They were never heard from again.
Among them was an eight-year-old girl who was traveling with her mother, six members of a family from the central Cuban city of Camaguey and a couple from the south-central city of Cienfuegos who left their children behind for safety.
The boat’s occupants also included Yoel Romero, a 43-year-old bricklayer and father of three, Jonathan Jesus Alvarez, a 30-year-old truck driver, also with three children, and Dariel Alejandro Chacon, a 27-year-old maintenance worker.
Chacon’s mother Idalmis put some toast in her son’s backpack for the crossing to Florida, but he never got to eat it.
The bag washed up four days later on a rocky beach at a luxury golf club in the Florida Keys.
‘We need to know’
The Caribbean has become a watery grave for Cubans fleeing a severe economic crisis on the communist island and headed for Florida.
At least 368 Cubans have died or disappeared on the Caribbean migration route since 2020, when the International Organization for Migration (IOM) began gathering statistics on what it calls “invisible shipwrecks.”
The US Coast Guard repatriated a similar number — 367 — who tried to enter the country illegally in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024.
But residents of the cash-strapped island, reeling from the worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main ally and financial backer, in the 1990s, remained undeterred.
AFP spoke to 21 relatives of the 32 Cubans who went missing at sea on January 3, 2023.
All were desperate for news of their relatives’ fate.
