The Longest Romance (5 page)

CHAPTER 3

O
n July 14, 2011, only six months after Tina Brown's
Newsweek
had pronounced Cuba among the “Best Countries in the World,” an Iberia Airlines jet left Havana and landed in Madrid with a member of the “world's luckiest people” stowed away. The 23-year-old Cuban man, named Adonis G.B., was curled in the landing gear, crushed to death.
¹

Adonis joined an estimated 70,000 Cubans dying (literally) to leave Fidel Castro's handcrafted kingdom. Almost two million Cubans have made it out alive, from a nation formerly swamped with immigrants.

On Christmas Eve 2000, a British Airlines jet flying from Havana opened its landing-gear near Heathrow airport, and out dropped two corpses, frozen solid. They were shortly identified as 16-year-old Miguel Fonseca and 17-year-old Alberto Vazquez.

“Crazy blokes!” some of the passengers probably huffed, oblivious or uncaring that all those pounds they'd just spent on their Cuban vacations had gone straight into the coffers of the Stalinist military and police who drove the Cuban boys to such deadly desperation.

On July 21, 1991, the frozen corpses of Alexis Hernandez, 19, and Jose Acevedo, 20, plopped onto Madrid airport's tarmac from
the landing-gear of another Iberia Airlines flight.

On August 22, 1999, the frozen cadaver of Felix Julian Garcia dropped from a British Airlines plane onto the tarmac of Gatwick airport as it landed from Havana.

In July 2002, the frozen and battered corpse of a of 20-year-old Cuban identified only as “Wilfredo D.” was found in the landing-gear of a Lufthansa Airlines plane at Dusseldorf airport.

In December 2002, a 20-year-old Cuban who worked at Havana airport snuck into a pressurized compartment of Canadian Airlines, just under the cabin. Four hours later he scurried out alive in Montreal's international airport.

On June 4, 1969, an Iberia Airlines plane, just landed in Madrid from Havana, was taxiing to the terminal when the frozen corpse of 16-year-old Jorge Perez dropped out. His partner in escape, Armando Socorras, 17, somehow survived in what Spanish medical authorities described as a form of “human hibernation.”
²

In September 1999, an unpleasant stench led airport officials near Milan, Italy to the decomposed corpse of Roberto Garcia Quinta in the landing-gear of an Alitalia Airlines flight that had landed from Santiago, Cuba ten days earlier. In 1958 the Cuban Embassy in Rome had a backlog of 12,000 applications from Italians clamoring to immigrate to Cuba. “A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in, and how many want out,” famously quipped Tony Blair. Millions of people “voted with their feet” in favor of
The New York Times'
near-feudal Cuba. Then came Castroism.

Pre-Castro Cuba took in more immigrants per-capita (primarily from Europe) than the U.S., including the Ellis Island years. In the 1950's, when Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking, about the same number of Cubans lived in the U.S. as Americans lived in Cuba. This phenomenon was so alarming that in 1933, as a stopgap against foreign rascals horning in on the “Cuban dream,”
the Cuban government passed laws more draconian than Arizona's and Georgia's today: a majority of employees at all Cuban businesses had to be Cuban natives.

Would our construction, service and hospitality industries survive the enforcement of such a law nowadays?

In 1992 former East German dictator Erich Honecker was tried (to no avail) for the deaths of 192 Germans killed while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall. Some human-rights groups estimate that actually 300 people (out of an average East German population over the decades of 18 million) had died trying to breach the Berlin Wall or otherwise escape East Germany—no runner-up in the “quality-of-life” awards, even by
Newsweek
standards. (The Wall's official name was the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.”)

As mentioned, an estimated 70,000 people (out of an average population of seven to ten million over the decades) have died trying to escape Castro's Cuba,
Newsweek's
quality-of-life winner. After so many machine-gun blasts of their frontier “guards” disturbed their coastal subjects, the Castro brothers hit upon the expedient of having helicopters hover over the escaping freedom-seekers, who often comprised whole families—but to hold off on shooting.

