September 25, 2016

Escaping Castro

Reason Hit and Run notes the death of Jose Fernandez and his escape from Cuba. I did not realize he was going to be a father, and that he was a hero in the more conventional sense:

In a 2013 interview with the Miami Herald, the Cuban-born Fernandez said he had spent a year in prison as a teenager for “illegally attempting to leave the country.” In Fernandez’s telling, it would take four attempts for he and his family to finally be able to successfully flee the impoverished island prison run by the Castro brothers since 1959.

When they crammed themselves onto a speedboat headed for Mexico and eventurally the U.S., they had to avoid “flying bullets from Cuban coast guard boats” and then had to endure days “in the solitude of the the ocean,” according to the Herald. When one of the people in the boat fell overboard, Fernandez says he immediately jumped into the sea in an attempted rescue. He was successful, and only after securing the person did he realize the life he saved was his mother’s.

Fernandez certainly crammed a great deal of adventure, danger, and success into a very short life.

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