Cuba escape: 34 free, 1 dead, 2 in jail
Two men have been arrested on suspicion of smuggling 35 Cubans from the
island to Palm Beach County, a voyage that left one man dead.
Posted on Sat, Nov. 17, 2007
BY MICHAEL LaFORGIA
The Palm Beach Post
AND JOHN LANTIGUA
The moment had come. In the darkness, Wilfredo Casa shed a jacket and
hat he had worn since boarding the boat three days earlier, stood up on
deck and dived into the roiling black ocean.
In the water he was surrounded by the splashing of 34 other men, women
and children who, like Casa, were bent on leaving Cuba behind. Nearby he
saw his uncle paddling toward shore with a small child on his back.
''The trip was very hard because the seas were rough the whole way,''
Casa, 41, recalled in an interview Friday.
``The water was deeper than six feet and the waves were bad and it was
very dark.''
A FATALITY
All that separated them from the darkened shore of Palm Beach -- and the
end of a more than 300-mile journey from Camaguey, Cuba -- was a swim of
some 150 yards on Thursday morning.
It would prove too much for one of them.
As Casa and the others kicked toward the sand, 39-year-old Carlos
Alberto Pons-Arias slipped beneath the waves.
The first to jump in, Pons-Arias had fought to stay afloat.
At one point he had clung to a fellow traveler, but the other man was
forced to fight free and continue on, authorities said.
Later, after the sodden Cubans had pounded on the door of a $1.7 million
home on Mockingbird Trail, rousing the residents at 2:30 a.m., a Palm
Beach police officer found Pons-Arias drowned in the surf.
On Thursday night, federal immigration agents arrested two South Florida
men on suspicion of smuggling the migrants over on a 33-foot Hydrasport
boat.
Duany Llorente-Jimenez, 24, of Miami and Maikel Soto, 28, of Homestead
remained in federal custody Friday night on charges of migrant smuggling.
About five hours after the Cubans swam ashore Thursday, federal agents
stopped Soto in a white pickup as he tailed a red Corvette out of the
parking lot at the Burt Reynolds boat ramp in Jupiter, according to a
criminal complaint filed Friday in federal court.
A CONFESSION
The man driving the Corvette, Leonardo Tundidor, told investigators Soto
had called him Thursday morning with news that something had gone wrong
during a smuggling run.
Tundidor told them he drove to Leighton Park in Palm City to pick up
Soto and bring him to the pickup in Jupiter, so they could return to
Palm City and pull the boat out of the water.
On the road to Jupiter, Soto told Tundidor he and Llorente-Jimenez had
ferried people over from Cuba three times before and had never had a
problem, according to the complaint.
With Soto in custody in Jupiter, Martin County Sheriff's deputies
arrested Llorente-Jimenez in Palm City, where they found him waiting on
the boat.
A FISHING TRIP?
Both men have maintained they were on a fishing trip from Burt Reynolds
Park to Leighton Park, the complaint noted. They're scheduled to go
before a judge again on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, federal authorities brought the 34 surviving migrants -- 17
men, 12 women, three teens and two children, 3 and 2 -- to a health
clinic in Miami, where they got checkups before they were turned over to
social workers.
By Friday night, all but one, a 15-year-old girl who landed with nothing
but a phone number, were reunited with family and friends, authorities said.
The girl was taken to Boys Town of Florida, a Miami nonprofit that looks
after displaced children, said Agent Robert Swathwood of the U.S. Border
Patrol.
She'll remain there until care workers track down her relatives here.
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