“Dozens of illegal immigrants were sent back to Cuba after being stopped in four vessels off the Florida Keys, US Coast Guard officials said. Photos released by the Coast Guard showed the migrants tightly huddled on small wooden boats, including one that appeared to be extremely tattered.” (New York Post, June 20.)
The titillation and thrill of the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” is totally lost on Cuban exile Elicier Castillo, a former heavyweight boxing champ, so not exactly a wimp. “I get goose bumps whenever I see anything with sharks and turn it right off,” he says. The Cuban boxer and four partners including his two brothers lashed together an inner tube and canvas raft in 1994, hopped aboard and paddled north into the Gulf Stream as part of a small fleet of similar floating contraptions filled with similar desperate Cubans.
As usual, within hours sharks were trailing and circling the rafts. The current carried the ramshackle rafter flotilla away from the U.S. and Castillo spent five days at sea. He recalls watching many of the rafts around him capsizing and falling apart from the waves. The sharks would rush in immediately, their patience and diligence paying off. Castillo would see the water frothing white, then red as his fellow rafters yelled for help. “But what could anyone do?” he recalled.
“Getting attacked by a shark just might be the scariest event in nature!” gasped a Discovery Channel narrator during Shark Week a few years ago. “Australia recorded 56 fatal shark attacks between 1956 and 2008!” he gasped again. “Find out what it's like from people who've lived to tell the tale!”
So the Discovery Channel went back over half a century and to a distant continent to interview the victims and dramatize the attacks. But why the distant timeline and setting, ask many people in south Florida.
“The Florida Straits probably record 56 fatal shark attacks every few years,” says Matt Lawrence, who spent years flying over the straits rescuing desperate Cuban rafters. "Probably every month during the early 90s,” adds the late Bay of Pigs vet Arturo Cobo who ran the rafter rescue center in Key West and for years heard the sobbing, gut-gripping details of these attacks almost daily.
“I’ll never forget the case of the two teenagers who came ashore, sunburnt, malnourished as usual, but also in a state of near hysteria,” recalled Arturo Cobo. “After a while they could finally explain how their father, in a delirious state from thirst and exposure, finally jumped in the water. They threw him a rope tied to the raft and he clutched it. So they turned away for a second, slightly relieved—but only to spot a huge shark approaching, then another. Soon an entire school was around their raft.
“And almost before they could react, the sharks ripped into their father from all sides. From what they told me a day later at the local hospital, what erupted around their tiny raft was a feeding frenzy, like the ones you see on those shark shows where they bait the water for hours to attract the sharks. The water turned red as their father was eaten alive…. I can tell you from decades of and heart-breaking work from our center here in Key West that in the Florida straits every week was shark week…”
“Something was moving in this raft,” recalled one of Matt’s colleagues in airborne rescue. “So I went in lower. The water all around the raft was turning red…the cloud spreading. Then I saw the shark—about the same length as the raft. The rafter was in fact a Cuban woman in her early twenties. Upon her rescue we found she had two bullet wounds in her legs from Castro’s frontier police. All others in the raft, including two infants had died, as did the shark, from being repeatedly stabbed by the pointed end of a broken oar by Maria. The Shark had bitten the oar in half as Maria pounded him...I started flying rescue missions full-time after that.”
Were the “root-cause” of this drama and horror more politically-correct can you imagine its popularity in movies? Docudramas? Reality TV? But AH! These desperate people are all fleeing the handiwork of the left’s premier pin-up boys, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Enough said.
The waters surrounding Cuba are famed for their hordes of sharks. Most people entering them for extended periods (all those showboat swimmers like Diana Nyad, Penny Palfrey, etc.) insist on a defense against them. Yet from a quarter to a half million Cubans have crossed these waters with little between them and the sharks than thin rubber or canvas--and knowing the odds were close to 50-50 that their raft would overturn or crumble.
Almost as if to celebrate their swinish hypocrisy, back in 2015 the Discovery Channel featured Cuba itself in an episode. “Searching for Monstrous Sharks Near Cuba,” is how ABC headlined that week’s Discovery program titled “Tiburones de Cuba.”
And yet on this very blockbuster show (produced in conjunction with totalitarian Cuba’s propaganda ministry) focusing on an area of the world that must witness among the most shark attacks on earth—on this very program the Discovery producers do not mention a single shark molesting a single human being!
For Cuba-watchers, an explanation for this neck-wrenching and whip-lashing 180 degrees by Discovery’s producers comes to mind:
Upon viewing a Shark Week segment featuring shark attacks off Cuba, even some liberals might ask themselves:
Gosh? But why is it that for over half a century so many thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Cubans have risked the “scariest event in nature” in these waters simply to escape the free and fabulous healthcare the media keeps telling us is the primary feature of life in Castroite Cuba?”
After all, a few years ago Newsweek hailed Cuba as among the “Best Countries in the World!” And in 2015, Time Magazine gushed that: “People enjoy life in Cuba like in few other places. They’re safe, literate and healthy!”
Yet prior to Castroism Cuba (a nation with a higher standard of living than half of Europe) took in more immigrants per-capita than did the U.S.—and yes, that includes the Ellis Island years. In fact, during the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s—when Cubans could get a U.S. visa virtually for the asking and were perfectly free to emigrate with all of their belongings—during this entire period more Americans lived in Cuba than did Cubans in the U.S.
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