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Storm. Still others were eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks, much like Captain Quint in Jaws . Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. As we’ve seen on the Discovery Channel, sharks don’t dally at a meal.
    â€œIn space no one can hear you scream,” says the ad for the original Alien . Same is true for the middle of the Florida Straits; except, of course, for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while watching the fins rush in and water froth in white, then red, they hear the screams all too clearly. Elian Gonzalez might know.

    All during the decades coinciding with Castro’s rule, the Coast Guard has documented hundreds of such stories. Were the cause of these horrors more “politically incorrect,” we’d have no end of books, movies, documentaries, TV interviews, survival-story specials, etc. We’d never hear the end of it. Alas, the agents of this Caribbean holocaust are the Left’s premier pin-up boys.
    So what’s the alternative if you can’t flee Cuba, among “the Best Countries in the World” according to Tina Brown’s Newsweek and a “happy island” according to The New York Times?
    Well, in 1986, Cuba’s suicide rate reached 24 per thousand—double Latin America’s average, triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate, Cuban women the most suicidal in the world , and suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15 to 48. At that point, the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites. 4
    But apparently they did not faze Newsweek .
    During the summer of 1961, as the Berlin Wall went up, Miami’s Cuban Refugee Center started keeping records of the refugee wave then setting out from Herbert Matthews’s “happy island.” By late 1964 they recorded 1,002 boats and rafts of various types carrying more than 10,000 bedraggled Cubans to Florida. Approximately 800 of these craft were first spotted in mid-passage by the Coast Guard’s two Grumman Albatross planes patrolling the Straits. These then notified the U.S. Coast Guard, who escorted the escapee crafts to U.S. shores.
    Too often, however, upon being alerted and guided by their airborne colleagues, the cutter would pull up to an empty boat or one filled with corpses. At the time, the Cuban Refugee Center and the U.S. Coast Guard estimated that, for every Cuban who made it to the U.S., three died—by drowning, exposure, sharks or bullets. The odds were well known in Cuba. And still they came. 5
    Arturo Cobo, who runs a refugee center in Key West ( Hogar de Transito para los Refugiados Cubanos), says the number of dead
freedom-seekers tops the 70,000 figure often cited. “Word eventually reached Cuba that our group was helping rafters here in Key West,” says Cobo, a Bay of Pigs veteran. “So there came a point in the 80’s when we started getting calls from Cuba saying so and so just left on a raft from such and such a place. Can you please notify us when they reach the U.S.?”
    â€œUsually my heartbreaking notification to the Cuban relatives came a few weeks later,” says Cobo, “meaning that that no people by those names had ever been rescued or processed. The vast majority never reached the U.S. At first it was an informal tally. But finally I began posting the names and the dates of their departure from Cuba on a wall and running them against the names of those who we rescued at sea or helped and processed when they somehow made it to land. My informal study showed that right around three-quarters of the freedom-seekers never made landfall. And many who did we had to rush to local hospitals—dehydration, sunburn, dementia, all of that for sure, but also add gunshot wounds from Castro’s police, shark attacks, etc. I well remember processing