‘I’ve arrived!’ A Cuban boat’s dangerous voyage to freedom in the Florida Keys

The motor died early in Arlen Núñez’s voyage by sea from Cuba to the Florida Keys, leaving him and nearly two dozen other migrants to rely on wind and their own paddling to get to the shores of the United States.

“A commercial boat almost ran us over,” Nuñez, 41, said after the end of more than a week at sea before landing with 22 other migrants on the ocean side of Key Largo.

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The group left around New Year’s Day from Matanzas, a province that is a common departure spot for Cuban migrants. But the engine died as the boat was still within Cuban waters. The passengers threw the motor overboard, unloaded some of the would-be migrants at a nearby island, and continued on, part of an influx of migrants arriving on the chain of islands that make up the Florida Keys.

The pre-sunrise landing brought relief 30 miles away in Homestead. Diana Betancourt was awaiting news of her brother, Nuñez, and whether his departure from Cuba had ended safely in the U.S.

“ ‘My sister, I’ve arrived!’ ” an elated Núñez told his sister over a borrowed phone.

Betancourt didn’t even brush her teeth, and raced down to Key Largo with her husband in a white pickup truck. The siblings hugged and kissed and talked for an hour near the quiet residential street where his boat had landed, before a flurry of lit-up patrol cars and vans showed up and whisked the group away.

“We wanted to see him before he was taken,” she said.

Family sent money to Nuñez in Cuba so he could buy food and other necessities to survive life in the island nation. He got a hand-held GPS device so he could help guide the boat to the US.

On Sunday Betancourt gave her shoes to another Cuban migrant who had lost his, leaving her to walk barefoot on the gravel back to the truck. Both she and her husband, Yoan David Gonzalez Milanes, arrived in the United States about a decade ago as political refugees. They said Núñez had been persecuted in Cuba because he belonged to a family that publicly opposed the government.

“I’m crazy happy. And relieved,” Betancourt said. “The regime won’t be able to trap him if God allows it and this great country opens its doors to him.”

This story was originally published January 8, 2023 at 1:33 PM.