Cubans missing in 'invisible' shipwrecks on route to US leave painful void at home

By Dave Sherwood

PALMA SOLA, Cuba (Reuters) -Every day, Cuban mother Mayra Ruiz wakes up wondering if today might be the day she hears from her only son, Maiquel Gonzalez.

Gonzalez disappeared without a trace in December 2022 alongside 28 friends and family who fled for Florida aboard a homemade boat. They were frantic to escape the crisis-racked Caribbean island, amid signs the United States was about to tighten immigration rules.

For nearly two years, Ruiz has lived in limbo, yearning for any sign of her son.

"We haven't had good news, but we haven't had bad news either," said the 61-year-old, who lives in the city of Santa Clara, in central Cuba. "My mother's heart tells me he's alive... but not hearing from him is torture."

Gonzalez, who would now be 28, was typical of Cuba's youth, his mother said: He loved music and dance, and drove a motorcycle taxi. But he also dreamt of a car, and a better home for his mother and father.

He knew he could never afford the nearly $5,000 price tag to fly to Nicaragua and then journey north to the U.S. border - the preferred migration route of many Cubans. So when the opportunity to take a homemade boat across the Straits of Florida presented itself - for less than $200 - he jumped at it. 

The price was right. The distance, little more than 90 miles, far shorter. But the risk was incalculable.

The Straits, which bridge the gap between Cuba and the U.S. state of Florida, are plagued by strong currents, treacherous weather and shark-infested waters - considered among the five most dangerous migrant crossings globally, the U.N. says. 

Reuters spoke with more than 40 friends and family of those lost on that boat. The conversations shed light on the complex calculus made by would-be migrants before undertaking the life-or-death journey. They also highlight how some families are left permanently scarred by their disappearance.

The U.N.'s Missing Migrants Project says 626 have died along the route since 2014, but cases like this one - never investigated by regional governments nor registered by the U.N. - suggest the numbers who disappear at sea may far exceed official counts.

Some family and neighbors of those lost told Reuters that preparations were already underway for a new exodus as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debate immigration policy ahead of the Nov. 5 election, sowing fear among prospective migrants that the U.S. may again tighten its entry requirements.  

The U.N. project has already recorded a nearly 20% surge in dead or missing migrants along traditional Caribbean migratory routes through Sept. 13.

The U.N. project classifies the missing boat of 29 as an "invisible" shipwreck, in which a vessel is reported missing, those aboard disappear, and neither authorities, the media, nor relatives can say for sure what became of them.

It's a phenomenon echoed in other refugee hotspots worldwide such as the Mediterranean and off the West African coast.

Reuters provided the names, birthdates, and the precise location and date of departure of the missing boat to migration authorities in the United States, in Cuba and in the nearby Bahamas. Neither U.S. or Bahamian authorities had any information on their whereabouts, nor had any government conducted a thorough investigation into the boat's disappearance.

Local authorities around the small farm town of Palma Sola, where the boat disappeared, conducted a search a week after the boat's disappearance but found nothing.

"It wasn't just one person, it was massive," said Ruiz, in tears during an interview at a farmhouse just a mile or so from where her son disappeared. "It's cruel, but the governments don't give us answers." 

BAD LUCK

U.N. experts say 2022 was an especially bad year for migrants in the Caribbean region - the most lethal on record. 

Word was spreading in Cuba of a pending U.S. crackdown on illegal migration by land and sea as the Biden administration prepared to implement its parole policy in 2023. 

That new policy allowed Cubans, as well as those from Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela - to enter the U.S. legally provided they met certain requirements. But it came together with stronger enforcement, including across the Florida Straits, which prompted a rush to leave Cuba before the crackdown began.

Trump, who has touted anti-immigration policies as a key part of his campaign platform, has said he would eliminate the Biden parole program. The initiative has allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants with U.S. sponsors to enter the country legally.

The U.N. declined to comment on the U.S. elections or immigration policy. Edwin Viales, a regional monitor for the U.N.'s Missing Migrants project, told Reuters that migrant deaths are often the result of "restrictive policies that force people to migrate irregularly."

By the time the doomed raft was preparing to depart in late 2022, food, medicine and fuel shortages were worsening following a deep recession triggered by the global pandemic as well as more aggressive U.S. sanctions under Trump that had made life miserable for many in Cuba. Desperation had set in.

