Cubans forsaking rafts, hiring smugglers

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer

He is known only as El Argentino, but he is famed among Miami Cubans as a daring boatman who, for the right price, will smuggle almost anything out of Cuba, from cigars to entire families. Even baseball players.

There's also ``Juan in Key West,'' and ``Marcus'' in the Bahamas. And, if the scuttlebutt on the streets of Cuba is right, a slew of owners and captains of boats of all sizes along the island's northeastern coast.

They are smugglers all, entrepreneurs in a business slowly replacing the personal acts of quiet desperation once exemplified by the Cubans who shoved off for the promised land of Florida aboard inner tubes.

Of the nine Cuban sea-migration incidents reported so far this year, involving some 130 people, Coast Guard and Border Patrol officials said all but one appear to have involved paid smugglers.

``I haven't seen a real balsero in months,'' said Cmdr. Jim McKenzie, Coast Guard liaison with Cuba.

Tighter Coast Guard patrols across the Straits of Florida, and a U.S.-Havana immigration pact that returns home nearly all Cubans picked up at sea, have all but ended the era of risky escapes aboard rickety rafts.

Instead, more Cubans appear to be paying experienced boatmen with better craft to smuggle them along a multichanneled route that hops almost illogically from one Caribbean island to another but always aims at Florida.

``In the past there has always been this type of thing. . . . But this is making a lot of waves now,'' said Arturo Cobo, coordinator of the former Transit Center for Cuban Refugees on Stock Island, off Key West.

The waves these days are especially big because of suspicions that U.S. sports agents may have financed the recent defections of four baseball players and a coach who were reported missing at sea for 10 days. The group turned up safely in the Bahamas last week -- with no signs of having endured a hazardous journey.

But the smugglers most often deliver any Cuban with enough U.S. dollars to buy their services and, perhaps, with a special need -- like top security officers or scientists who would never get government exit permits.

``The smugglers are carrying people who can afford to pay or are important, because the old system of balsas isn't getting people to Florida any more,'' said one Border Patrol official.

Ready cover stories

At its most simple, the smuggling involves Florida boatmen, like El Argentino and ``Juan in Key West,'' who sail to Cuba to pick up relatives or paying passengers and then try to sneak them back here.

If stopped by U.S. officials, they have ready cover stories to try to avoid criminal charges of people-smuggling.

Two Miami Cubans stopped with 10 migrants aboard their 20-foot speedboat Feb. 13 told the Coast Guard they were out testing the boat's motor when they spotted a sinking raft and rescued the group. It was sheer coincidence, they claimed, that among the 10 was the wife of one of them. They are still under investigation.

In another episode, five Miami Cubans whose rented boat capsized in Biscayne Bay March 12, drowning a family of three, initially claimed they were out fishing when they stumbled on 11 migrants aboard a leaky boat, Coast Guard officials said.

The Miami-Cuba-Miami route appears to be the smugglers' favorite -- quick and direct. But it's also expensive -- $5,000 a head for most Cubans, $10,000 for prized cargo like baseball players, according to people who claim to know -- and difficult.

``Because of drugs and balseros, these are some of the most watched waters in the world,'' said McKenzie. Most paying migrants, he added, appear to favor other routes.

Have cash, can travel

Most of the channels start with Florida Cubans sending U.S. dollars to relatives on the island to buy a boat or contract a boat captain who will sail them to freedom. It is not a subject that anyone inside Cuba wants to discuss in detail with journalists, but Cubans say anyone with enough cash can easily find a smuggler in almost any town along Cuba's northeastern coast.

``In my city, everyone knew about the boatmen who were charging $3,000 a head to smuggle people to the Turks and Caicos in 1994,'' said Olance Nogueras, a native of the southern port city of Cienfuegos who is now a reporter for El Nuevo Herald in Miami.

Rich passengers might pay hefty sums to sail directly to Florida. But most make only a short hop to one of the hundreds of tiny Bahamian keys just north of Cuba, according to Coast Guard statistics.

That's apparently the tale of the 31 Cubans spotted March 3 on Bahamas' Anguilla Cay. Apparently, because the fishing boat that U.S. officials suspect dropped them off had vanished by the time a Coast Guard cutter arrived to transport them to Nassau.

The 31 Cubans volunteered nothing on how they got to Anguilla, and The Bahamas' point man on Cuban immigration, Carlton Wright, said he never found out, either. ``We don't ask too many questions about how they get here,'' he said.

Bahamas a jump-off point

It is from this first landing on Bahamian soil that the smuggling routes begin to divide and multiply, according to Coast Guard and Border Patrol officials.

Some refugees are believed to hide and telephone relatives in Florida to come and get them before authorities find them. Some try to steal or hire Bahamian boats to smuggle them to Florida.

``There's a lot of talk of captains who take Cubans and other migrants -- Chinese, Pakistanis, Nigerians -- to Florida, but it's all very private, small scale, not open at all,'' said one Nassau boatyard owner.

Migrants picked up in Bahamian territory are taken to the Carmichael Road Detention Center, a former Nassau primary school ringed with barbed wire that now holds more than 150 Cubans. Bahamas has a treaty with Havana to repatriate any Cubans who don't qualify for asylum, but Carmichael leaks like a sieve.

Twenty-seven Cubans escaped from the camp in the first six weeks of 1998, Deputy Director of Immigration Vernon Burrows said last month. The migrants escaped through ``very skillfully cut'' holes in the fence, he said. But Nassau is rife with rumors that Miami Cubans are paying Carmichael guards to allow migrants to escape.

Two Cuban refugees who landed on Miami Beach Jan. 8 told the Border Patrol that they had escaped from Carmichael Road and then stolen the 18-foot fishing boat that brought them here.

Two other camp escapees who swam ashore on north Miami Beach on Feb. 11 claimed to have been brought to Florida by a Bahamian boatman they refused to identify, according to Coast Guard records.

And those are only the major routes.

A trickle of Cubans moves toward the Dominican Republic -- one from the Bahamas along the Dominican Republic's northern coast, and the other from Jamaica along the southern coast.

Most of the Cubans later try to join the huge flow of Dominicans smuggled by boat each year to Puerto Rico to the east. From San Juan, it's a no-passport flight to Florida, New York or New Jersey.

Corruption suspected

Some U.S. officials who try to monitor the smuggling trade say it is so widespread that it must involve some level of corruption among Cuban government officials such as fishing cooperative directors, harbor masters and security agents.

But the Cuban government in fact has meted out stiff punishments to Miami exiles caught trying to smuggle relatives or paying customers out of the island, said Arturo Cobo.

``I believe this happens in spurts, that there are people who do these kinds of things . . . sporadically,'' he said. ``Those who do it know they run a risk. Not so much here, but in Cuba.''

Herald staff writers Susana Bellido and Javier Mota contributed to this report.