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The boat was heavy in Isabel’s arms, and she was afraid of dropping it, even though there were five other people carrying it with her. She and Iván held the middle of the boat on either side, while Iván’s parents and Isabel’s father and grandfather carried the front and back.
Señora Castillo, Iván’s mother, was dark-skinned and curvy, and wore a white kerchief over her dreadlocks. Isabel’s mother, almost nine months pregnant, was the only one not helping to carry the boat. It was big and heavy to begin with, and they had packed it with the gas cans, plastic soda bottles filled with fresh water, condensed milk, cheese and bread, and medicine. Everything else had to be left behind.
Nothing was more important than making it to Florida.
It was night, and a waning moon peeked out from behind scattered clouds. A warm breeze lifted Isabel’s short curly hair and raised goose bumps on her arms. Fidel Castro had said that anyone who wanted to leave was welcome to go, but that was hours ago. What if he had changed his mind? What if there was a line of police waiting to arrest them at the beach? Isabel hefted the boat to get a better grip and tried to pick up her pace.
They left the village’s gravel road and hauled the boat over the dunes to the sea. All Isabel could see was the metal side of the boat in front of her
face, but she heard a commotion behind her. There were people on the beach! Lots of them! She panicked, her worst fears come true, and suddenly a blinding light lit her up. Isabel cried out and let go of the boat.
Ahead of her, Señora Castillo staggered and lost her grip too, and the front of the boat slammed into the sand.
Isabel turned, holding a hand up in front of her eyes and expecting to see a police searchlight shining on her. What she saw instead was a television camera.
“You’re on CNN,” a woman said in Spanish, her face nothing but a silhouette against the light. “Can you tell us what made you decide to leave?”
“Quickly!” Señor Castillo called from the other side of the boat. “Pick it back up! We’re almost to the water!”
“I—” Isabel said, frozen in the bright light of the camera.
“Do you have any relatives back in Miami that you want to send a message to?” the reporter asked.
“No, we—”
“Isabel! The boat!” Papi called.
The others had already lifted the boat up out of the sand and were lurching toward the sound of the crashing waves. The bright lights of the camera swung away from Isabel and lit up what looked like a party on the beach. More than half their village was on the sand, clapping, waving, and cheering on the boats.
And there were so many boats. Isabel’s family had worked in secret all night with the Castillos, worried someone might hear them, but apparently, everybody else had been doing the same thing. There were inflatable rafts. Canoes with homemade outriggers. Rafts made of inner tubes tied together. Boats built out of Styrofoam and oil drums.
A rickety-looking raft made out of wooden shipping pallets and inner tubes raised a bedsheet sail, and as it caught the wind, the villagers on the beach cheered. When another raft made out of an old refrigerator sank, everyone laughed.
The camera lights swung around again, and that’s when Isabel saw the police.
There was a small group of them, up on the rocks overlooking the inlet. Not nearly as many as there had been in Havana, but enough. Enough to arrest her family for trying to leave Cuba. But these police weren’t doing anything. They were just standing and watching. Castro’s order to let people leave must have still been good!
“Chabela!” her mother called. “Chabela, come on!”
Mami was already in the boat, and Papi was helping Iván in. Señor Castillo was trying to get the motor started.
Isabel waded into the water, the waves lapping up to the bottom of her shorts. She was almost to Papi’s outstretched arms when she saw her father’s eyes go wide.
Isabel looked back over her shoulder. Two of the policemen had broken from the group and were running toward the water.
Toward them.
“No—no! They’re coming for me!” Papi cried. Isabel fell into the water and swam the rest of the way to the boat, but her father was already climbing over the side.
“Start the engine!” he cried.
“No, wait for me!” Isabel yelled, spitting seawater. She got a hand to the side of the boat and looked back. The two policemen had hit the surf and were running high-legged through the waves. Worse, the other policemen were running too—and they were all headed for the Castillos’s boat!
Hands grabbed Isabel and helped her climb the side of the boat—Iván! But when he got her aboard, Iván and his mother then reached their hands out for the two policemen who were chasing them. What were they doing?
“No!” Papi cried, scrambling as far away from them as he could. Iván and Señora Castillo grabbed the arms of the two policemen and pulled them on board, and they all collapsed into the bottom of the boat. The policemen pulled off their berets, and Isabel recognized one of them instantly—one was Luis, the Castillos’s elder son! The other policeman shook out his long black hair, and Isabel was startled to realize it wasn’t a policeman at all. It was a policewoman. When she took Luis’s hand, Isabel guessed she was his girlfriend.
This must have been the Castillos’s plan all along—for Luis and his girlfriend to run away with them! But they had never told Isabel and her family.
Pak! A pistol rang out again over the waves, and the crowd on the beach cried out in panic. The pistol fired again—pak!—and—ping!—the hull of the Castillos’s boat rang as the bullet hit it.
The police were shooting at them! But why? Didn’t Castro say it was all right to leave?
Isabel’s eyes fell on Luis and his girlfriend, and she understood. They had been drafted into the police, and they weren’t allowed to leave. They were deserters, and deserters were shot.
The motor coughed to life, and the boat lurched into a wave, spraying Isabel with seawater. The villagers on the beach cheered for them, and Señor Castillo revved the engine, leaving the charging policemen in their wake.
Isabel braced herself between two of the benches, trying to catch her breath. It took her a moment to process it, but this was really happening.
They were leaving Cuba, her village, her home—everything she’d ever known—behind.
Isabel’s father pitched across the roiling boat and grabbed Señor Castillo by the shirt. “What are you playing at, letting them on board?” he demanded. “What if they follow us? What if they send a navy boat after us? You’ve put us all in danger!”
Señor Castillo batted Geraldo Fernandez’s arms away. “We didn’t ask you to come along!”
“It’s our gasoline!” Isabel’s father yelled.
They kept arguing, but the engine and the slap of the boat against the waves drowned their words out for Isabel. She wasn’t paying any attention anyway. All she could think about was the ninety miles they still had to go, and the water pouring in from the gunshot hole in the side of the boat.
