A boat with more than 800 Haitians seeking to reach the United States landed the day before in a town in central Cuba, where the migrants said they had asked for help with light signals for being adrift after the abandonment of their captain.
They were taken to a temporary reception center, The Associated Press found on Wednesday.
“We had been on Tortuga Island for two months waiting for the trip until last Saturday at 5 in the morning in a yola (a small boat) they took us to the ship,” Joyce Paul, 19, one of the women, told The Associated Press. people who arrived on the ship packed with compatriots, including nursing children and pregnant women.
In those days “there were 15 people who threw themselves into the sea because they couldn’t stand hunger. There was a herring for (each) 15 and they gave us water, ”said Paul, who traveled with an uncle, his wife and a baby at a cost of 4,000 dollars per person.
842 people were traveling, including 70 children and 97 women -two pregnant-, indicated the journalist Máximo Luz, from the official broadcaster Telecubanacán on his Facebook portal.
According to the story of this family, the captain of the ship abandoned them at dawn on Tuesday. When he left, he took everyone’s phones in another small boat and left them on board without a pilot. In parallel, the ship began to tilt. Through light signals with a flashlight, the migrants managed to attract the attention of the inhabitants of the Cuban coast.
The arrival took place on Tuesday at a point called Villa Blanca, in the vicinity of the town of Caibarién – some 300 kilometers east of Havana – in the province of Villa Clara with the participation of border guard units and rescuers.
The migrants “intended to arrive by irregular means to the United States” although, Luz explained, “the adverse navigation conditions” brought them to Cuba, where “they requested the help of the border guard troops.”
There was no official version of the details of what happened.
The official Cubadebate website showed images of a gray boat of medium draft and crowded with people in the vicinity of the coast before being evacuated. In other photographs you can see the work of the rescuers and soldiers who supported the Haitians’ arrival on land and then the migrants in a line receiving face masks.
They were later taken to the temporary reception center. The place, one kilometer from the beach, consists of small cement huts with tiled roofs and colorfully painted walls. On Wednesday afternoon some Haitians there played soccer or board games.
Although it is not unusual for Haitian migrants traveling north to end up in Cuba due to winds and ocean currents, such a large group has never been reported.
Miguel Ángel Fernández, head of the Red Cross in Villa Clara province, indicated that the 842 Haitians had received medical attention and first aid. “They are in quarantine,” he told the AP, adding that they will be in that condition for between 72 hours and five days.
For her part, Arletys Ramos, a municipal epidemiology director, indicated that Haitians are monitored in relation to diseases such as COVID-19, malaria and cholera and although no one is seriously ill, they had to intervene to control some dehydrated and others with affections. on the skin.
These 842 migrants are expected to be returned to Haiti under existing agreements between that country and Havana, Cubadebate said.
A crumbling economy and a surge in gang-related violence and kidnappings in Haiti prompted thousands to flee the country last year and according to US authorities the number of detainees in and around US jurisdictions in the Caribbean is has doubled.
“There is a lot of insecurity, there is my God,” said Paul when asked why he had left Port-au-Prince to go to Tortuga to begin this journey. According to the man, his two sisters were murdered by gangs.
On Tuesday, the US Coast Guard said it detained a freighter carrying about 153 Haitian migrants near the Florida Keys. Earlier this month, that force found 36 people of that nationality and found 11 dead, all women, after a boat capsized in northwestern Puerto Rico.
The rescue came just days after another 68 migrants were rescued in treacherous waters between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
In April, the Coast Guard saw more than 130 Haitian migrants aboard a ship near the Bahamas, and a month earlier another 140 migrants landed in the Keys.
Coast Guard crews have intercepted some 4,500 Haitians since October of last year. Many were trying to land in the Keys in overloaded boats. More than 3,000 such migrants have been found since mid-March, indicating the pace has quickened this spring.
In February, a group of 292 Haitians had arrived in the Cuban province of Ciego de Ávila.
