The rescuers

A Cuban-Rhode Islander flies home

by Ana Cabrera

"If we have to ditch the plane in the ocean, the water will come to about here," says Bill Schuss, slapping his hand midway on the passenger window of the silver Cessna 337 Skymaster I am preparing to board. I have just enough time to note that his hand is level with my nose when he swings open the door and yanks out a yellow life preserver.

"Put this on," he says. "You know how these things work, don't you?"

I nod as I fiddle with the plastic ends of the nylon cords. Schuss points to the interior of the plane, to a red latch under a clear vinyl cover. "I'll depend on you to pull that out while we go down. You may want to take your shoes off then. The copilot and I will do everything else. There will be plenty of time before we hit the water."

Schuss must see the trepidation on my face. Smile lines crinkle around his eyes as he pats me on the shoulder. "Relax," he jokes. "I don't think we'll see any MIGs today."

I laugh and get in the plane, watching Schuss as he crosses the tarmac to a similar craft, where his partner, Jose Basulto, is performing last-minute checks. Through the open window I can hear Basulto telling the mechanic to look for anything unusual, anything that could be a bomb.

Schuss and copilot Agusto Rosa strap themselves in and we take off from Opa Locka Airport, in southern Florida. The sky is clear blue and the visibility perfect. Our destination: the waters near the 24th parallel, only 30 or so miles north of Havana, Cuba, and a mere 20 miles from Cuban airspace, the 12-mile cushion around Cuba in which pilots need Cuban permission to fly. Permission we do not have.

Schuss and Basulto have done this a few hundred times before. They are the founders of Miami's infamous Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue, or BTTR), a group of pilots that routinely flies near Cuban airspace in search of balseros -- Cuban émigrés who have fled the country on boats and homemade rafts in hopes of washing up on a friendly shore. In 1996, Basulto's craft was the sole survivor of a three-plane mission that made national headlines when two were shot down by Cuban fighter jets after they had breached Cuban airspace.

That was not the first brush between a Brothers plane and a Cuban MIG. There had been several near-misses in the past, and at least one BTTR plane found itself escorted to safety by US Air Force pilots responding to reports there might be trouble. Today, Basulto and co-pilot Raul Martines fly in N2506, the same light-blue Cessna in which he escaped the MIGs with his life.

Basulto and Schuss, now both 58, founded BTTR in 1991, after watching a televised report of the death of a 15 year-old balsero named Gregorio Perez Ricardo. "He was in a fetal position in the raft," says Schuss, "and the Coast Guard people were trying to save him. He had managed to escape Cuba, but the attempt cost him his life."

The story moved Schuss to call his old friend, Basulto, to see if there was anything they could do to prevent further tragedies like Gregorio's. Using credit cards to buy fuel for the first missions, the two pilots began flying an area of the Caribbean in which, due to ocean currents, boats were most likely to drift. To date, BTTR claims to have assisted more than 5000 rafters found during 2500 rescue missions or, as they put it, one life for each five hours spent in flight.

But in spite of the humanitarian nature of BTTR's early efforts, it must be noted that the founding fathers of the group have a strong history of political activity and that they were motivated by something more than charity. Basulto, who attended Boston College for awhile, left that for the University of Havana to organize student uprisings. Schuss claims to have met Ché Guevara during his student days. Both Basulto and Schuss say they trained with the CIA before they joined the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation.

The two men have diametrically opposing personalities: Basulto, an architectural engineer who took part in a 1962 assassination attempt against Castro, is jovial and intense. Schuss, a one-time agent for the CIA and a former Dallas cop, is more stoic and silent. Both men bristle openly at the sound of one name: Fidel Castro. And so both have taken their combined years of training to spend their own time pursuing what is essentially a very dangerous passion -- breeding anti-Castro sentiment while helping the rafters to safety.

My own obsession with the balseros began a few years after the first BTTR flights in 1994. I was a writer for a newspaper in the Cayman Islands, a British-dependent territory some 150 miles south of Cuba. Late that summer, President Fidel Castro had thrown open Cuba's doors, letting anyone who wanted to escape do so. Tens of thousands fled. Many took to the sea in whatever they could get their hands on, amassing a pathetic fleet similar to the one that had embarked from Mariel in Cuba in the 1980s.

Nearly 1200 of those balseros washed up on the shores of Grand Cayman, where the government put them into a campsite about the size of Kennedy Plaza and refused to give them asylum. I saw up close the "boats" to which they had entrusted their lives. Having grown up in New England, I thought about how no self-respecting Yankee sailor would have braved the North Atlantic in those hunks of junk.

I was horrified. I was born in Cuba. Were it not for the twists of fate that took my family to Rhode Island, I, too, might have been one of those 1200 faces staring at me whenever I walked with my notebook through their dusty campsite.

