REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Flight From Cuba
Early Friday, four Cuban Coast Guard officers tooled their patrol boat across the Florida Straits, pulled up to the Hyatt Marina in Key West and surrendered to local law enforcement officials.
"My impression is that it was a last-minute decision," said the officer who interviewed them. "They were patrolling, talking about living at the poverty line when they said, 'You know what, the United States is only 90 miles that way.' So they set the heading on their boat, terminated communication with Cuba and headed straight here."
Forty-four years of Castro dictatorship have produced thousands of escape stories, many more sensational than this one. Cubans have fled on inner tubes and shaky rafts, in commandeered MiG jets and government owned bi-planes and in airplane wheel wells, just to name a few. One tall, muscular athlete dressed in drag to walk past guards at the airport.
Yet the bolt for freedom even on a seaworthy vessel was far from sure. Each of the men on the Coast Guard boat had to face a risk common to all Cubans: the risk of trusting one another. It is a chance many defectors are not willing to take. "Not even my family could know," said New York Yankee baseball pitcher Jose Contreras about his decision to escape during a road trip to Mexico four months ago. That these men found a way to trust each other is a testament to their desire to flee their homeland.
By now escape from Cuba is a dog-bites-man story. But the very fact that it has become routine should also serve as a reminder of the grim existence of most of Cuba's 11 million people. Fidel-philes want us to believe that while Cubans may be poor, they are happy. But the daring flights of so many, year after year, tell a much different story. February 11, 2003
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Beginning in early 2002, Cuba launched a campaign to improve conditions at its primary schools, but reforms for the older students are still pending. Cuba's secondary school program will be radically improved, Castro declared. "The future developing of our education will have enormous political, social and human connotations," the Cuban leader said.
Despite the huge changes that the 1959 revolution made in Cuban society, some social problems have not been completely eliminated, including racial discrimination, Castro acknowledged. "While science shows unquestionably the real equality that exists among human beings, discriminations lives on," especially among the island's poorest groups, Castro said. [End]
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Four Cuban border guards arrive in Keys undetected *** KEY WEST - Four armed defectors from Cuba's border guard, clad in green camouflage and black boots, walked onto Key West's main drag after arriving undetected early Friday -- the same day that the U.S. attorney general put the nation on a heightened state of terrorist alert. The men tied their 30-foot go-fast boat behind the Hyatt Key West Resort and Marina, stashing it within a short distance of the Coast Guard station, which failed to spot their 4 a.m. arrival. Police found two AK-47s and eight magazines of ammunition inside the Cigarette speedboat. The incident occurred six days after five Cuban fishermen in a large rickety boat landed on U.S. Naval property close to a cruise ship. The controls of the boat that arrived Friday were in English. Federal authorities suspect Cuban authorities confiscated the craft from a botched smuggling mission and turned it into a state-operated patrol boat. A big metal canopy and blue police lights had been added to the vessel, which still flew a Cuban flag when authorities found it.
Friday's defectors, who are believed to have worked from a station in Bahia Honda on the island's northwest coast, told authorities the Cuban government obtained the boat in 1996. Federal investigators lined up Friday to interview the men and to confirm their identities. ''We do believe they are military people. We think they are Cuban border guards, and we think that they did plan this outing,'' said Keith A. Roberts, a U.S. Border Patrol spokesman. ``This is something I haven't seen in my 11 years being here. It truly is an anamoly.'' Roberts said border officials were keeping the imported weapons ``locked away very safely in our inventory.'' The arrivals, who wore Cuban Ministry of the Interior patches on their shirts, made it about two blocks from where they landed -- down a wooden dock, past the hotel pool, past an outdoor Jacuzzi -- before flagging down a Key West police officer. Soon after, one turned over a Chinese-made handgun.
'FRUSTRATED' MEN The men told a Spanish-speaking officer that they were frustrated with life on the island and decided to embark on the trip, which, with the boat's twin 200-horsepower engines, took three hours. ''They stated that they were basically tired of the impoverished conditions and frustrated with not being able to own their own homes and their own cars and that type of thing and that's why they left,'' said Tara Koenig, a Key West police officer. Then the men asked if they could call relatives in Miami. The men, who said they were with Cuba's Tropas Guardafronteras -- Border Guard Troops, identified themselves as Yoadris Rodríguez Camajo, Egar Raúl Batista Gamboa, Ofil Lara Corria and Rodisan Sugura López.***
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Castro got his boat back. I hope it will be used for more escapes.