Cubans from the city of Cojimar, close to Havana sail in small rafters.
Rafael Perez
The titillation and thrill of the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” is completely misplaced on Cuban exile Elicier Castillo, a former heavyweight boxing champ.
“I get goose bumps each time I see something with sharks and switch it proper off,” he as soon as advised The New York Instances.
The Cuban boxer and 4 companions, together with his two brothers, lashed collectively an inside tube and canvas raft in 1994, hopped aboard and paddled north into the Gulf Stream as a part of a small fleet of comparable floating contraptions stuffed with equally determined Cubans attempting to flee Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
As traditional, inside hours sharks have been trailing and circling the rafts. The present carried the ramshackle rafter flotilla away from the U.S. and Castillo spent 5 days at sea.
He remembers watching lots of the rafts round him capsizing and falling other than the waves. The sharks would rush in instantly, their endurance and diligence paying off. Castillo would see the water frothing white, then purple as his fellow rafters yelled for assist.
“However what may anybody do?” he recalled.
“Getting attacked by a shark simply is perhaps the scariest occasion in nature!” gasped a Discovery Channel narrator throughout Shark Week a number of years in the past. “Australia recorded 56 deadly shark assaults between 1956 and 2008!” he gasped once more. “Discover out what it’s like from individuals who’ve lived to inform the story!”
So the Discovery Channel went again over half a century and to a distant continent to interview the victims and dramatize the assaults. However why the distant timeline and setting? Simply ask many south Floridians.
“The Florida Straits most likely file 56 deadly shark assaults each few years,” says Matt Lawrence, who spent years flying over the straits rescuing determined Cuban rafters.
In all probability each month throughout the early 90’s,” provides the late Bay of Pigs vet Arturo Cobo, who ran the rafter rescue heart in Key West and for years heard the sobbing, gut-gripping particulars of those assaults virtually every day.
“I’ll always remember the case of the 2 youngsters who got here ashore, sunburnt, malnourished as traditional, but additionally in a state of close to hysteria,” recalled Cobo. “After some time they might lastly clarify how their father, in a delirious state from thirst and publicity, lastly jumped within the water.
“They threw him a rope tied to the raft and he clutched it. So that they turned away for a second, barely relieved — however solely to identify an enormous shark approaching, then one other. Quickly a whole college was round their raft.
“And virtually earlier than they might react, the sharks ripped into their father from all sides. From what they advised me days later on the native hospital what erupted round their tiny raft was a feeding frenzy, like those you see on these shark reveals the place they bait the water for hours to draw the sharks. The water turned purple as their father was eaten alive. …
“I can let you know from many years of and heart-breaking work from our heart right here in Key West that within the Florida straits, each week was shark week.”
One in all Lawrence’s colleagues recalled a harrowing rescue:
“One thing was transferring on this raft,” recalled the airborne rescuer. “So I went in decrease. The water throughout the raft was turning purple. … the cloud spreading. Then I noticed the shark — about the identical size because the raft. The rafter was in reality a Cuban girl in her early twenties.
“Upon her rescue we discovered she had two bullet wounds in her legs from Castro’s frontier police. All others within the raft, together with two infants, had died, as did the shark — from being repeatedly stabbed by the pointed finish of a damaged oar by Maria. The Shark had bitten the oar in half as Maria pounded him.
“I began flying rescue missions full-time after that.”
The waters surrounding Cuba are famed for his or her hordes of sharks. But from 1 / 4 to a half million Cubans searching for American freedom have crossed these waters with little between them and the sharks than skinny rubber or canvas, realizing the percentages have been near 50-50 that their craft would overturn or crumble.
In 2015 the Discovery Channel lastly visited Cuba. But throughout this whole blockbuster episode of “Trying to find Monstrous Sharks Close to Cuba” — produced along side totalitarian Cuba’s propaganda ministry in a spot that has most likely seen extra deadly assaults than anyplace else — the producers didn't point out a single shark molesting a single human being.
Humberto Fontova is the writer of “Exposing the Actual Che Guevara and the Helpful Idiots Who Idolize Him.”
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