Journey brings Cuban rafter back to Guantanamo

Journey brings Cuban rafter back to Guantanamo
Thu Mar 16, 2006 8:09 AM ET

By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE (Reuters) - Virgilio Franqui was a
sun-blistered Cuban migrant plucked off a makeshift raft in the Florida
Straits when he first set eyes on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay
in 1993.

He spent 11 months there in a vast tent camp full of refugees. Now a
U.S. Navy medical corpsman and U.S. citizen, Petty Officer Franqui is
back at Guantanamo handling paperwork at the base hospital, which cares
for U.S. service personnel and their families. He is believed to be the
only Cuban refugee ever to have returned as a U.S. serviceman.

"It was either Iceland or Gitmo," Franqui said of the only job postings
available when he asked for the assignment. The "Ice" part did not
appeal to his tropical sensitivities.

Guantanamo has become synonymous in recent years with the prison camp
that holds about 490 foreign captives in the U.S. war against terrorism.
But for tens of thousands like Franqui, the dusty little base in
southeast Cuba has served as a way station for Cubans who want to leave
Cuba, and also for Haitians fleeing their impoverished land.

Franqui's posting will keep him on the island until 2007. But because
Cuba and the United States have no formal diplomatic relations, he
cannot leave the U.S. base to visit any other part of his homeland.

He is friendly with a few Cubans living on the base and said he was
happy to see Cuba again. "Of course you know it's Cuba, so I was happy
to come back," he said. "I was dying to go in the ocean again, the Cuban
ocean."

The United States has leased the base from Cuba since 1903, under a
perpetual agreement that rankles President Fidel Castro, a longtime U.S.
ideological foe who would prefer to evict his tenants.

WAY STATION

U.S.-bound Cuban migrants stopped at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard are
generally returned to Cuba. But those who persuade immigration officers
that they would face persecution from the communist government are taken
to Guantanamo to await rulings on political asylum in the United States
and elsewhere.

There are about 40 at any given time. They live in old hotel-style
quarters and some take jobs to earn a little money as they bide their
time. One works at the base McDonald's.

The migrant population peaked at 45,000 in the mid-1990s, when waves of
Cubans and Haitians fled political and economic upheaval in their
homelands. The United States has since negotiated migration accords to
avert mass exoduses like the one that first brought Franqui to Guantanamo.

He and his father were among 11 people who pitched in to build a crude
15-foot (4.5-meter) raft and set out to sea from a beach near Havana in
1993. Franqui had wanted to leave since he was a boy of 7 or 8 and half
his family had fled during the Mariel boatlift in 1980.

"We didn't like Castro," he said. "I just wanted to leave because I
didn't like the system."

The group was picked up by the Coast Guard three days later. Badly
sunburned and shivering with pneumonia, Franqui watched from the deck as
the ship stopped to pick up other Cubans from rafts and small boats.

"The ocean was full," he said. "It was like ants in the water."

Another ship dropped him at Guantanamo but the arid brown landscape of
southeast Cuba looked nothing like his home near lush, green Havana. He
thought he had been taken to South America.

"I didn't even know this was Cuba," Franqui recalled.

He and his father were sent to a camp at an abandoned airstrip under the
blazing sun, crowded with canvas tents as far as the eye could see.
Franqui turned 21 there, subsisting for the first few months on the
military's limited rotation of packaged ready-to-eat meals called MREs.

"Everybody's fighting for No. 5 with the ham," he said. "This place was
like a market, people trade MREs for stuff."

The tent camp became more bearable as kitchens were set up to cook food,
a small library opened and nightly movies were shown to relieve the
tedium. Franqui was allowed to walk to the beach to swim and cool off.
He was eventually flown to Miami, where much of his family had settled.

He took English classes at a local high school, studied to become an
operating room technician then joined the Navy and took medical training
at a base near Chicago.

Nearly a dozen years after leaving Cuba, he was working at a Navy
hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, choosing his next post. He asked
his assignment detailer about an opening listed for Guantanamo.

"He said 'Have you been here before?' and I said yes. I think that he
thought ... as a station. He said, 'Oh that's good, that's good,'"
Franqui recalled.

He got the posting in 2004 and so did the woman he had been dating. She
is now his wife, Petty Officer Rebecca Franqui, and they live in a small
townhouse on the base that resembles small-town America in the 1950s.

Stepping off the plane into the ovenlike heat of Guantanamo, he was
reminded of his days as a refugee.

"I got very lucky," he said, laughing.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=lifeAndLeisureNews&storyID=2006-03-16T130901Z_01_N39207458_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-GUANTANAMO.xml