at least there’s a chance. Staying here in Cuba means slowly choking to death anyway, at least for people like me.”

  Roberto could come across as a contestant on “Survivor,” or as a thrill-seeking fan of “X-treme” sports as featured on MTV—that is, except for the Cuban setting. “Here in Cuba I’m drowning on the surface, right here on dry land,” continues Roberto, stomping his feet on the sand. “The way I feel right now, I’d rather live out there on the bottom with my girlfriend and brother than continue drowning by inches in this piece-of-shit country. Good-bye,” he says, running towards his friends.

  Contreras then realized that Roberto was part of the group assembling the ramshackle raft. They pushed it out over the small waves, clambered on board and started paddling north.

  A few weeks later Rafael Contreras finished his piece. “Nobody around here has heard anything about Roberto and his friends,” he wrote. “Perhaps he’s happy out there on the bottom of the sea with the silence of the fishes while the rest of us continue drowning by inches here in Cuba.”

  The quip “sleeping with the fishes” never quite caught on in Cuba. It hits too close to home for too many families. But Castro rolls out the red carpet for Francis Ford Coppola on every one of his frequent visits to Cuba. “Fidel, I love you,” gushed a young Francis Ford Coppola. “We both have beards. We both have power and want to use it for good purposes.”9

  CHAPTER 4

  Here Come the Sharks. Where’s the Discovery Channel?

  Edward O. Wilson calls the shark “the most frightening animal on earth ... a killing machine, the last free predator of man.” Yet fully aware of the high odds of being eaten alive by sharks, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have taken to the sea in flimsy rafts to escape what Newsweek magazine hails as among the “Best countries in the world to live,” what Jack Nicholson calls “a paradise,” and what Bonnie Raitt commemorates in song as a “happy little island.”

  “I’d just joined Freedom Flight International when my colleagues came in from a flight with a video, ”recalls Matt Lawrence, who flew rescue flights over the Florida straits in the 90’s in conjunction with Brothers to the Rescue. “On this video one could see a tiny raft. Then the plane came in for a lower pass and I expected to see the typically heartbreaking empty raft, as happened so often.

  “But something was moving on this raft. Now I expected to see a desperate rafter waving a shirt or anything else that might have been available to him in order to get the plane’s attention. This was also routine, and not as heartbreaking. But then I noticed the water all around the raft turning red ... the cloud spreading ...

  “Then as they came in for a lower pass and an even closer look, I saw that this rafter wasn’t focused on the plane at all, wasn’t even looking up at them. He was in frantic motion all right, but not waving. Instead he—she, actually—was bashing the water with an oar. Then I could see the shark—a shark about the same length as the raft.

  “The rafter was in fact a Cuban woman in her early twenties. Upon her rescue we found she had two bullet wounds in her legs from Castro’s frontier police. All others in the raft including two infants had died, as had the shark, which had been repeatedly stabbed by the pointed end of a broken oar by Maria. The shark had broken it with a bite, we later learned. I started flying rescue missions full-time after that.”I

  Matt’s life-changing rescue mission took place as much of the world rejoiced over the fall of the hated Berlin Wall.

  CROSSING THE FLORIDA STRAITS FOR FUN AND GLORY

  “I just want to be crystal clear about how my team will handle sharks on our upcoming attempt to make history in swimming the 103 miles from Cuba to Florida,” wrote the popinjay recreational swimmer and Huffington Post contributor Diana Nyad in July 2011. “No shark will be harmed at any time during our event. I am humbly asking the sharks of this particular ocean to allow me to skim across the surface of their home for about three days. I am duly respectful of them, their habits and their habitat.”2

  Maria viewed the matter differently, while stabbing the ten-foot bull shark through the gills with her broken oar. “Humbly asking” the shark to allow her family to reach freedom safely probably never occurred to the Cuban woman.

  And despite her humble entreaty during her celebrated attempted swim from Cuba to Key West, Diana Nyad was protected by an electrical device or “shark shield” that surrounded her with an invisible electrical field to repel sharks. She was also shadowed by a little fleet of boats full of divers tasked with warding off any sharks that ventured too close.

  A month earlier, in June 2011, another open-water swimmer, Penny Palfrey, had made a similar trip south of Cuba, swimming some 68 miles between Little Cayman and Grand Cayman islands. As the Cayman News Service reported on June 14: “Palfrey’s swim was not only an incredible feat of endurance but pretty dangerous as she said one shark cruised under her throughout the night.”

  Much like Diana Nyad a month later, the showboating Australian swimmer was escorted the entire way by three shark-watching inflatable boats and surrounded by a shark shield. Even so, two sharks got too close to Palfrey, so her escorts hooked them, towed them away from the swimmer and hacked them to death with machetes.

  “One of the white tip sharks, it just shadowed me the entire night—I could see it sort of five feet away, maybe more,” Palfrey said. “I had the (electronic) shark shield on so it was just outside the range of the shark shield and it was just cruising underneath me all night long.”

