Cuban Death-Lift Read Free

Garrison Bight that the Sheriff’s Department had to send deputies to direct traffic day and night. And the little harbor was packed. For those of us who had boats on charterboat row, it was a real pain in the butt. Most of them had little knowledge of seamanship, so they were constantly running over anchor lines and ramming into wharves and other boats, occasionally catching fire. It was a deadly serious kind of Keystone Kops. It got so that the other guides and I were afraid to leave our boats unguarded. When you came in from a charter, there were normally two or three Cuban-American boats in your slip, and it wasn’t easy getting them to move. There were people and noise and traffic everywhere, so finally I just said to hell with it.
    And that’s how I happened to be out in my stilthouse off Calda Bank when the squall hit.
    It’s some kind of place to watch a squall come in. It’s an old fisherman’s shack, built in open water eight feet deep, and the nearest land is Fleming Key—about a mile or so away. The old pine clapboard is a weathered gray, and the roof is tin. The sixteen pilings it’s built on are stout and smell of creosote, and they angle down into the clear water where barracuda hang in the shadows and big gray snapper swim their nervous figure eights. I had bought the stilthouse only a few months before. I wanted solitude, and I had the money—more money than I could use in a lifetime, after that deadly last mission off the Marquesas. I had plenty to forget, and I was tired of the strange April madness that had overtaken Key West.
    I wanted to be alone, to rest, to forget. And there is no place on earth better for being alone than a stilthouse.
    On the Friday before the squall, I ambled up to the marina at Garrison Bight and told Stevie Wise to cancel all my charters until the craziness was over. Stevie looked harried and weary, which isn’t hard to understand, really. He lives on an old lunker of a houseboat named Fred Astaire, which is as famous around Key West for its parties as Stevie is well known for his enthusiastic bachelorhood. But it was neither women nor parties which had exhausted him. It was the madness of what the newspapers were calling the Freedom Flotilla.
    We stood in the little marina office staring out at the wild activity in the harbor. Cars with boats on trailers sat in a long line down Roosevelt Boulevard, waiting in the April heat to unload at the cement ramp. Fifty or sixty other boats were rafted in the harbor, while others tried to anchor with knotted lines, old engines smoking, their skippers screaming Spanish insults at each other.
    â€œI can’t believe they’re letting this crap go on,” Stevie said. He had taken the phone off the hook to stop the endless barrage of calls he had been getting from the country’s news media, and he sat behind the counter on a wooden stool.
    â€œCome on, Steve—you’d be going too if you had relatives trapped in Cuba.”
    â€œNo, it’s not that.” He brushed at his thick black hair with a free hand. With the other, he toyed with a pencil. “What I can’t believe is that they’re letting those poor people head across the Strait in those damn little boats. Look out there! What are they, mostly eighteen-to-twenty-three-footers? Shit, that’s suicide.”
    â€œYou’ve got to admire their bravery. They’re a determined people.”
    â€œYeah, determined to get themselves killed. I don’t see why they all just don’t hire shrimp boats—or licensed captains like you—to take them across. Makes a helluva lot more sense.”
    â€œStevie, you know what those shrimp-boat people are charging—and if you don’t, you ought to walk on down and have a beer at the Kangaroo’s Pouch. That’s where all the dealing’s going on. The shrimp boats are getting between fifty and a hundred thou in cash for a trip. And