Instead of machine-gunning the families to death as years of tradition called for, they switched to dropping sandbags onto the rickety rafts and tiny boats to demolish and sink them. Then the tiger sharks and hammerheads could do the Castroites' deputy-work. Screams, groans and gurgles, after all, don't carry nearly as far as machine-gun blasts.

“The best revolutionary German man I've ever known was Erich Honecker,” tweeted Fidel Castro on June 1, 2012 commemorating the 18
^th
anniversary of the East German Stalinist's death. “I maintain feelings of profound solidarity with Honecker.”

“What a chump,” Castro was probably thinking. “A measly 192?”

“In one week during 1962 we counted more than 400 firing-squad blasts from the execution yard below our cells,” recalled
former Cuban political prisoner and freedom-fighter Roberto Martin-Perez to this writer.

“This is the most savage kind of behavior I've ever heard of,” said Robert Gelbard, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Latin America during the Clinton administration. “This is even worse than what happened at the Berlin Wall!”
³
Gelbard had watched desperate Cubans trying to swim to our Guantanamo Naval Base when machine-guns opened up and the water around them frothed in white, then red.

The corpses were retrieved by Cuban guards on boats, with the same kinds of gaff hooks the lucky contestants in the regime-sponsored “Hemingway Fishing Festival” were using in nearby waters to yank thrashing tunas and marlins aboard their Cuba-registered yachts.

In September 2011 Spanish medical examiners found that stowaway Adonis G.B.'s throat had been crushed. He probably died on takeoff, meaning he died more quickly and painlessly than the tens of thousands of others who perished while running from Cuba's free and fabulous health-care.

It was a different story for the tens of thousands of dead Cuban rafters. Most of these desperate rafters probably died like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. Others perished gasping and choking after their arms and legs had finally given out and they had gulped that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in
The Perfect Storm.
Still others were eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks, much like Captain Quint in
Jaws
. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. As we've seen on the Discovery Channel, sharks don't dally at a meal.

“In space no one can hear you scream,” says the ad for the original
Alien
. Same is true for the middle of the Florida Straits; except, of course, for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while watching the fins rush in and water froth in white, then red, they hear the screams all too clearly. Elian Gonzalez might know.

All during the decades coinciding with Castro's rule, the Coast Guard has documented hundreds of such stories. Were the cause of these horrors more “politically incorrect,” we'd have no end of books, movies, documentaries, TV interviews, survival-story specials, etc. We'd never hear the end of it. Alas, the agents of this Caribbean holocaust are the Left's premier pin-up boys.

So what's the alternative if you can't flee Cuba, among “the Best Countries in the World” according to Tina Brown's
Newsweek
and a “happy island” according to
The New York Times?

Well, in 1986, Cuba's suicide rate reached 24 per thousand—double Latin America's average, triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate,
Cuban women the most suicidal in the world
, and suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15 to 48. At that point, the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.
⁴

But apparently they did not faze
Newsweek
.

During the summer of 1961, as the Berlin Wall went up, Miami's Cuban Refugee Center started keeping records of the refugee wave then setting out from Herbert Matthews's “happy island.” By late 1964 they recorded 1,002 boats and rafts of various types carrying more than 10,000 bedraggled Cubans to Florida. Approximately 800 of these craft were first spotted in mid-passage by the Coast Guard's two Grumman Albatross planes patrolling the Straits. These then notified the U.S. Coast Guard, who escorted the escapee crafts to U.S. shores.

Too often, however, upon being alerted and guided by their airborne colleagues, the cutter would pull up to an empty boat or one filled with corpses. At the time, the Cuban Refugee Center and the U.S. Coast Guard estimated that, for every Cuban who made it to the U.S., three died—by drowning, exposure, sharks or bullets. The odds were well known in Cuba. And still they came.
⁵

Arturo Cobo, who runs a refugee center in Key West (
Hogar de Transito para los Refugiados Cubanos),
says the number of dead
freedom-seekers tops the 70,000 figure often cited. “Word eventually reached Cuba that our group was helping rafters here in Key West,” says Cobo, a Bay of Pigs veteran. “So there came a point in the 80's when we started getting calls from Cuba saying so and so just left on a raft from such and such a place. Can you please notify us when they reach the U.S.?”

