Cuban Death-Lift (2 page)

For years, I apologized for these books. I no longer do.

 

—Randy Wayne White
Cartagena, Colombia

 

The day before my federal connection, Norm Fizer, told me about the disappearance of the three CIA agents in Mariel Harbor, Cuba, the squall hit.

The word “squall” doesn't seem strong enough to describe the storm that came roaring down unannounced from the open ocean of the west-northwest. Winds gusting to ninety knots, seas walling ten to fifteen feet, death written all over the face of it. And the weather boys in southern Florida did a bad job of picking it up. A damn bad job. For them it meant just one more mistake to log with the others and forget. But for the thousands of Cuban-Americans in small boats bound for Mariel Harbor to pick up relatives in the largest Cuban sealift in history, it meant disaster.

It was a Sunday in late April. Normally, April is a time for recovery in Key West. The barrage of tourism is over by Easter, and the citizens of the little island city that has become America's chic dead end usually spend April walking the spent streets, blinking their eyes at the new quiet, at the return of the old slowness, like bears just out of hibernation.

But not this April.

You must have heard all about it, headline after headline, with film at eleven. The international newsmongers have turned us all into victims. We've become headline addicts, and they've increased our supply so gradually and steadily that we don't even realize the seriousness of our addiction. Most of us forget the dreams we've just had in the white glare of the morning edition, and at six we're too busy with Cronkite's understated lamentations to hear the words of our own children. The little man from Walden Pond saw the folly of that, but he was no anchorman, so who listens?

So you know about the Cubans who crashed the gate at the Peruvian embassy outside of Havana and demanded political asylum in early April. It was nothing new, really. Cubans tired of Castro's pipe dream had long ago figured out that breaking into the embassies of Peru and Costa Rica was the most reliable way out. But this time the unexpected happened. When the Peruvians, as always, refused to return the would-be refugees, Castro sent bulldozers to crash down the gates, removed his military force, and announced that anyone who wanted to abandon “the dream of socialism” was welcome to take refuge at the little embassy. Within two days, more than ten thousand Cubans had collected on the grounds. There was no food, so they ate the mangoes off the embassy tree, and then the leaves, and then the bark. The embassy's cat and guard dog were killed and roasted over an open fire. By the time the Peruvians—with the help of Costa Rica—had started to airlift refugees (fifty at a time) to South America, the world press got hold of the story, and Castro was made to look like the maniac he is. He might not care a hoot about the needs of his people, but he sure is sensitive to world opinion. He saw the refugees getting off the planes in Costa Rica as the source of his disgrace, so he found a way to halt the airlift—one of his goons pushed a Costa Rican diplomat through a plate-glass window. It wasn't an admirable method of diplomacy, but it was effective. The airlift was halted immediately. Then Castro did something which at the time seemed even stranger. He let it be known that if Americans wanted to come to Cuba by boat, they were welcome to pick up relatives— whether they were among the thousands at the Peruvian embassy or not. At first it didn't make any sense. I followed the news reports, like everyone else in Key West, and couldn't figure it out. Why would Castro suddenly give his people the freedom of choice? And then I remembered something my little friend Carlos de Marti had told me. Carlos is in love with a Cuban woman—whom he had grown up with before his parents shipped him off to America in 1960. Once a month—if he can manage it—Carlos makes the dangerous ninety-mile crossing alone to visit his girl on a secluded beach, and then sneaks back, bringing with him two cases of Hatuey beer for me. After his last trip, he had told me the way things were in Cuba.

“Very bad,
amigo,
” he had said. As always, he had brought the beer down to the docks at Garrison Bight in Key West where I moor my charter boat,
Sniper.
“My little love asked me if, on my next trip, I would consider bringing her and her family back. That is the only thing that keeps us apart—her family. But things are very bad there now and getting worse. Little bugs ruined the national sugarcane crop, and there is some blue fungus that has killed all the tobacco. At first it was a joke, see? No tobacco, so Fidel could no longer smoke his big Cohiva cigars. But then it was not so funny. There was no money, so there was no food. When starving people are caught stealing oranges from the national groves, they were imprisoned. My little love has gotten so thin,
amigo,
that I am worried. The next trip, she will come back with me—family or no family.”

When I remembered that, it started to make more sense. American boats in Cuba would bring American dollars. And unloading poor Cubans would take some pressure off Castro's economy. When the first two boatloads of refugees came into Key West on April 21, I understood even further. I was out off Mule Key at the time, trying to chum up some bonefish for two doctors from Moline. The first boats back were two Miami lobster fishermen—the
Dos Hermanos
and the
Blanchie III.
I watched the Coast Guard escort them back to the submarine base beside the low, dun-colored geometrics of old Fort Taylor. The boats were pathetically overloaded. One of Castro's little jokes. Overload the American boats just to see how many would be lost on the dangerous crossing of the Florida Strait. And for all the people on those two boats, there weren't that many relatives of Cuban-Americans. For every three relatives Castro allowed to leave, he sent about twenty of his castoffs—the elderly, political prisoners, habitual criminals. Another of his little jokes. But the Cuban-Americans didn't care—and I couldn't blame them. Most of them still had mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers back in Cuba, and it was their only chance to get them out. So they filed into Key West, thousands upon thousands, trailering their small fishing boats behind their cars, gas in plastic cans, food in coolers, ready to risk their lives to make the crossing and get their loved ones back. There wasn't enough hotel space on the island, so they slept in their cars and drank their morning coffee sitting on the curbs of sidewalks.

Yes, it was a strange April in Key West.

