For migrants more trouble follows risky trip

Posted on Sat, Mar. 18, 2006

FLIGHT TO FREEDOM
For migrants, more trouble follows risky trip
Cubans borrow all the money they can, risk their lives to get to a
remote island and face more trouble getting into the United States after
all that.
BY FRANCES ROBLES
frobles@MiamiHerald.com

Abel Mejía and Hilda Barbara Iglesias borrowed $8,000 from every friend
they have to finance a journey across the Mona Passage.

A Havana native, Mejía lived in the Dominican Republic for five years.
The former merchant marine later sent for his wife and three kids, but
he wound up having to pull his 15-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter
out of school: He could not afford the fees.

''It did not go well for me in Santo Domingo,'' he said. ``It was
actually worse than Cuba.''

The family left the southern coast town of San Pedro de Macoris on the
afternoon of March 10 with just a backpack filled with food and water.
When they got to their departure point, other Cubans with the same plan
joined them.

The passengers split up among three vessels, about 20 feet long. With a
heavy heart, Mejía stepped into one boat and left his wife and three
kids in another.

The waters were rougher than expected and the voyage longer. The choppy
sea thrashed the boat about, lifting the fiberglass vessel and crashing
it down on the cold water.

''It was 11 hours of 18-foot waves,'' Mejía said. 'People tell you: `Be
careful with your kids. This is hard.' But the person who tells you that
made it, and you are desperate.''

They finished the voyage to Mona Island, were later transferred to an
immigration detention center in Puerto Rico and were freed on Tuesday.

Hours later, they were on the street and broke -- one of two Cuban
families set free this week who had nowhere to go and no money.

Cubans United in Exile, an exile organization in San Juan, shelled out
$1,866 for tickets to Miami for the two families. Standing outside the
group's office as agency volunteer Aurora Ray shooed them out, a rattled
Mejía asked nobody in particular: ``How are we supposed to eat tonight?
What are we supposed to do when we get to Miami?''

Ray said some of the Cuban migrants she sends to Miami wind up at
Camillus House.

The Cuban American National Foundation helped the Mejía family contact
friends who could house them in Miami, and it's paying for the second
family to stay at a Little Havana motel.

''From the moment we stepped foot on soil, the warm reception we've
gotten has been incredible,'' Mejía's wife, Hilda Barbara Iglesias,
said. ``In Cuba, they tell you something different.''

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/14127788.htm