Cubans go to Mexico to dodge U.S. sea patrols

updated 5:16 a.m. ET Oct. 19, 2008

ISLA MUJERES, Mexico - On the night Lazaro Mendez got an alert that his boat had been stolen from the Florida Keys, he was swept up in a new chapter of the Cuban boat people drama.

Grabbing a laptop computer that tracked the fishing boat's position by satellite, he watched as it stopped for refueling at sea, then shot off toward Cuba — the latest in a swarm of thefts of Florida boats prized by smugglers for their speed.

Mendez, a Cuban-American and a popular Miami radio personality known as "DJ Laz," set out to get his boat back, succeeded, and even came face to face with the men who stole it. But it was just the tiniest of setbacks for a human-trafficking industry that is thriving off the Cuban exodus.

Because it has become so hard to dodge the U.S. Coast Guard and reach Florida to qualify for U.S. residency, Cuban migrants in recent years have been heading for Mexico, then overland to Texas. Last year 11,126 used that route, compared to just 1,055 who landed in the Miami area, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Evidence of this new escape route is stacking up at a Mexican Navy yard in Isla Mujeres, where the dock regularly runs out of space for seized Florida boats. During a visit to the small Navy dock last week, The Associated Press counted eight super-fast boats, all with Florida registration numbers.

Getting fed up
Mexican authorities are getting fed up, and islanders fear the trafficking is bringing crime to laid-back Islas Mujeres, off Cancun. The problem has grown so acute that Cuba's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, is making a rare visit to Mexico Sunday and Monday to discuss solutions.

Thefts of boats for smuggling are so frequent that some insurance companies require Florida owners to equip their boats with GPS — satellite tracking systems. That's how Mendez discovered his cherished Tranquility was stolen — the system alerted him by cell phone and updated its location every 15 minutes.

"The entire time I was on my laptop, watching every move that they made," Mendez told the AP in a telephone interview from Miami, where has a daily show on WPOW. When he saw Tranquility heading straight for Mexico, "I decided to jump on a plane and go and get my boat back."

He reached a dock on Isla Mujeres just in time to confront the men as they were tying up his boat.

"They walked by me. They're wearing my fishing hat! My fishing glasses!" he recalled. But they didn't know he had alerted police, who pulled out assault rifles and promptly arrested them.

"I showed them the laptop and I said, 'Look, this is where you stole the boat, this is you in the ocean, this is when you went to Pinar del Rio (Cuba), this is where you picked up all the people, this is where you dropped all the people," Mendez recounted.

Cache of stolen boats
He brought his boat to a local police dock and was astonished to find 19 other boats there — all of them U.S.-registered speed boats like his own. These US$175,000 "center console" boats, which often have three engines to reach 60 mph and give anglers the edge in fishing tournaments, can jam 25 migrants on board and make the 120-mile (190-kilometer) run from Cuba to Isla Mujeres in a couple of hours.

Isla Mujeres is now rife with tales of speedboats set adrift or afire to distract the Mexican Navy while the smugglers escape.

U.S. Coast Guard patrols have sharply reduced the flow of Cubans across the narrow Florida Straits, enforcing a policy of returning people intercepted at sea to Cuba's communist government.

It's called "wet-foot, dry-foot" — wet for those caught at sea, dry for those who reach land in Florida and thus qualify for U.S. entry. A third expression has entered the jargon — "dusty-foot," referring to Cubans who arrive in Texas, where Cubans need only present identity documents and undergo medical and background checks before being welcomed to America.

The price of passage is US$5,000 to US$10,000 per person and much shorter than in the days when Cubans would spend days at sea headed for Florida or Mexico on rickety boats and rafts. They were known as "balseros," from the word "balsa" to indicate the flimsiness of their boats.

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