Captain Contradicts El Duque’s Escape

Orlando Hernandez’s story is the stuff of legend. Less than a year after fleeing Cuba on a sinking boat through shark-infested waters, he was pitching the New York Yankees to victory in the World Series.

Now, a man who fled Cuba with “El Duque” says at least part of the story is just that: a legend--more myth than reality.

Juan Carlos Romero says the pitcher fled in a safe motorboat--which even returned to Cuba after dropping him off.

No leaky boat. No sharks. Calm seas.

“El Duque never had to row,” Romero, who piloted the boat, told The Associated Press. “He was lying in the cabin, not paying attention to where we were going. He got seasick and vomited.”

Romero has broken bitterly with the man he helped escape from Cuba nearly a year ago, suing Hernandez for $800,000. He alleges that Hernandez has broken promises to help him financially once they left the communist island.

Hernandez has not talked recently about the journey. He has hinted at aspects of the story that Romero denies--telling Newsweek that the boat began taking on water as soon as it left Cuba and speaking on NBC about the sharks that surrounded him during the trip.

His representatives have reportedly tried to sell the story as a movie treatment and a book deal about his flight to freedom.

This much is known for certain: A star with Cuba’s amateur team, Hernandez fled Cuba on Dec. 26, a year after Cuba banned him from baseball for life for allegedly having contacts with major league agents.

The U.S. Coast Guard picked up him and his seven travel companions on a deserted beach on Anguilla Cay in the Bahamas and took them to a Nassau detention camp. In January, Costa Rica offered asylum to the fugitives, and Hernandez’s agent arranged a private jet to fly them there.

After pitching before scouts in Costa Rican exhibition games, Hernandez signed a four-year, $6.6 million contract with New York. The Yankees won the World Series, and El Duque’s stardom was sealed.

Romero doesn’t quarrel with any of that, but he disputes some of the accounts of the trip.

News accounts at the time, based on interviews with those who made the journey with Hernandez, variously described the craft as “a small boat,” “a raft” and “a sailboat.” The accounts said the boat had been taking on water after the 10-hour trip.

The boat was stocked with drinking water, sugar and four cans of Spam, according to the reports.

Hernandez, interviewed in the Bahamas after the journey, said: “It was a rough trip. We survived on Anguilla Cay by eating conch. It seems to me I’ve lost some weight.”

Romero says the boat was not a raft, but a 20-foot craft with a cabin and diesel motor. He says it never took on water and certainly didn’t sink off the Bahamas. According to Romero, a ninth passenger piloted it back to Cuba so its absence wouldn’t arouse suspicions.

“His claims about being in a raft where the water was leaking in, and rowing along is just a lie,” Romero said. “We never saw a single shark during the trip.”

Romero also accuses Hernandez of dishonesty on another count, saying that in Cuba Hernandez promised to help him get to the United States and find work there. Instead, Romero is still living in Costa Rica with his pregnant wife, struggling on a combined monthly income of $400--barely survival wages in that country.

At first, Hernandez’s agent, Joe Cubas, put them up in a hotel and an apartment for a month. Then, when Cubas stopped paying for the apartment, Romero and his wife had to move to an abandoned warehouse.

“We lived better in Cuba,” the 31-year-old Romero said. “We lost it all when we took El Duque out. For this, we should have stayed in Cuba. We were 10 times better off there.”

Last week, he filed an $800,000 suit in a Costa Rican court against Hernandez, alleging breach of an oral agreement.

“He simply fooled me. He used me to get out of Cuba,” Romero said. “He forgot about me when I was of no use to him.”

Cubas refused to discuss specifics of Hernandez’s flight from Cuba but denied the charges raised in the lawsuit.

“The allegations are completely false,” Cubas said in a phone interview from Miami. Romero “is totally ungrateful. If it wasn’t for us, he would still be in a refugee shelter in Bahamas.”