Escape from Bedlam and Boredom

"iBotes al agua!" (Boats to the water!) Thus prompted by a Spanish-speaking skipper, TIME Correspondent Richard Woodbury boarded a chartered 40-footer at Key West for a voyage to the Cuban industrial port of Mariel. Woodbury expected to complete the 220-mile round trip in 24 hours but instead spent nearly a week in Cuba--including five days under virtual house arrest in a Havana hotel. Woodbury's account of his mission to Mariel:

There was a mood of euphoria mixed with anxiety on the Endeavor as it slipped out of Little Torch Key. Aboard were two Cuban Americans from Miami who had paid the boat's captain $5,000 to take them to Cuba to fetch 17 members of their families. It was 18 miles from the Cuban coast that the first faint harbinger of trouble surfaced: a small runabout wallowing out of gas. We secured a line and towed it in. At Mariel, the harbor gradually took on the look of a water-bound tent city: laundry fluttering from the tethered craft; dejected skippers passing the waiting hours with poker games and the Cuban favorite, dominoes. To provide for the boatmen's diminishing supplies, the port had set up floating stores with exorbitant prices: a take-out chicken dinner cost $30, a bottle of Scotch $50.

As the hours ticked into days, life in Mariel harbor grew monotonous, strangely communal. On one shrimper, a woman gave birth; on another boat, a man suffered a heart attack. There was a mini-mutiny aboard one boat; the captain, impatient after five days, decided to return home, although he had a $38,000 charter to pick up refugees. An angry exile pulled out a pistol and held him in his cabin a full day. The Cuban military presence also became more visible. Soldiers patrolled the banks of the harbor with automatic rifles. Jumbo choppers whipped across the bay by day, and searchlights swept the waters by night. Suddenly, the rescuers had become captives.

After three days at Mariel, three of us took up the government's standing offer of a diversionary trip to the Triton Hotel in Havana. A Castro showpiece, the 22-story facility was turned into a luxury stockade for exiles willing to pay $44 a night. Guests were forbidden even to visit the oceanfront, and the crowded lobby became as squalid and confused a bedlam as the harbor was. Exiles lined up twelve deep to call loved ones in Havana over wall phones. Elevators broke down, and fistfights broke out. One Miami sales executive, clutching $8,000 in cash, patrolled the corridors seeking a boat to take the eight members of his family home. "This is madness!" he cried.

Rumors spread that the Cubans from the U.S. might have to wait a month before being allowed to take their relatives to Florida. Meanwhile, restrictions on journalists were tightened. Cameras and film were seized and accreditations were withheld.

The next day, during a water outage that followed a power failure at Triton, journalists were told to leave--immediately. Authorities herded twelve reporters into a bus and dispatched us to the harbor: that evening we boarded a creaky 68-ft. shrimper, Nature Boy. Under a full moon we slipped out of Mariel harbor, bound for home. Our shipmates were 78 refugees, and we were as happy as they. "I've waited years for this. I'll kiss the ground!" exclaimed Ruiz Hernandez, 49, a Havana truck driver. At 8:30 the next morning, barely ten hours after pushing off, we docked at Key West. Hernandez, in all the confusion, never did remember to kiss the ground. But I, after seven days as a Cuban refugee, almost did.

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