/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM: The Bittersweet American Dream of Seven Cuban ‘Rafters’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Mónica Carrera

NEW YORK, Jun 24 2003 (IPS) - Not everything went as they thought it would for the seven protagonists of ”Balseros” (Rafters), a documentary that picks up the trail of seven Cubans seven years after they braved the dangerous sea crossing to the United States in 1994.

The 120-minute documentary won the Coral Prize for best film by a non-Latin American director at the Festival of New Latin American Film in Havana last March.

”A house, a car, a good woman,” was Rafael Cano’s answer when asked what desires drove him to leave Cuba. Emigrating had long been a secret intention, which not even his family knew about, by the time the opportunity finally showed up in the summer of 1994.

An estimated 30,000 Cubans set out that summer on makeshift rafts and other precarious watercraft in an attempt to reach Miami, Florida, after the socialist government of Fidel Castro momentarily lifted restrictions on sea departures from the Caribbean island nation. No one knows exactly how many drowned.

That summer, ”people dared to do things that they had never done before,” says the narrator of the documentary, which was shown on Jun. 20 at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York.

The film was produced in 2001 and directed by Spanish journalists Carles Bosch and Joseph M. Doménech, from the Televisión de Cataluña TV station. It tells the stories of seven of those 30,000 Cubans, from what they had to go through to defect, to their regrets and achievements on the way to their own version of ”the American dream.”

The documentary reflects the uncertainty experienced by the seven protagonists during their months of confinement in the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, at the extreme eastern tip of Cuba, before visiting them seven years later to find out what has happened to them.

Their journey to the United States was not easy, and took much longer than expected.

The catalyst for the summer of 1994 ”rafters’ exodus” was the Aug. 5, 1994 hijacking of the motorboat La Regla by a group of people trying to flee to Miami. The boat ran out of gas just off the Cuban coast, and was intercepted by the local security forces.

The narrator of ”Balseros” explains that spontaneous protests erupted on the streets of Havana and other Cuban cities after rumours circulated that the people who hijacked the boat were mistreated by authorities.

The government then made the unusual declaration that restrictions on departures from Cuba by boat would be lifted, which triggered the last massive exodus from Cuba.

But many, including those featured in the documentary, only made it to U.S. shores after months in Guantanamo, during which they lived in uncertainty as to what the future would hold.

”Balseros” was inspired by the desperate and frenetic efforts by many Cubans to build rafts and boats and set out to sea. One of them, Guillermo Armas, was seeking to join his wife and daughter, who had been living in Miami for five years.

Armas had applied for a visa to emigrate to the United States four times, but without success. ”I want to see my daughter. The only option I have left is to throw myself directly into the jaws of death,” he said, referring to the hazardous crossing of the Florida Strait.

Armas was picked up at sea by the U.S. coast guard and held at the Guantanamo naval base for over a year. But he was eventually reunited with his family, and the film shows the happy ending: his daughter’s 15th birthday bash.

Not all of the stories had rosy conclusions, however. Eduardo and his girlfriend Misclaida set out from Cuba together, after she prostituted herself to earn the money they needed to buy wood and floats to build a boat. After being held for a time at the Guantanamo base, they settled in Connecticut with the help of a church group.

Eduardo and Misclaida eventually broke up, and she moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and then Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she makes a living dealing drugs.

Eduardo is one of the few people featured in ”Balseros” who was able to send money home to his family in Cuba. He even visited his mother and bought her a washing machine.

Rafael Cano, meanwhile, moved around from state to state, holding a variety of jobs. After he was hit by a car, he ended up dedicating his life to religion.

The seven stories interwoven by the documentary not only show what many Cubans go through in their attempt to make another life for themselves in the United States, but reflect the dreams and hardships shared by immigrants from many Latin American countries.