100 Minutes to Freedom

by David Savold

Sometime around 4 a.m. on December 19, 1992, the manager of the Seaward Motel on Florida's Marathon Key heard the bell ring at the front desk. In the lobby he found two men waiting to check in. The younger of the two was wearing shorts and a short-sleeve shirt. The other, who appeared Hispanic, was wearing a dark blue running suit and moved like an athlete. He had what could be described as a baby face, but this morning his eyes were bloodshot and had dark circles beneath them. The name he signed in the hotel register was Joao Garcia.

The manager probably wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Garcia wasn't the man's name. This was southern Florida, where drug smuggling, much of it done by air, was a fact of life. Marathon Airport, a small facility that handles mostly Piper Cubs and a handful of corporate jets, was just across Route 1 from the motel. In fact, the two men had just landed there in a twin-engine Cessna 310.

But the man who was calling himself Garcia was no drug smuggler. He was Orestes Lorenzo Perez, a former pilot in the Cuban air force who had made headlines the previous year when he defected to the United States by flying a MiG-23 to Florida. Though he had gained his freedom, Lorenzo purchased it at the cost of his family, whom he had been forced to leave behind. Now he was planning a defection in reverse: a flight back to Cuba to bring his wife, Victoria, and their two sons--Reyniel, 11, and Alejandro, six--to the United States.

Lorenzo's companion was Ron Murphy, the Cessna's previous owner. He had flown down with Lorenzo from Columbus, Georgia, mainly to provide a voice for the radio, just in case anyone monitoring the airwaves from Cuba should recognize Lorenzo's voice. Tomorrow Lorenzo would set out alone for Cuba.

Thirty years after Fidel Castro's revolution, the Pearl of the Antilles had long lost its luster. Its economy already hard-pressed from a U.S.-imposed trade embargo, Cuba had recently lost the vital economic support of the Soviet Union, its major trading partner. As the economy worsened, fuel and food became scarce. So desperate were living conditions that in 1992 thousands of Cubans would risk crossing the Florida Straits in barely seaworthy vessels to escape.

Lorenzo had been born in 1956, two years before Castro's guerrilla forces overthrew the Batista regime in Cuba. When Lorenzo was three, he flew his first airplane--a toy his Uncle Orlando had brought for Christmas from the United States. It would inspire Lorenzo's dream of flying and eventually lead him to be chosen for a scholarship to flight school in the Soviet Union. There he learned to fly a small Czechoslovakian Aero L-29 Delfin two-seat jet trainer. Soon he was flying MiG-21s in Angola, part of the Cuban forces sent to support the country's Marxist government against the guerrilla armies attempting to overthrow it.

Lorenzo and Victoria married in 1976. While Lorenzo's military career forced him to endure long separations from his wife, Victoria studied to become a dentist. Their first son, Reyniel, was born in 1981. Four years later the family was sent to the Soviet Union so Lorenzo could attend officer training school. When they finally returned to Cuba, Lorenzo was assigned to Santa Clara Air Base, about 165 miles east of Havana. There he found that the only changes in Cuba had been for the worse. Even compared to life in the Soviet Union, which was undergoing the thaw of Gorbachev's glasnost, Cuba was unbearably oppressive. Castro, trying to distract the citizens from their internal problems, now kept the country on alert for a U.S. invasion. "I used to sleep three or four days inside the base because tomorrow will be American invasion," Lorenzo remembers. "Psychologically, it's terrible."

Now deputy base commander, Lorenzo talked with his wife for months about what to do. Finally they both realized he must go. "We decided that the best way to do it, I would fly away. I would try getting out of Cuba," he says. On March 20, 1991, Lorenzo suddenly appeared in the Florida skies over Boca Chica Naval Air Station in a MiG-23, circling three times in the noon sun and waggling his wings to signify friendly intentions.