There were so many Cuban-Americans unloading their boats at Garrison Bight that the Sheriff's Department had to send deputies to direct traffic day and night. And the little harbor was packed. For those of us who had boats on charterboat row, it was a real pain in the butt. Most of them had little knowledge of seamanship, so they were constantly running over anchor lines and ramming into wharves and other boats, occasionally catching fire. It was a deadly serious kind of Keystone Kops. It got so that the other guides and I were afraid to leave our boats unguarded. When you came in from a charter, there were normally two or three Cuban-American boats in your slip, and it wasn't easy getting them to move. There were people and noise and traffic everywhere, so finally I just said to hell with it.

And that's how I happened to be out in my stilthouse off Calda Bank when the squall hit.

It's some kind of place to watch a squall come in. It's an old fisherman's shack, built in open water eight feet deep, and the nearest land is Fleming Key—about a mile or so away. The old pine clapboard is a weathered gray, and the roof is tin. The sixteen pilings it's built on are stout and smell of creosote, and they angle down into the clear water where barracuda hang in the shadows and big gray snapper swim their nervous figure eights. I had bought the stilthouse only a few months before. I wanted solitude, and I had the money—more money than I could use in a lifetime, after that deadly last mission off the Marquesas. I had plenty to forget, and I was tired of the strange April madness that had overtaken Key West.

I wanted to be alone, to rest, to forget. And there is no place on earth better for being alone than a stilthouse.

On the Friday before the squall, I ambled up to the marina at Garrison Bight and told Stevie Wise to cancel all my charters until the craziness was over. Stevie looked harried and weary, which isn't hard to understand, really. He lives on an old lunker of a houseboat named
Fred Astaire,
which is as famous around Key West for its parties as Stevie is well known for his enthusiastic bachelorhood. But it was neither women nor parties which had exhausted him. It was the madness of what the newspapers were calling the Freedom Flotilla.

We stood in the little marina office staring out at the wild activity in the harbor. Cars with boats on trailers sat in a long line down Roosevelt Boulevard, waiting in the April heat to unload at the cement ramp. Fifty or sixty other boats were rafted in the harbor, while others tried to anchor with knotted lines, old engines smoking, their skippers screaming Spanish insults at each other.

“I can't believe they're letting this crap go on,” Stevie said. He had taken the phone off the hook to stop the endless barrage of calls he had been getting from the country's news media, and he sat behind the counter on a wooden stool.

“Come on, Steve—you'd be going too if you had relatives trapped in Cuba.”

“No, it's not that.” He brushed at his thick black hair with a free hand. With the other, he toyed with a pencil. “What I can't believe is that they're letting those poor people head across the Strait in those damn little boats. Look out there! What are they, mostly eighteen-to-twenty-three-footers? Shit, that's suicide.”

“You've got to admire their bravery. They're a determined people.”

“Yeah, determined to get themselves killed. I don't see why they all just don't hire shrimp boats—or licensed captains like you—to take them across. Makes a helluva lot more sense.”

“Stevie, you know what those shrimp-boat people are charging—and if you don't, you ought to walk on down and have a beer at the Kangaroo's Pouch. That's where all the dealing's going on. The shrimp boats are getting between fifty and a hundred thou in cash for a trip. And that's in advance—with no guarantees. And the reason I'm not going is that no one I know has asked. The Cuban-Americans I do know are close friends, and I suppose they just don't want to put me on the spot.”

“And what if they did ask?”

I thought for a moment. Would I go? Castro was making a fool of everyone who went to Mariel Harbor, no doubt about that. He was making a fool of Americans, his own people—everyone but himself. But the bottom line was that there were good people who looked upon this sealift as their only chance to rescue their relatives from Castro's little commie paradise. Some paradise.

Stevie stared at me with his mocking brown eyes and began to grin. “If one of your friends asked, you'd be gone in a minute, MacMorgan. You know it's true.”

I snorted. Maybe it was. And maybe that's why I had decided to isolate myself on my stilthouse—to escape being asked. I didn't want to haul Castro's castoffs, so I was taking the coward's way out. You don't have to make any decisions when the world can't find you. And I was tired of decisions. I wanted to sit in my little weather-scoured shack on the sea, drink cold beer, read good books, and catch fish—just to let them go and watch them swim free again. Key West could have its traffic and its Mariel Harbor madness. And it could have it without me.

I finished rescheduling my charters, shoved the long black calendar back under the counter, and turned to leave. As I did, Stevie stopped me.

“Hey, Dusky—I almost forgot.” He began shuffling through a stack of papers on a metal spindle. “You got a message here someplace. . . .”

“It'll keep.”

“Naw, the guy said it was very important. Had nothing to do with a charter—hey, here it is.”

I took the narrow envelope he handed me and opened it. It was from Norm Fizer. Stormin' Norman we had called him on one very secret mission a long, long time ago back in Cambodia. I had been a Navy SEAL back then, more fish than man, more killer than fish. It was a dirty, nasty, dangerous time, but I had come to respect and admire Fizer during our mission there. He's a fed—and one of the rare good ones. I owed him a lot—and not just because of Cambodia. When the drug runners—the pirates who roam the Florida Strait and call Key West home—made the mistake of murdering my family and my best friend, Norm had seen to it that I had the chance to get even. He had hired me as a government freelance troubleshooter, working outside the law to expedite the work of the lawkeepers.

The note read:

 

It was typed in plain block pica, just typed initials for a signature. So it was business. But I wasn't ready for any more business. Not now, anyway. I had been having a bad time of it since that brutal night off the little chain of mangrove islands called the Marquesas. At night I couldn't sleep, and during the day I couldn't seem to wake up. I was drinking too much beer, and my hands shook slightly when I tied new leaders. That's what killing does to you. It steals into the middle of your brain and begins to eat its way out again. I needed more time to shake it, to put it all behind me, to crush the nightmares in the peace of isolation.