Cuban star's fateful voyage was doomed from start

Cuban star's fateful voyage was doomed from start
Ray Sanchez | Direct from Havana
April 20, 2008
HAVANA

The suspected smugglers were armed with the most sophisticated equipment
and the simplest of weapons — global positioning systems, satellite
phones and hunting knives, according to survivors of their ill-fated
venture.

But the large sturdy vessel that was supposed to carry reggaeton star
Elvis Manuel, his mother and other Cuban migrants to America turned out
to be neither large nor sturdy. The twin-engine, 25-foot catamaran
flipped over in rough waters 50 miles shy of Key West, spilling its
passengers into the sea.

"The boat was a piece of junk," said Irioska Maria Nodarse, mother of
Elvis Manuel, the 18-year-old singer.

With Cubans migrating to the United States in the greatest numbers in
more than a decade, the failed journey in which Elvis Manuel and four
others disappeared at sea offers a window into the murky underworld of a
multimillion-dollar human smuggling enterprise.

Ray Sanchez Ray Sanchez E-mail | Recent columns

Authorities in Miami said the illicit trade, largely run out of the
Cuban American enclaves of South Florida, delivers thousands of migrants
to the United States at up to $10,000 a head.

"They only think about these people as cargo," said Lazaro Guzman, a
supervisory U.S. Border Patrol agent, adding the two suspected smugglers
in the failed operation were in custody in Miami.

Alejandro "DJ Jerry" Rodriguez Lopez, 19, Elvis Manuel's friend and a
survivor of the journey, said the alleged smugglers did not inspire
confidence as pilots. When the GPS equipment stopped working in bad
weather before dawn on April 7, the men shut down the engines and asked,
"Which way do we go?"

The suspected smugglers had no other maps, no compass. With the engines
off in rough seas, the craft took on water.

Some migrants panicked and stood up, Rodriguez said. The vessel turned
over, throwing all 19 people into the ocean.

Elvis Manuel, a heavy knapsack strapped to his back, and four others
were swept away by a giant wave and disappeared. The Coast Guard rescued
Nodarse, Rodriguez and a dozen others on April 9. All 14 were returned
to Cuba three days later.

Recent migration figures indicate the largest exodus is under way since
38,000 Cubans crossed the Florida Straits in 1994. At that time, the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of subsidies to Cuba triggered
an economic crisis, American officials said.

Since Oct. 1, the start of a new fiscal year, nearly 3,000 Cubans tried
to reach the shores of South Florida – a 21 percent increase over the
previous year, a U.S. official in Havana said. Coast Guard interdictions
at sea rose 65 percent to 1,194 in the current fiscal year.

Days after Elvis Manuel and the others vanished at sea, the chief of the
U.S. Interests Sections in Havana, Michael Parmly, told reporters that
the increase in migration was partly attributable to Cubans having lost
hope that life would improve under Raul Castro.

"In the migratory phenomenon, you see the reaction of the Cuban people,"
Parmly said. "Why do so many people want to leave the country?"

Cuban officials, however, contend the migration is more economic than
political and is provoked by Washington. Under the "wet foot-dry foot"
policy, Cubans who reach U.S. shores are allowed to stay and obtain
legal residence, while those picked up at sea are returned to Cuba.

Analysts said the policy has encouraged a new migration pattern for
Cubans — taking smuggler's boats to Mexico, where they work their way up
to U.S. border stations and ask for political asylum. Almost twice as
many Cubans — 11,486 — took the Mexican border route in fiscal 2007,
which ended in September, as in the previous fiscal year, U.S. officials
said. More than 5,500 Cubans have arrived at U.S. land ports so far this
fiscal year.

In response to the increased smuggling operations, the U.S. attorney's
office in Miami recently announced indictment of 18 people for trying to
smuggle more than 200 migrants into the country.

In Miami, Elvis Manuel's aunt, Mirtha Nodarse, said she opposed the
perilous sea voyage.

"If they told me they were leaving that way, you can be convinced that I
would have said, 'No, not by sea,'" she said in a phone interview.
"Every day in Miami you hear about people who don't make it across the
sea, people who get lost and die."

Ray Sanchez can be reached at rlsanchez@sun-sentinel.com.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/cuba/sfl-flrndcubanotebook0420sbapr20,0,3695658.column