The Cuban government publicly promised that any Cuban with a visa would be allowed to leave the country, and Lorenzo had hoped the government would want to avoid creating a scandal by keeping his family. Yet he told Victoria on the day he left, "If in a year you are not allowed to leave Cuba, I will be back for you. I don't know how--in a boat, a plane, or swimming--but I will be back for you and the children."

Soon after his arrival in the United States, Lorenzo started a campaign to win his family back. Radio Marti carried his appeals across the Florida Straits to Cuba. In New York City, he denounced the government of his former country at an anti-Castro rally. In Geneva, he asked for the world's help before a United Nations Human Rights Commission. In Madrid, he chained himself to the gates of Retiro Park and went on a week-long hunger strike. He met with a host of dignitaries, including President George Bush, Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, and Coretta Scott King. But it was all to no avail, and Lorenzo began to feel increasingly helpless. "Every night my children were calling me," he says. "In fact, I used to sleep a couple of hours and I'd get up scared because I could confirm that my children were with me in my room. They were talking to me. They were asking for help."

The Cuban government had told Victoria that the family would never be allowed to leave the country, and Lorenzo realized he would somehow have to get them himself. Helicopters and speedboats were out--both were too expensive. The only way he could get to Cuba and back again was with a light airplane. So Lorenzo started taking flying lessons. Although he had flown over a thousand hours in high-performance jet aircraft, he had never flown piston-engine or light airplanes. He enrolled in a flight school near his new home in northern Virginia, and for six weeks the ex-MiG pilot attended classes with a dozen neophyte aviators as fellow students.

As soon as he got his license, Lorenzo started to look for an airplane. Through friends at the Valladares Foundation, a human rights organization founded in 1989 by a former Cuban political prisoner, he learned of a 1961 Cessna 310F with 6,000 hours on it. Painted white with a blue racing stripe and a nose the same turquoise as the water off the Florida Keys, the twin-engine airplane had been manufactured the same year as the Bay of Pigs invasion and it looked its age. Originally owned by the state of Georgia, it had spent some time in New Mexico before Ron Murphy had purchased it in November 1991. He was willing to sell it for $30,000, and the Valladares Foundation agreed to purchase the airplane for the rescue attempt.

When he checked into the Seaward Motel, Lorenzo had not slept for three days, yet once in his room he resumed studying the plans for his flight. Every night for the past several months he had been working things out in his tiny one-bedroom apartment in the Washington D.C. suburbs. He had covered his map, a chart of Cuba's western coast he had purchased at a store only two blocks from the White House, with equations and sunset times. He hoped his inside knowledge of Cuban air defenses would help him slip through the system.

The next morning he walked back to the airport to check his Cessna. He refueled the two wingtip tanks for what he hoped would be a 200-mile round trip. Several hours before he had arrived in Marathon Key he had talked to his wife and, in a carefully planned code, told her when he would be arriving. He would start his flight around sunset, arrive with the last rays of the sun, and get out under a descending curtain of darkness. He needed just enough light to land on a highway, and then darkness to protect him from any Cuban MiGs that might pursue him. To arrive at the rendezvous site in Cuba at 5:45, Lorenzo calculated that he would need to take off at 5:07 exactly.

Later that morning two friends from the Valladares Foundation met him at the airport. They wanted to take pictures of Lorenzo with his Cessna and he good-naturedly complied, although he was nervous about creating a scene. Well aware of the prevalence of drug smuggling in the Florida Keys, he didn't want to arouse suspicion by hanging around the airport. He and his friends went for a walk. They had lunch at Pizza Hut. They got ice cream cones.

At 4:00 p.m. Lorenzo returned to the airplane, did a final walk-around check, and then climbed into the cockpit. He was still wearing the running suit, an early Christmas present from friends who had asked him to wear it on the flight. He sat in the cabin repeating everything until 4:50. Then he started the engine. After one more run-through of his checklist, he started to taxi slowly to the runway. At exactly 5:07 he radioed local air traffic: "Cessna 5819. Departing runway 07."