And now here I was on this Brothers to the Rescue mission, reliving those faces all over again, only this time 700 feet above the Atlantic. I wasn't a former CIA agent with a political agenda: I was just a journalist -- a Rhode Islander and a Cuban -- staring helplessly at the endless water and hoping against hope, for a reason as of yet unclear to me, to find a speck of life in the blue.

When people refer to Miami as "Little Havana," they aren't joking: outside of South Miami Beach, with its turquoise-, yellow-, and purple-tinted Art Deco district, the city belongs to the Cuban expatriate population. Businesses that originated in Cuba during the era of dictator Fulgencio Batista in the early 1950's transplanted themselves to the area, and now the Cuban-Americans are an economic and political force in the city.

So when, as a result of Castro's 1994 open-door policy, balseros risked their lives in staggering numbers -- there were several thousand in Panama, more in Belize, and in Cuba 20,000 of them were holing up in a sprawling, makeshift tent city at the Guantanamo Naval Base, waiting to leave -- Miami's Cubans put pressure on the Clinton administration to do something to rescue their fleeing relatives. And while Clinton pow-wowed with advisors, trying to find a balance between keeping the lines of communication with Castro open and securing the crucial Cuban-American vote in the upcoming 1996 election, BTTR stepped up its efforts. According to Basulto, at one point BTTR planes were flying every day in search of balseros.

Now, it is midmorning and we are flying 600 feet above some uninhabited chunks of land in the Bahama chain. The water is spectacularly clear, bright blue-green with a few whitecaps visible. The two planes on the mission have split up so they can cover more area.

"Basulto is about 10 miles that way," Schuss explains, pointing westward. We are heading toward Salt Key, one of the larger islands on which there is an abandoned airstrip. I can see the remains of what looks to me like a Quonset hut, and assorted other small buildings.

Salt Key is a routine stop for BTTR, because boats often drift there due to the currents. "This is one of the better places for them to end up," Schuss says, matter-of-factly. "At least they have some kind of shelter." BTTR has rescued quite a few people from this spot, which has a pretty beach, dense vegetation and all the natural potential for an island resort.

"Are you ready?" says Schuss. "I am going to show you a close-up of one of our planes that crashed there."

Crashed?

"We were trying to rescue a girl that day," Basulto says of how he ended up landing a BTTR plane on the small strip of land. BTTR flew to Salt Key after they'd heard reports of balseros marooned there. "The Coast Guard was going to do nothing and the Bahamians, even less," he says, painting an image right out of a superhero comic: BTTR planes heading out to go where no one else would, to save the life of an individual they were told was diabetic.

It turned out she was not diabetic -- she wasn't even sick. So Basulto counted the number of balseros on the island, gave them some food, and made plans to airlift them off Salt Key. But while landing the plane had been relatively simple, takeoff was something else.

First, the crew tried to improve the crumbling runway, hacking a path through the vegetation with machetes. But the poor ground conditions and the high winds that day made for a combination that proved too much. "We couldn't go fast enough to pick up altitude," he says. "And as soon as we hit the treetops, I had just enough time to say to myself, `Oh, shit!' when we pancaked. Splat. Just like that."

Splat. It's as good a word as any to describe what it's like to be a Cuban living in the United States. A lot of us landed here, as I did, as youngsters. I remember kicking and screaming as my father hauled me onto that plane back in 1960, the one I was told was going to take us to this place called America. I had no comprehension of the politics going on where I had been born, or of the sheer fear that drove my parents to escape at all costs. All I knew that day was that something momentous was happening to me. Splat. Just like that.

We moved to Rhode Island, and I wondered why there were no palm trees. To a child who had never owned a wool sweater, it was very, very cold. And when I began school here, none of my classmates had any idea of where I had come from. I used to point it out on the map to them, and, compared to the United States, Cuba seemed miniscule to them. And, eventually, to me. They didn't understand it, and I gave up trying to explain a land that evoked an emotional connection that I didn't yet have the vocabulary to talk about. It just seemed much easier to do whatever it took to fit in. And to forget a place that, as the years passed, seemed more and more alien to me.

"Don't write about how close we got to the ground!" Schuss laughingly shouts to me through my headset, and the plane swoops low, low, lower. We are maybe 100 feet above the trees. In the middle of the island is the unmistakable wreck of a plane -- a Cessna 337, like ours -- the one Basulto smashed because of wind-shear problems. What are left are the wings and the hull -- the usable parts were salvaged by BTTR on another mission. Schuss says BTTR has lost six planes so far. One pilot had to ditch in the gator-infested Everglades. Another of their members is partially paralyzed because of a sabotage-related crash.

We circle around the carcass of the Cessna twice, my stomach a mile below me. Finally we head up again, and Schuss turns eastward towards the shoreline.

"There are a few boats along the beach, can you see them?" he asks. That I can. At least five. Schuss explains to me that he always knows when it is a Cuban boat. "They have only three colors of paint," he says. "Gray, dark blue, or green."