  Explains Christine Ambrosino, zoologist at the University of Hawaii: “Shark shields come in different forms, including ones that strap to the ankle, attach to a surfboard, and can be affixed to small vessels like canoes and kayaks. They set up such a strong electric pulse in the water that, as the shark swims toward it, it’s like punching them in the face with a cattle prod. If you’re out there and you see a big shark coming, that’s security that you probably want to have.”

  Point is, the waters surrounding Cuba are famed for their hordes of sharks. Most people entering them for extended periods insist on a defense against them. Yet from a quarter- to a half-million Cubans have crossed these waters with little more between them and the sharks than thin rubber or canvas—and knowing the odds were close to 50-50 that their craft would overturn or crumble.

  “Sharks Attack Boat!” videos abound on YouTube. Recently a bull shark bit the welded aluminum swimming platform off a 22-foot luxury boat near the Florida coast. Imagine those teeth and jaws crunching into the rubber, canvas or styrofoam that keep precariously afloat the typical escapees from that happy little island.

  Many of those freedom-seekers have also “seen big sharks coming,” including perhaps Elian Gonzalez’s mother, who unlike Nyad and Palfrey got precious little empathy from the media.

  “Why did she [Elian’s mother] do it?” asked NBC’s Jim Avila in April 2000. “What was she escaping? By all accounts this quiet, serious young woman, who loved to dance the salsa, was living the good life, as good as it gets for a citizen in Cuba.... An extended family destroyed by a mother’s decision to start a new life.”

  So according to NBC (the recipient of a Havana bureau, by the way), Elian’s mom had
lived the “good life” in Cuba, and irresponsibly “destroyed her extended family’s life.” Got that?

  If only 99.99 per cent of the people who precariously cross the Florida Straits got the media attention of Diana Nyad. Actually, Ms. Nyad herself could help. “As someone who grew up with many Cuban friends in South Florida, someone who has now visited Havana some 30 times....” (emphasis mine). So she starts a recent article in The Huffington Post.

  First off (and this is for the brain-dead): You’re not welcomed into the Castros’ totalitarian fiefdom 30 times if you’re not blatantly helping the regime.

  “With each stroke as I head north will also be the love of Cuba,” she continues. “Millions of us worldwide, but especially here in the United States, have been fascinated by the mystique of this ‘forbidden’ island so close to our shores.

  “We have become raging fans of‘The Buena Vista Social Club,’ among other famous Cuban artists: painters, poets, photographers.

  “We have installed proud posters of Che on our college room walls.

  “We are aware of the advanced level of medicine and general education on the island.”3

  Wouldn’t Nyad’s swim be a great way to honor those tens of thousands of dead Cubans? She boasts that she grew up in Miami surrounded by Cuban friends. Can she be oblivious to what drove them to Miami? Wouldn’t her swim be a great way to focus some much-needed media attention on this ‘cemetery without crosses’ and on the oppression that drove so many to throw themselves into the sea on craft most of us wouldn’t board outside a backyard swimming pool?

  Maybe for some, but not for someone who proudly installed Che Guevara posters on her dorm wall and has been welcomed into Stalinist Cuba more than 30 times. Obviously Nyad feels greater affection for the uniformed Cubans who welcome her in Cuba than for the ones in rags who jump on rafts.

  “His body was torn by sharks almost beyond recognition,” reported The Miami Herald about 23-year-old Juan Carlos Rodriguez-Bueno who had fled Cuba in a tiny boat a week earlier. “U.S. Coast Guard officers were unable to retrieve the body of the man’s brother after a tiger shark dragged him underwater about 20 miles off Looe Key on Thursday. The stepbrother showed the picture to his father, Carlos Rodriguez, 59, of Hialeah, who identified the badly mutilated man.”

  “My father is devastated,” said his son. “Twenty-two years ago he lost another son and I lost another brother in the same manner. My father doesn’t even want to hear the word Cuba anymore. He shuts himself off from any mention of its tragedy.”

  This was reported twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and within sight of the U.S. coast. Only The Miami Herald saw fit to report it.

  The thrill of the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” is totally lost on Eliecer Castillo, former heavyweight boxing champ, so not exactly a wimp. “I get goose-bumps whenever I see anything with sharks and turn it right off,” he says.4 The Cuban boxer and four partners, including his two brothers, lashed together an inner-tube and canvas raft in 1994, hopped aboard and paddled north into the Gulf Stream as part of a small fleet of similar floating contraptions filled with similar desperate Cubans.

  As usual, within hours sharks were trailing and circling the rafts. The current carried the ramshackle flotilla away from the U.S. and Castillo spent five days at sea. He recalls watching many of the rafts around him capsizing and falling apart in the waves. The sharks would rush in immediately, their patience and diligence paying off. Castillo would see the water frothing white, then red as his fellow rafters yelled for help. But what could anyone do? Hence the goose-bumps and squeamishness of a professional heavyweight boxing champ who specialized in brutal knockouts in the first round.

  “I’ll never forget the case of the two teenagers who came ashore sunburnt, malnourished as usual, but also in a state of near hysteria,” recalls Arturo Cobo. “After a while they could finally explain how their father, in a delirious state from thirst and exposure, finally jumped in the water. They threw him a rope tied to the raft and he clutched it. So they turned away for a second, slightly relieved—but only to spot a huge shark approaching, then another. Soon an entire school was around their raft.

