Cuba: Exodus by Air

Almost 1,000 Cuban exiles milled anxiously about the lobby and observation platforms of Miami’s International Airport. “Do you have someone coming over?” one Cuban asked another. The man crossed his fingers. “We wait. We hope. We pray,” he said.

At 1:59 p.m., the waiting, the hoping, the praying was ended for a fortunate few in the crowd. A Pan American DC-7 taxied up the ramp after a 60-minute hop from the onetime Cuban resort town of Varadero, carrying the first planeload of refugees to leave Cuba under last month’s air-evacuation agreement. Aboard were 75 passengers —15 men, 31 women, 29 children. Before the week was out, another 187 had been flown over to join the 5,000 Cubans who journeyed across by sea in the two months since Castro suddenly decided to let his people go. “If you’ve got some good music on the radio,” beamed one old man, “I could dance right here.”

Black Markets. There are no rich left in Cuba, and hardly any middle class. The refugees were almost all poor: spouses and parents, brothers and sisters of those already in exile, and thus marked as gusanos (or worms), with all the hardship that brings in Cuba. They were fishermen, seamstresses, stevedores, carpenters.

Their stories of Communist repression were no more or less chilling than all the others coming out of Cuba. What was interesting was the talk of growing shortages, as Castro’s grey little island sinks deeper into economic chaos. “Anything that breaks remains broken,” said a Havana clinic worker. “Anything that becomes useless remains useless.” Supplies of clothing, shoes, medicine, meat are diminishing. Even coffee is declining; production this year will be only 25,000 tons, nearly 40% less than the pre-Castro average. What there is fetches a handsome price on a black market that is growing so big that Castro himself recently fumed: “There are some officials who use their own government vehicles to carry their pounds—little pounds or big pounds—of black market coffee.” Sugar may end up 500,000 tons under last year’s 6,000,000-ton crop. In a desperate effort to get needed foreign exchange, Castro has launched Cuba’s sugar harvest two full months ahead of normal.

Freedom House. Castro is treating outgoing refugees with disdain. Many were notified of their departure at 1 or 2 a.m., given only an hour to round up a few belongings while militiamen took inventory of their homes, then were bundled into a bus for the trip to Varadero. They were allowed 44 Ibs. of luggage; everything else belonged to the state. “I didn’t bring anything with me,” said one woman. “I was afraid they wouldn’t allow me on the plane.”

The U.S. picked up the full air tab—$8 per person. Refugees settling in Miami were processed and on their way home with relatives a few hours after their arrival; those locating elsewhere stopped over in “Freedom House” at Miami’s International Airport, where barracks and mess halls were set up. Within 48 hours after their arrival, 54 of the first 75 refugees were on their way to Illinois, New York, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, West Vir ginia, Virginia and Colorado. To start them off, the U.S. gave each refugee traveling alone and going beyond Miami a $60 grubstake, and each family $100.

This week Pan American, which will rotate the shuttle with six other airlines, plans to add a second daily flight, raising the traffic to 3,000 or 4,000 refugees a month. More than 150,000 are expected to take up Castro’s offer.