Grab at Freedom : Cuban Couple Represent New, Desperate Generation of Refugees

On the coast of Cuba, on a black June night, two swimmers stroke slowly through the shallow, murky water, then dive beneath a fence surrounding a boat owned by a senior Communist official.

Working swiftly, the pair cut the fence, ducking to avoid spotlights sweeping the water near the dock, swim to the boat and cut its mooring lines. Gently, the swimmers tug the 21-foot boat through the gap in the fence and down the coast 150 feet to a landing, where Pedro and Ania Torres, a young Cuban couple, wait silently with 12 others.

“In Cuba, the slogan of the revolution is: ‘Socialism or Death,’ ” said Ania Torres on Tuesday. “Well, we chose neither.”

Ania, 24, a teacher, and her husband, Pedro, 34, an engineering student, reached her aunt’s home in North Hollywood a month ago and have been living there ever since.

They represent a new, desperate generation of Cuban refugees, willing to risk drowning, shark attack, or dehydration for a chance at freedom in the United States. This generation of Cuban immigrants, captured on innumerable television shots floating in black rubber inner tubes tied together with rope, with U.S. helicopters or Coast Guard vessels hovering nearby, is different in many ways from the older generation of Cubans who emigrated to the Valley 30 years ago.

“I think it’s a tragic situation,” said Aurelio De la Vega, a music professor retired from Cal State Northridge who left Cuba by the less rigorous method of simply buying an airplane ticket in 1959, a few months after Fidel Castro came to power.

To De la Vega, a noted composer who started a university music program in Cuba before he fled, this latest generation differs greatly from his because they do not remember Cuba without Castro.

“Cuba was a great country to live in,” remembers Christian Bru, a 73-year-old retired accountant now living in Chatsworth. He left Cuba in 1961 with only a nickel in his pocket. “No pollution. The ocean was beautiful. The country was beautiful.”

Bru, who in Cuba was an accountant for Standard Oil of New Jersey before Castro came to power, said he left because “I did not want my children to live in a communist system. I knew that country would get worse and worse through the years.”

Nonetheless, De la Vega can still identify with the new refugees.

“Once you lose your country, you don’t belong anywhere anymore,” De la Vega said. “You just have people who are congenial to you. You leave behind all your history and all your memories.”

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The generation of Cubans who arrived here in the years just after Castro’s 1959 revolution were often educated, bilingual professionals, such as lawyers, bankers, accountants, businessmen and women, and educators. Together they have constructed a strong, informal network of families, friends and Cuban professionals able to assist new, young arrivals such as the Torres couple.

Pedro and Ania took nothing with them but powdered milk, water and the clothes on their backs when they left. Still wearing those clothes, and speaking in Spanish through an interpreter, Pedro Torres recounted their seaborne escape that would lead them to Los Angeles, home to what Cuban American groups estimate are 45,000 Cuban immigrants.

Vital mechanical parts of the boat they stole had been removed in an attempt to keep it from being used to escape from Cuba, he said. But one of the 16 immigrants aboard was a mechanic who was able to start the motor, but it was stuck in reverse. They motored along backward for a short while until the engine broke down and the group hid on a small island while the mechanic repaired it. They reached the Florida Keys three days after leaving Cuba.

They had to escape, Ania Torres said, “because of the impossibility of continuing to live there.” They had to endure severe food shortages in Cuba and lived in the kitchen of a house with Pedro’s mother, brother and sister. They could not get better jobs because they were not Communist Party members.

Even so, their happiness here is troubled by guilt. They made it to America before the Clinton Administration’s recent reversal of a 28-year U.S. policy of granting asylum to Cubans who reach U.S. soil. The United States has said it will grant 20,000 visas this year to Cuban immigrants who qualify. All others must get in line, no matter how desperate their circumstances.

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As of Monday morning, a total of 31,400 Cubans had been rescued at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard, according to a Justice Department spokesman. They are being detained at camps in Panama, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and at sea on ships. Most will be returned to Cuba.

“I left most of my family behind. I left my grandfather,” Pedro Torres said. “They are suffering, and here we are enjoying freedom and liberty.”

De la Vega, who was a law student at the University of Havana from 1944 to 1947, remembers an energetic fellow student a year behind him named Fidel Castro. “A young man full of ideals,” De la Vega said. “We didn’t see what he was going to become.”

California has the fourth-largest population of Cuban immigrants in the United States, with 71,000, according to 1990 U.S. Census data. New Jersey and New York rank second and third, respectively, and Florida has the most, with 674,000.

Bru sympathizes with the Cubans now being held on American military bases, but he believes the United States cannot absorb so many new immigrants.

“The problem right now is that the economy is not too good,” said Bru, adding, “I wish all the 10 million people over there can come over here, but it’s absolutely impossible.”

Juan Bonilla of Northridge, a controller at NBC who left Cuba in 1962, said he understands the Clinton Administration’s position regarding Cuban refugees, but added, “I think the people that risked their lives should have preference. The ones who rafted over, these people are risking their lives. Most of them have relatives in this country. Let 35,000 or 40,000 in. I guarantee, they will work for their living.”

Pedro and Ania Torres, meanwhile, are busy learning English and planning new lives. Ania has already found a theater group and has a small part in a Cuban play. Pedro is seeking a job that will allow him to continue his studies as a computer engineer.

“Maybe some day, we can have this in Cuba,” Ania said, smiling and hugging Pedro’s arm.

* RELATED STORY: A20