The New Exodus

The ancient, potbellied C46 of Cuba's nationalized Aerovias Q had barely broken ground from Havana airport, bound for the Isle of Pines with 53 aboard, when five men rushed the flight deck, guns in hand. Two guards aboard the plane fired their pistols. In the point-blank battle, the pilot, one guard and an attacker were killed. Six others, including the copilot, were wounded. Miraculously, the copilot managed to land in a sugar cane field, and the surviving would-be hijackers fled.

They were a different breed from the ex-mental patient who, over Mexico, had commandeered the Pan Am DC-8 jet (see THE NATION), and demanded that it be flown to Havana. The men who tried to seize Castro's C4& were anti-Castro Cubans, pointing up a growing embarrassment for Communists from East Germany to the Red Chinese border at Hong Kong: the widening river of desperate refugees fleeing to freer lands. Middle-class Cubans still come out aboard the twice-daily Pan Am flights to Miami. But now the humildes, the humble ones, la-'borers, rural peasants, fishermen, the very people Castro pretends to champion, have joined the exodus. They flee however they can.

Without visas, unable to afford a plane ticket, they arrive in Florida at the rate of 50 to 100 a week in stolen launches, by sailboat, fishermen's dory or makeshift raft, drifting up the Gulf Stream, from Cuba's northern coast 90 miles to the Florida keys. One group of five young men spent 2 1/2 days at sea in an 8-ft. rowboat, at one point hailed a passing freighter for food and water. Their request was refused; it was a Russian ship.

For days, 15-year-old Gregorio Rodriguez helped his family steer a tiny sailboat to Florida. How many other craft have been lost at sea no one knows.

Longino Dominguez. 44, was a village woodworker until he was bluntly advised to join the militia or lose his customers. "I told them, 'I am a carpenter, not a politician.'" said Dominguez last week after sailing to Florida with 16 others. A second refugee, Day Laborer Gabino Mendiola, 39, confirmed the story: "If you do not join the militia, you cannot get a job." Added Jose Aurelio Lechuga Villanueva, 53, a fisherman for 36 years: "A fisherman cannot live. I used to be able to sell fish freely. Now everything goes to the Agrarian Reform at their price. You have nothing left with which to eat." One haggard mother recently landed at Key West in a small sailboat with her two children, a son, 11, a daughter, 7. Said she: "Their father wanted to send them to Russia--they are doing that with many children now."

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