As we leave the remains of the plane, I can't help but think of the neat metaphor between the wrecked shell and what happened to me in the Cayman Islands, how my own career was wrecked by an attempt to do something about the balseros stranded there. I haunted their dirty campsite almost daily, and when I could finally tear myself away to go home, I would have to stop my car by the side of the road to let out a primal scream, release the rage, confusion, and pent-up emotions that overwhelmed me.

I wrote passionately about their troubles for the newspaper, committed the cardinal journalistic-sin of getting too involved in a story. But I couldn't stop. Because every time I looked into the eyes of the balseros stranded there, I saw myself looking back.

By the time the Caymanian balseros found asylum, I'd written one story too many, scribbled too many editorials casting the Caymanian government's inhospitable policy in an unfavorable light. I was ousted from sunny Cayman, back in New England, without a job during the snowiest winter on record. A friend on the island told me later I'd "done something to anger someone high up." That someone forced me out of the Caribbean for the second time in my life.

Soon after, with the stream of balseros dwindling to a trickle, BTTR adopted guerrilla tactics. They crossed the line between search-and-rescue and into civil disobedience, deliberately flying south over the 24th parallel and into Cuban airspace. They dropped half-a-million anti-Castro leaflets right over Havana. The Cuban government warned the US that if BTTR kept up these illicit flights, they would deploy jetfighters to take action. On February 24, 1996, when BTTR again crossed the line, they did.

"We hit him. Cojones. We hit him. This one won't mess around anymore." Those are the words in the transcript of the radio conversation by the MIG pilot who demolished a BTTR plane flown by pilot Carlos Costa and Antonio Morales at 3:21 p.m. on that February day.

Basulto, who had seen the MIGs and had lost track of Costa and Morales, radioed the second plane. Co-pilot Antonio de la Peña said, "I did not see a MIG. I saw smoke and a flare." Those were his last words -- he and pilot Armando Alejandro were shot out of the sky at 3:28 p.m. While Basulto's passenger, Sylvia Iriondo, clutched a rosary in the back seat, Basulto raced toward Key West. Two MIGs chased him until 3:51, when Havana ordered the planes home.

Today, Washington officials insist Basulto was pressing his luck, that they had told him repeatedly that Cuba had threatened to open fire if BTTR kept up their activities. Further, they say the Brothers continual flights over Cuba -- deliberate violations of the law -- provoked an international incident.

A report of the incident filed by Brigadier General Rodney P. Kelly of the US Air Force states that BTTR deviated from their filed flight plan that day. And even though Basulto denies it, the report says his plane had indeed flown south of the 24th parallel and into Cuban airspace. Basulto swears the MIGs followed him within an inch of Miami, but Kelly's findings show the jets never got closer than roughly 48 miles from his plane, and that they never entered US territory.

Today, Jose Basulto speaks about February 24 like a man haunted by bad dreams. He refutes the official findings, spouts conspiracy theories, lectures in public forums, and says he won't stop calling for more investigation until the day he dies. He also won't wear his gold Rolex anymore. "I figure somebody is going to get me eventually, either Castro or some politician in Washington I might have pissed off," he jokes, waving his hands animatedly. "If somebody finds me dead on the street, I want to make sure the world knows I didn't get killed by a mugger looking to steal my jewelry."

And as Schuss and Basulto carry on routine communications with air-traffic control in Havana, I can see it now, a long strip of land. Cuba. As my schoolmates once noted, it really is small. And yet, it evokes such powerful emotions in those of us who were born there. I think of the people who live there now, who risk a nasty death in these waters as they try to get out of the country's grip. And I think of those of us who escaped it, like Basulto, like Schuss, and like me, how, no matter how far away we go, we are all, in a way, driven back to it, though the effort might kill us.

I want to go home, but suddenly don't know where home is. I begin hoping that Schuss will land the plane on the island. It is so very, very close. I want to walk on the soil, breathe the air, see the palm trees. I passionately need to make mine again what has been taken away. I feel the blood rushing hot in my hands, like what always happens to me when I've got a story I want to write, one dying to come out.

Only now does it occur to me that we are in the approximate area where the MIGs shot down the BTTR planes in 1996. Only now does it occur to me that, this gorgeous morning, I am flying with both of the founders of BTTR -- men who had joked with me earlier about how lucky they'd been so far. And I think about how my cousin is getting married in a beautiful church in Coral Gables this evening. My whole family is looking forward to this occasion, and for a moment I panic, no longer feeling like Indiana Cabrera out on some adventure. Now I feel small and vulnerable and frightened, worried that I might not be lucky today and might not get to that wedding.

Then I look again at Cuba, and at the water around it. I don't see any balseros. I don't see any MIGs. What I see is Schuss's face outlined against the plane's windshield and, through it, the shadowy forms of Basulto and Martines in N2506 in the distance. And I realize that these guys have families waiting for them, too.

Ana Cabrera can be reached at IndianaMC@yahoo.com.