"The clock was ticking," said Kastia Rodriguez, a 36-year old who lost both a brother and a sister on the missing boat. "If they didn't go, they would be turned back." 

Taking off from remote and poverty-stricken Palma Sola, the home of many of those who vanished, provided the shortest route from the Cuban coast to the nearby Florida Keys, and the cheapest.

The group's homemade boat, or "balsa," seemed like a winner, said Carlos Raul Reyes, an experienced local fisherman whose nephew was among the crew. He said it measured nearly 30 feet (9 meters) in length, built from solid wood planks with 16 flotation tanks - repurposed gas cans - to each side and a bus engine for power.

But bad luck struck early, he said. The crew, which set out under the cover of darkness, was forced to return for a forgotten bottle of engine oil, costing them a day - and their cherished clear-weather window. 

A storm was brewing. The wind veered from a more favorable south to north, frothing up waves of 10 feet or more, sheets of driving rain and ushering in an unusually bitter chill.  

"If they hadn`t turned around, they would have made it for sure," said Reyes, who searched for their bodies later but found only some familiar clothes and some spilled rice where the crew had camped before departing. "The conditions got very bad." 

On December 26, 2022, one of their crew called home by cell phone, assuring family back home they were ok. 

That was the last anyone would hear from them.

DEAD ENDS

Anxiety turned to panic about a week after the boat's initial departure, family members recall. 

On January 6, 2023, less than two weeks after the boat left, the family alerted the police in the nearby town of Marti. A search by local authorities and local fishermen turned up nothing, family members said. 

Officials with Cuba's foreign ministry advised Kastia Rodriguez, whose brother and sister were among the missing, to watch for migrants returned to Havana on charter flights from the Bahamas, where many had been detained. 

Her siblings never materialized.

The months to come saw reports of mysterious phone calls from the U.S. as well as a sighting - later recanted - of one of the young men from the boat near Fort Lauderdale. 

Many friends and family cling to the belief the migrants were detained in the United States, or in the Bahamas.

But some now concede, reluctantly, that their loved ones may have drowned.

"The weather was bad, and the ocean is a traitor. Maybe they were shipwrecked, but where is the evidence?," said Luis del Sol Vasquez, 69, whose only son vanished with the boat.

Back home, in Palma Sola, the boat's disappearance left some children in the town without a mother or a father, devastating the close-knit community.

Marbelia Estrada, 56, lost two children, an adult son and daughter, on the boat. Both had children of their own. Her daughter left two children without a parent after her husband took another rustic boat to the United States to earn money to support the family. Both children are now under the care of Sosa, their grandmother. All are traumatized, she said.

"We had to take them to a psychologist," Estrada told Reuters. "The 5-year old often asks, when is Papa coming home? He sometimes doesn't eat; he gets very sad."

The U.S. Coast Guard, which patrols the Straits of Florida and returns illegal migrants attempting to cross illegally to their home countries, told Reuters "there is not a case that matches this migrant voyage", after reviewing a list of the boat's crew. 

Neither U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) nor U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) had any record of the case.

The Bahamas' top immigration official, William Pratt, told Reuters in an email that "none of the names you provided appear in our Detainee Management System."

"HORROR SHOW"

Upwards of one million Cubans have left the island since 2020, roughly a tenth of the population, in an exodus demographers say has few parallels outside of war. 

There are few signs of it slowing, especially as a fresh U.S. move to restrict illegal immigration further may be looming no matter who wins the November elections.

Cuba's government - which has long blamed U.S. sanctions for tanking its economy and stoking migration - is taking note. 

"The issue of migration has become, like never before in the last 25 years, a key point of the current U.S. electoral campaign," according to a report in state-run media outlet Granma in late September. 

"This is sounding alarms for potential migrants who will try to reach U.S. territory more quickly before the elections... and on many occasions they resort to irregular migratory movements."

Alain Molina, from the nearby coastal town of Coralillo, who survived his own shipwreck on a U.S.-bound balsa in December 2022, said he believed another such wave of emigration was imminent, as the island's communist-run economy flounders.

"People are already making preparations. Everyone is talking about it," Molina said. He had already been offered a seat on a boat, he said, though he'd declined.

"It's going to kick off again at any moment."

(Reporting by Dave Sherwood, additional reporting by Alexandre Meneghini and Alien Fernandez in Palma Sola, Jasper Ward and Ted Hesson in Washington and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by Christian Plumb and Daniel Flynn)