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Old 02-21-2014, 11:14 AM
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Stories of other windsurfers who made the crossing in the 1990's.

"3 Cubans Windsurf To Freedom
May 01, 1994|By Knight-Ridder/Tribune.

MIAMI — Three Cuban refugees who escaped the island on sailboards glided for 12 hours as sharks circled them-then, exhausted, they stretched out and took naps. Three hours later, at 3 a.m. Wednesday, they heard the rumble of a boat and sent up a flare. It was a group of American fishermen on their way back from a tournament in Cozumel.

"I was thinking, `Please, let a boat come by and pick us up. Enough with the heroism,"' said Alexander Morales, 21, a professional windsurfer. "And the boat did come." Hitching a ride with the fishermen, Morales, Carlos Lopez Gonzalez, 26, and Roberto Gonzalez Ortiz, 22, arrived in Key West Wednesday morning.

The men first concocted their plan more than two months ago. They rigged their sailboards for the trip across the Florida Straits with special seats, similar to swings, and sturdy sails. And they trained every day, at least four hours a day, often longer. But they lost a powerful ally the moment they left the coast of Santa Fe, their hometown, at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday. The wind died, leaving them idle and impatient for long stretches. The sharks edged in closer. At night, the predators never left them alone.

"It's very risky, very tiring," said Morales, who competed on Cuba's windsurfing team. "You are nothing compared to the sea. So insignificant." Cuba's border guards never suspected a thing. Windsurfers sail along the Santa Fe coast all the time. "We had done this all our lives, so the border guards couldn't say anything to us," Morales said. Just to be safe, he and the others hugged Cuba's coastline as they sailed toward Mariel. They each carried a liter of water. Twenty miles offshore, they changed course and headed to Key West. They didn't feel safe from Cuban authorities until nightfall.

Their conditioning served them well: During 12 hours of non-stop windsurfing, their feet and hands throbbed, but they didn't think about the pain. Only at midnight, after they nearly collapsed from fatigue, did they let down the sails to rest. "I had trained my whole life for this," Morales said. The men aren't alone. Three other Cubans have windsurfed their way to South Florida this year, according to the Church World Service resettlement agency.

On Friday, Morales was reunited with his father, Alexander Morales. Father and son hadn't seen each other since 1979. Morales' mother and half his family are still in Cuba. "That's a small little board, 3 inches of width. You have nothing to protect yourself with," Morales' father said. "It's unbelievable.""
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1...ng-sails-cuban


and


"Boardsailing: Freedom Jiber

Outside magazine, May 1994

How long had he planned the daring crossing, reporters wanted to know last February. Eugenio Maderal Roman, who'd just arrived in Marathon, Florida, after a nine-hour, 110-mile boardsailing odyssey from Cuba, hadn't planned it at all. "If I'd thought about it twice, I wouldn't have done it," said Roman, a 21-year-old boardsailing instructor at the Club Tropical hotel in Cuba's Varadero Beach resort area. Actually, Roman knew it was possible because a boyhood friend had made a similar journey in 1990, but he never seriously considered such an insane stunt. "I went surfing, to catch some air," said Roman, who launched from his girlfriend's house on Varadero Beach at 1 P.M. on February 8 and headed for his aunt's place a few miles east of there. But the winds were unfavorable for a family visit, so Roman sailed out to sea instead--and he kept sailing. Navigating first by the sun and later by the North Star, he rode the steady eight- to 15-knot easterlies until he was five miles off Marathon. When the winds died, he stood on his board and rowed with his mast until he rolled up, exhausted, on the beach. Roman, who hopes to be granted political asylum in the United States, said, "Something was calling me.""
http://www.outsideonline.com/adventu...dom-Jiber.html

and


"April 23, 1990 A New Dawn
Lester Moreno Perez fled Cuba by boardsailing toward Florida under cover of darkness
by Sam Moses

In the annals of great escapes, the flight by 17-year-old Lester Moreno Perez from Cuba to the U.S. surely must rank as one of the most imaginative. At 8:30 on the night of Thursday, March 1, Lester crept along the beach in Varadero, a resort town on the north coast of Cuba, and launched his sailboard into the shark-haunted waters of the Straits of Florida. Guided first by the stars and then by the hazy glow from concentrations of electric lights in towns beyond the horizon, Lester sailed with 20-knot winds, heading for the Florida Keys, 90 miles away.

Two hours past daybreak on Friday, Lester was sighted by the Korean crew of the Tina D, a Bahamian-registered freighter. The boom on his craft was broken, and he was just barely making headway, 30 miles south of Key West. The astonished crew pulled Lester aboard, fed him spicy chicken and white rice, and then radioed the U.S. Coast Guard, which sent the patrol boat Fitkinak to take him into custody. After five days in the Krome Detention Center in Miami while paperwork was being processed, he was issued a visa by U.S. immigration officials and released into the welcoming arms of his relatives.

Except for his rich imagination and broad streak of courage, Lester could be any 17-year-old who decides to leave home, He was raised in the shoreside town of Varadero, the second-oldest of five children in his family. "As soon as I started thinking a little bit—when I was seven or eight years old—I wanted to come to America," he says. Independent thinking ran in the family; his grandfather, Urbino, had been imprisoned for attending a counterrevolutionary meeting early in Fidel Castro's regime and spent nearly five years in jail. Furthermore, Lester's sister Leslie, who had been on the national swim team and had traveled to several foreign countries, had told intriguing tales of life outside Cuba. Lester also did not like the idea of serving three years in the Cuban army and then facing the possibility of having his career chosen for him by the Communist Party. There was also trouble at home; he and his stepfather, Roberto, were at odds, mostly over politics. So Lester decided he wanted to go to America, not Angola.

When he was 10 years old, Lester taught himself to windsurf by hanging around the European and Canadian tourists who rented boards on the beach at Varadero. "If you made friends with them, they would sometimes let you use their equipment," he says. As he grew older and got better at the sport, he found he liked the isolation and freedom of the sea. "Sometimes I would sail for eight hours without stopping, and go very far out," he says. His windsurfing to freedom seemed destined."
Continued at http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vau...6974/index.htm



"Balseros Ballenas"
http://juanminero.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html


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Last edited by ricki; 11-22-2017 at 10:59 AM.
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