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| Robert L. Scheina |
© ABIP 2020
“I had never faced death before nor seen it on other people’s faces. I’ll never forget those children. Or the look in their mothers’ faces,” said Eduardo Serrera in Helga Silva’s book The Children of Mariel.
While Cubans did not leave their country before 1959, once Cuba became Castro’s communist paradise, history is riddled with massive and daring escapes. There are enough thrilling and dramatic stories to fill entire libraries and entire graveyards. But these escapes happened in all countries that fall to Communism as life becomes unbearable.
Eduardo Serrera recalls the traumatizing event he experienced after leaving the port of Mariel, Cuba in 1980. He was crammed aboard a 24-foot shrimp boat along with 36 men, women and children. He was leaving with his mother, but was forced to travel separately by Castro’s guards. He lost track of her.
“By the third day water started coming into the boat. We used everything at hand – buckets, containers – to bail out.” Fortunately, around noon the U.S. Coast Guard spotted the boat. Serrera recalls, “The sailors had to make a human chain to physically lift us from our sinking boat.”
Aboard the cutter on their way to the U.S., they encountered other Cubans in distress in the Florida Straits. But not everybody could be saved because the waves prevented the Coast Guard cutter from getting close enough to rescue them. A boat was drifting away and falling apart and Serrera cannot forget the screams for help.
“It was awful.” When the women aboard realized that they could not be rescued, they “picked up their children and threw them over the railings over to our side. Eight or nine children were flung in the air. I caught one, a baby – about nine months old – so cold his skin was blue. And his eyes were open wide in terror.
“The women on the boat looked so desperate when their boat began to drift away. They wailed in pain. I could hear their voices trail off in the darkness begging us to look after their children.”
According to Helga Silva’s book, of the more than 125,000 refugees who came to the U.S. during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, there were 13,000 to 18,000 minors.
But the U.S. “liberal” media (with a few exceptions) was silent to these tragedies and at every opportunity the Cuban exiles were derided and vilified for being anti-communists. Their experiences with that totalitarian system were left out of the mainstream media and Americans were kept ignorant of this example of the evil of Marxist philosophy.
Today with the experience of the coronavirus and the secrecy of China's Communist Party, I hope that many wake up and think very seriously about the future of America and for whom they must vote. If we lose America, we don't have any place to escape to.
Filmmaker Agustin Blazquez's latest production is The Ava Gardner Museum
Filmmaker Agustin Blazquez's latest production is The Ava Gardner Museum