  “And almost before they could react, the sharks ripped into their father from all sides. From what they told me days later at the local hospital, what erupted around their tiny raft was a feeding frenzy, like the ones you see on those shark shows where they bait the water for hours to attract the sharks. The water turned red as their father was eaten alive.... I can tell you from decades of heartbreaking work from our center here in Key West that in the Florida Straits every week is shark week.... ”

  “People who are attacked by sharks are exceptionally, almost absurdly unlucky,” writes Michael Capuzzo, author of Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916. From 1979 to 1986 Capuzzo worked at none other than The Miami Herald. So probably thousands of (extremely unlucky) people had been attacked by sharks not far from his office. Arturo Cobo and Matt Lawrence were a brief phone call and short drive away. Instead Capuzzo wrote about an attack 1,300 miles away and 60 years earlier.

  “I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for this decades-long and seemingly never-ending horror to burst upon the national media,” says Matt Lawrence. “I mean, here are thousands upon thousands of people—men, women, children—right off our coast braving dangers as bad as, if not worse than, those of hundreds of East Germans five thousand miles away. And the Berlin Wall was just coming down when I started my rescue flights.

  “Where’s the outrage? I kept asking.... And on every flight, upon every sighting of another empty boat, another tombstone at sea as I started calling them, and imagining what might have become of the occupants—of another body bobbing in the water surrounded by sharks—upon every encounter with the emaciated, sunburnt, delirious survivors, upon hearing their stories, upon watching them—in their stumbling, stuporous, emaciated condition—still dropping to the ground to kiss U.S. soil, mostly sand actually, when they reached Key West ... well ... my outrage grew worse and worse—against the Castro regime for sure, but also again Castro’s accomplices, witting and otherwise, in the international media.

  “Well, it never did burst upon the media,” continues Matt. “This astounding insensitivity still troubles me deeply, breaks my heart. I’d come in from those flights every evening and simply break down. Many of us would, and I’m talking tough guys, Bay of Pigs veterans, former Cuban political prisoners who stood up stoically to KGB-tutored torture. Just about anyone who would see what we saw on those rescue flights, and hear what we heard from the survivors, would break down.

  “That said, helping save a few thousand lives still made it the most rewarding experience of my life. In fact maybe the knowledge that no one else would be coming in to help us, or to publicize this horror, hardened my determination to keep flying even in the most horrible weather, with Castro’s MiG’s constantly menacing us, and continue saving the lives of people who, after I got to know so many of them, seemed no different from my own family and friends. Their only crime was having been born in Castro’s Cuba.”

  SO WHERE’S THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL?

  For 25 years The Discovery Channel has charted its highest rating during its “Shark Week,” which exclusively features documentaries on sharks, especially the frequent attackers. Every year, tens of millions of viewers have tuned into the Discovery Channel to watch such programs as “Teeth of Death,” “Sharkbite Summer,” “Anatomy of a Sharkbite” and “Blood in the Water.” Indeed, the bloodier the better, as Discovery Channel producers well know.

  These shows feature, in gruesome detail, shark attacks from Australia to South Africa to California to northern Florida. “Australia records 56 fatal shark attacks between 1958 and 2008!” gasps one show’s narrator.

  “The Florida Straits probably record 56 fatal shark attacks every few years,” says Matt Lawrence. “Probably every month during the early 90’s,” adds Arturo Cobo.

  Right off the southern Flo
rida coast an estimated 70,000 people have perished since 1961 on the high seas, a large but unknown number of these at the hands (jaws, actually) of sharks. To this day, most airborne rescuers report seeing sharks in the vicinity of Cuban rafters. Many have observed attacks. Most survivors mention sharks and shark-attacks often during their terrible voyage.

  So here’s one of America’s most populous states and one bounded by beaches crammed with tourists. You’d really think this setting could provide the Discovery Channel with material much more dramatic and relevant (titillating) for its U.S. audience. So where’s the Discovery Channel on this?

  In Cuba, partnering with the Castro regime, that’s where.

  The Cuban press reports very little about rafters. In his tell-all about reporting from Cuba, long-time Havana correspondent for Spain’s Television Espanola Vicente Botin reports that he never saw a mention of rafters in the state-run media. It’s obviously embarrassing.

  And for the benefit of those who came of political age after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Communist regimes do not issue media, academic or scientific visas (as in the Discovery Channel’s) randomly. “The vetting procedure starts when the regime receives your visa application,” reports Chris Simmons, once the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuban spycatcher, now retired. “When your smiling Cuban guide greets you at the airport he knows plenty about you, and from several angles.”

  Often they learn much more about you during your stay. “First thing I advised visiting Americans,” an official at the U.S. Interests Section told this writer, “was to check their rooms for bugs—the electronic surveillance type. One of these visitors later told me he’d just fallen asleep when he heard a loud thump from the closet. He opened the door and somebody ran out of the closet almost between his legs and scooted out of the room.”

  “My job was to bug visiting Americans ’hotel rooms,” confirms high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez, “with both cameras and listening devices. And famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro’s intelligence.”5