Lorenzo left the Keys, flying about a thousand feet above the flat and translucent sea. Far off he could see a tanker crossing the Florida Straits. Ninety miles away lay Cuba.

On his left knee Lorenzo had his flight plan. On his right knee he had strapped his calculator. He had also brought a camera, but nothing else except for some soft drinks and a box of chocolates. To protect himself in the event he was caught, he had left all identification cards at home.

As he got further out over the Gulf Stream and the sea turned darker blue, he shut down the radar transponder, lights, and radio to avoid being detected. After he had been flying for about 15 minutes, Lorenzo started to descend until he was flying about ten feet above the waves. His altimeter indicated zero. He had a loran system to navigate and determine his geographical position. As he approached the 24th parallel, which lies almost halfway between Key West and Cuba, he realized that he was ahead of schedule. At Marathon he had gotten figures for wind velocity and direction, but the tailwinds were a little stronger than expected. Lorenzo considered making a 360-degree turn to kill time, but decided against it in case he was already on Cuban radar.

Lorenzo calculated that once he appeared on Cuban radar, he would have about 15 minutes to pick up his family. He knew it took 20 seconds for the radar to complete a 360-degree sweep. Even if the radar operator were paying close attention, Lorenzo knew the radar would have to sweep the screen three times before the operator could positively identify Lorenzo's Cessna as an aircraft flying south. But Cuba's P-14 radar didn't provide altitude information: to get that, the operator would have to call a PRV-11 radar operator. This would give Lorenzo at least another minute.

The key to Lorenzo's plan was the clumsy chain of command that would be initiated at this point. An alert would require a time-consuming series of phone calls up the command hierarchy, from a company to a battalion to a brigade to a division. That would buy him a few more minutes as he got closer to his destination.

He had other advantages. He knew that the island has daily blackouts to save power, so the radar is often shut down. The system's old Russian radar uses tubes instead of transistors, and Cuba's humidity causes them to break down often. He also knew that the people operating the radar were increasingly apathetic. "The situation in Cuba is nobody cares for anything," he says.

In fact, Lorenzo was less concerned that the Cuban air defense system would catch him than he was that his wife and children wouldn't make it to the rendezvous point. Victoria would have a difficult trip. When Lorenzo was checking into the Seaward Motel earlier that morning, his wife had been getting up at her parents' house in Havana, where she had moved with her sons after Lorenzo's defection. To reach the rendezvous spot, she had to travel 70 miles through a country where gasoline was so scarce that Castro had declared 1991 the Year of the Bicycle. She left at 8 a.m. and, like many around Cuba, caught rides with passing cars. For each ride she paid a hundred pesos--in a country where an engineer made only three times that in a month.

Lorenzo would have liked to pick up his family on a highway where he used to land his MiG-21 during military exercises. But the rendezvous would have to take place at a spot that was both accessible to his wife and yet not likely to arouse the suspicion of anyone keeping her under surveillance. This meant the rescue site had to be somewhere between Havana and Matanzas, where his parents lived.

He knew the Matanzas area well because he used to snorkel nearby. For the rendezvous point, Lorenzo had picked a new highway that ran from the old coastal highway to a new airport. The only problem was that the site was located near four anti-aircraft missile complexes. But Lorenzo knew that authorities would need Castro's personal okay before shooting down an airplane. Even after Castro had been located and had given the command, it would still take a minimum of three minutes to warm up the radar--if it had been shut off during a blackout. Lorenzo also knew that the missiles' range was only 15 miles. He hoped that by the time the missiles were ready to fire, he would be well on his way back to Florida.

Not long past the 24th parallel, Lorenzo saw Matanzas materialize on the horizon. First he saw the hills that loom over the city, then the buildings and the 400-foot-high bridge that spans the Canimar River. As he approached the bridge he began to climb. His wife was supposed to be waiting about a mile east of the bridge, where the road curves around a hill. Lorenzo was flying so low, however, that the hill blocked his view of the rendezvous site. He banked around the hill at about 20 feet and finally spotted the rendezvous spot. But he still didn't see Victoria. He had only a single chance to land, so he reduced speed and dropped the landing gear.