“Usually my heartbreaking notification to the Cuban relatives came a few weeks later,” says Cobo, “meaning that that no people by those names had ever been rescued or processed. The vast majority never reached the U.S. At first it was an informal tally. But finally I began posting the names and the dates of their departure from Cuba on a wall and running them against the names of those who we rescued at sea or helped and processed when they somehow made it to land. My informal study showed that right around three-quarters of the freedom-seekers never made landfall. And many who did we had to rush to local hospitals—dehydration, sunburn, dementia, all of that for sure, but also add gunshot wounds from Castro's police, shark attacks, etc. I well remember processing Ivette Molina who arrived horribly sunburnt, delirious and dehydrated. She had several bullet wounds and was also pregnant. Why does the world ignore this? I still wake up often in the middle of the night and find it impossible to sleep.

“That cemetery-without-crosses as we started calling it is a huge one. And this holocaust is still being denied—not by a few nutcases as in the one during WWII, but by most of the world.”
⁶

Landfall itself doesn't always ensure survival. On May 15, 1997 a Brothers to the Rescue flight-crew noticed people waving frantically from tiny key called Dog Rock in the southernmost Bahamas. Following their standard rescue pattern, the crew banked, came in on a lower pass and dropped water, food and a radio.

In minutes the plane's radio crackled with the news from below that the family of six rafters had languished on that blazing rock for 17 days. Three of them were still alive. The Brothers notified the Bahamian Coast Guard which arrived on a windless day
to find a dreadful stench hovering over the little rock island. Two of the freedom-seekers had perished days before and been crudely buried under rocks, the only burial possible. One was a four-year-old moppet named Camila Martinez Rodriguez, the other a 13-year-old girl named Adianet Tamayo Rodriguez. The captain of the tiny raft, 26-year-old Leonin Rivas, had also perished. The Cuban American National Foundation recovered the bodies and gave them a proper burial in Miami. The three survivors were granted asylum in the U.S.

“Multiply that horror hundreds of times,” says Arturo Cobo, “and you'll get an idea of what many of us witnessed from Key West during the 90's. And it's still going on today, though mercifully more infrequently.”

During the first five months of 2012 the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted close to one thousand Cubans at sea. These were all shuttled back to Cuba, as mandated by U.S. law.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Who can forget the famous line? In fact most people forgot it shortly after President Reagan detonated the words at the Brandenberg Gate in June 1987. At the time they got little press-play, and what they got was mostly negative. President Reagan's own advisors, Colin Powell and Howard Baker, denounced as “unpresidential” and “extremist” the proclamation that would become President Reagan's most admired and famous.

It was only in November 1989, as the wall was finally torn down, that Reagan's proclamation was recalled, dusted off, and festooned with the fame now almost universal—at least among conservatives.

The people of the Free World were thrilled
en masse
when the wall finally came down. To lay eyes on the Berlin Wall provoked
shame and horror. Here was stark and perfect proof of what divided the world. No amount of paint or plaster to pretty it up could disguise what it was doing. Reagan saw it and outspokenly called it by its name-diplomatic peck-sniffs be damned.

And two years later Mr. Gorbachev complied, to much acclaim worldwide, though his compliance may have been unwitting.

Down in Cuba at this very time, Raul Castro was warning: “If any Gorbachev raises his head around here, we'll promptly chop it off! We would rather see Cuba sink into the ocean, like Atlantis, before we see the corrupting forces of capitalism prevail!”
⁷
Raul Castro's boasts came safely from behind a Communist barrier that had murdered (by the
lowest
estimate) more than
20 times
the number of innocents as the one Gorbachev had been petitioned to tear down.