In Cuba, It Is a Time of Young Men and the Sea

La Gaviota is a graceless homemade rowboat of ill-sawed timber and tired green canvas that will never look like its seagull namesake. But on the rocky beach here Monday, six friends labored mightily to make their craft seaworthy--for they plan to bet their lives on it. This morning they almost certainly will be between hope and desperation in the Florida Straits.

In the chronicle of a failing revolution, it is a time of the young men and the sea.

Ramshackle Cojimar, a short ride east of Havana, is Ernest Hemingway’s old haunt, but as a focus now of an unrelenting exodus of rafters fleeing Cuba, it is pure Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The impossible has become the routine.

“So who’s braver?” asked a bony old woman in an unlikely black wig. “Those who leave in boats that should never set sail, or we who stay?”

Not long ago--only a few days ago--it was a crime to leave Cuba without official permission. For a long time--three decades--the United States welcomed Cubans who succeeded in their flight.

Now, feuding anew with Washington, the Cuban government offers carte blanche to anyone who wants to float away in anything that is not stolen.

“Only if there are young children aboard do the police intervene. The Coast Guard will actually point you in the right direction,” said one hopeful backyard boat-builder named Hector, 27.

Everybody on Cojimar beach Monday knew that American policy changed last week, that Washington is sending out the fleet and pitching tents in detention camps.

No importa . Nobody cares. The thirst to flee unpursued is all-consuming here and at countless other beaches along Cuba’s long northern coastline.

It is fueled by one dramatic fact: Big Brother is not watching. Even better, Big Brother is watching but doesn’t give a damn.

There have been enough subversive shipwrights on Cojimar beach in recent days, in full view of a nearby Cuban Coast Guard station, to have judges working overtime in previous times.

“This is my only chance. I’ll float around for a month until somebody picks us up if I have to. If the Americans detain me, fine. I’m going,” said a young man with a gold earring and long curls, hammering at La Gaviota.

Esteban, a wiry black man with work-hardened hands and one-sixth interest in the boat, grunted his agreement. “I’ll eat better in an American jail than I do here. And sooner or later they’ll have to let me go. What crime is it to flee the unlivable?”

Under the sun, the six friends worked with hammer and pliers and great ingenuity to fashion an awkward outrigger. An encouraging crowd gathered to watch, leaning against Chinese-made bicycles with evocative names like Phoenix and Flying Pigeon. Many in the crowd looked as if they were going too, and some said as much.

One fat woman waddled up under a parasol to contribute to the flight of The Seagull--a single nail. A man in a bright bathing suit who had come to sell a compass pulled a military-looking instrument from a pouch and pointed importantly: “That’s north. You have to steer a few degrees to the east,” he said.

“How much do you want for the compass?”

“Three hundred dollars.”

The good-natured crowd swirled around La Gaviota in a cross-age, cross-gender, cross-race egalitarianism that is a Cuban hallmark. A few weeks ago, such beach theater would have been impossible to imagine. By now, everybody is an expert.

“They are coming day and night now. Yesterday I counted 76 from this beach alone,” said one pimply youth with wanderlust writ large.

A blonde woman sashayed along the beach, smiling winsomely at raft builders, waving a bottle that she offered to contribute for a ride out to sea.

Another woman came back from where two rafters in bathing suits waded ashore from a contraption that seemed mostly one large leak.

“They got scared out there, and now they want to sell the boat for $30. Some nerve,” she scoffed.

At the beach’s edge, a vendor sold peanuts and lollipops. Above him, a BBC television crew filmed rafts already at sea and those, like La Gaviota, waiting for nightfall.

One party of eight would-be Miamians rested in the cool shade next to a catamaran that they had finely and precisely crafted from insulation material intended for refrigerators.

“It’s called Libertad, and it’s not for sale,” said the eldest of the eight, rebuffing a would-be buyer. Nearby, a two-oil-drum raft scraped ashore a few miles from where it had been launched, its disconsolate captain unable to make it sail.

Until the rafters came, Cojimar, pronounced co-HE-mar, was best known to outsiders as the fishing village near where Ernest Hemingway lived and where he found the inspiration and the characters for his novel “The Old Man and the Sea.”

A colonnaded park with a bust of the writer is one of the few fresh-painted buildings in town, across from a Cuban Coast Guard station in a old colonial fortress where sailors with binoculars tracked the procession of rafts moving north.

“Papa (Hemingway) used to lean against this pillar when he drank. If he also ate, it was at that table over there in the corner,” said a bartender, too young to remember, at La Terraza restaurant.

There is an oil painting of Hemingway there, and a striking portrait in copper of the bearded hand-line fisherman named Anselmo, a Cojimar institution for decades, on whom Hemingway modeled the novel’s hero.

“Everything about him was old except his eyes,” reads an inscription that Hemingway wrote in another Cuba.

Today, such echoes from the old are hostage to staccato intrusion from the new. Lunch at La Terraza on Monday came to the strains of breakneck physical labor by four young men on the patio of the building next door. They were building a raft.

* IMMIGRATION WARNINGS: Clinton Administration seeks new ways to slow exodus. A18

* RELATED STORIES: A24, A25