He was approaching to land on the two-lane highway when he saw his wife on his left. As he had instructed, she and the children were wearing brightly colored clothes so he could spot them quickly. It had been 21 months since he had last seen them, and now there they were on the side of a road, wearing fluorescent orange T-shirts and caps. Below him, a small car was moving in the same direction as the airplane. Several hundred yards ahead of it a truck was approaching. Behind that a bus was trying to pass. Lorenzo planned to fly over the car and land in the highway between the car and the oncoming truck when he noticed a large rock in the middle of the road.

He didn't have room for a proper landing, but he knew there wasn't time for a second approach. He overflew the car and raised the left wing to pass the rock, then touched down. When the Cessna came to a stop, Lorenzo found himself staring directly at the truck's driver, who sat clutching his steering wheel, his eyes wide and mouth open.

Victoria didn't see her husband until the airplane was almost on the ground. She and the children had their backs turned to the Cessna as it approached and couldn't hear it because of the traffic on the highway. Now they ran toward the airplane, Victoria gripping her sons' hands.

While his family was running to him, Lorenzo turned the Cessna around and then made another 90-degree turn to the left to keep the propellers away from his family. He opened the door on the starboard side and they scrambled up into the cockpit: Reyniel, Alejandro, and finally his wife. Alejandro was barefoot because he had lost both his shoes while running. "Papi! Papi!" the children cried as they tried to hug their father. But Lorenzo had to concentrate, and he sternly ordered them to be quiet and sit in the seats behind him.

His family now aboard, Lorenzo hurried to close the door. Twice he tried, and each time he failed. "Calmate, calmate," his wife said. "Calm down, calm down." On the third try he got the door closed.

With the airplane's flaps set for a short field takeoff, Lorenzo began to accelerate down the highway. As the airspeed indicator showed 60 mph--not fast enough to take off--Lorenzo could see the highway's curve approaching. He pulled the yoke back slowly and the airplane continued accelerating, gaining speed.

Finally the Cessna cleared the ground. We did it!, Lorenzo thought, and he retracted the landing gear. In the back seat, Victoria wrapped her arms around the boys. They recited the Lord's Prayer.

As he left Cuba, Lorenzo flew over the sea as low as he could. "I had experience flying at low altitude for the war in Angola," he says. By flying over the water at night at low altitude and low speed, he hoped to be an elusive target for any pursuing MiG, which would have to spot him from above, using radar information from the ground that would be at least three minutes old by the time the pilots got it. Soon it became too dark for Lorenzo to continue hugging the water safely. He climbed to 200 feet and maintained that altitude until he reached the 24th parallel. There he climbed to 3,000 feet and turned the transponder and lights back on. Victoria and Lorenzo took some pictures with the camera, and Lorenzo remembered to give his children the box of chocolates he had brought. It was dark. No moon or stars were shining, but soon Lorenzo saw the lights of the Keys and U.S. 1 with the lights of cars extending north to el monstruo, as his kids had been taught to call the country that was about to become their new home.

"Mira, mira," he urged his wife as he pointed to the lights. "Look ahead, look ahead." He called air traffic control and they assigned him an altitude of 7,000 feet. Originally he had planned to fly to Opa Locka Airport near Miami, but now he was spent, physically and emotionally, and ready to land. "I was so excited," he says. "I wanted to embrace them, you know. I don't want to fly. They were free. We did it. We wanted to enjoy. I was suffering because I couldn't embrace them."

At 6:45 p.m. he was back on the ground. From start to finish the rescue flight had taken less than 100 minutes. The Cessna was covered with salt.

Transmitted: 94-01-31 19:37:31 EST