Posted on Miamiherald.com on July 3, 2006

A tribute in photos to refugees' innovation

In isolated parts of the Florida Keys, an artist photographs ingeniously crafted Cuban refugee boats.

BY MARC CAPUTO

mcaputo@MiamiHerald.com

MARQUESAS KEYS - On this isolated atoll 90 miles from desperation, scores of Cuban immigrants got the right to stay in the United States when their feet hit the beach, only to leave behind a treasure of ruggedly seaworthy boats crafted with salvaged metal and rejiggered car engines as complex as Rube Goldberg contraptions.

The hand-riveted and hand-hammered hulls stuffed with expanding foam, the rudders made of mahogany furniture or the telephone wires converted to sailing shrouds all look like works of art to Key West artist Benjamin ''Dink'' Bruce, who photographed a small sampling of them this winter when scores of migrants came ashore.

Few have seen the boats -- called ''chugs'' for the sound of the little engines that could -- because they usually land in places like this, 23 miles west of Key West, and are promptly shot for target practice and then sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard, removing what it calls ``hazards to navigation.''

''It's just so incredible. It's history. They're going to be lost, maybe never to happen again,'' Bruce said. ``So it's fascinating to see how much effort these took. I've been to Cuba so many times, and you see how desperate the people are.''

Bruce, 62, is the son of Ernest Hemingway's right-hand man, Toby Bruce, and inherited both his nickname and passion for Cuba from The Old Man and the Sea's author.

In the coming months, the Key West Art & Historical Society plans to exhibit some of Bruce's photographs and the odds and ends he found, such as the shoes and boots neatly placed in the sand by the immigrants to take advantage of the U.S. government's wet foot/dry foot policy.

''They leave their shoes on the beach. They're here. They're in America. They're dry feet,'' Bruce said.

Also left behind: cans of Bill Beef processed meat with five-language labels; Cuban pesos made worthless the minute they left the island, and a statue of Cuban patron saint La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre that was made headless during the perilous journey through heavy swells, tricky winds and swift currents in the Florida Straits. Bruce glued the head back on.

Not everyone chugged to the Marquesas. Some zipped here on fast boats, which Bruce surmised after finding a new Global Positioning System tracker. A friend at the sheriff's office downloaded and mapped out its coordinates, which showed the tracker flying south to Havana, then zipping north in a straight line from Cuba at 25 knots, and then accelerating to 40 knots once away from the Cuban coast.

Bruce also managed to salvage a chug painted sky blue with an American flag bearing 11 stripes and 18 stars. But at nearly 22 feet long, the craft is too large to fit in the historical society's East Martello Tower, which already displays an old rickety raft that washed up in the 1960s.

The historical society's executive director, Claudia Pennington, said the museum was flooded with seven feet of water from Hurricane Wilma and doesn't have the money to preserve the vessel.

She said Bruce's photographs of the chugs and the salvaged items tell a story that draws people in.

''A lot of people support this whole spirit -- this I gotta get out of here and live my life,'' she said. ``People are naturally interested when they see the boats. They find these odds and ends and they try to construct a story with it.''

In Miami, activists had planned to build a Little Havana museum dedicated to the Cuban exodus, but the hurricanes and lack of money have delayed its construction, said Miami City Commissioner Joe Sanchez.

''This is history. Anybody who leaves their country in desperate measures and puts their lives and their family's lives in danger is part of a story that needs to be told,'' Sanchez said. ``Just like with slavery or the Holocaust, there's a history here people need to know so we don't repeat it.''

The push for such a museum was driven by the national attention given to the so-called ''truckonauts,'' who in 2003 became the first immigrants in history to drive the Straits of Florida. They were stopped by the Coast Guard in a 1951 Chevy truck converted into a boat. Other attempts were made in a 1959 Buick and a 1948 Mercury taxi.

In 2004, Key Largo residents Ana Baidet and Vinny Dalena found a wooden chug outside their beachfront condos. It was missing its engine, which as in other chugs was probably held by just four bolts so that it could be easily discarded when fuel ran out. The boaters sailed in with a painter's canvas strapped to a mast of two-by-fours.

Baidet and Dalena sold the boat on eBay for $749 to a Tennessee restaurant owner who planned to exhibit it.

''These people are creative like you wouldn't believe. There's such desperation and ingenuity. This stuff needs to be in museums,'' Dalena said.

Most of the chugs Bruce documented resemble fishing smacks. The most elegant, a catamaran, was built with hulls stuffed with empty water jugs and expanding foam that was guided by a salvaged Dacron sail and a mast from who knows where. Some made it across with their one-lung engines or retrofitted Nissan car engines intact.

The chugs are a mystery, a whodunit as much as a howdunit. Where did the builders find the time and space to make them without government interference? How much time and practice did it take to rebuild a car engine and route a drive shaft that bends at multiple angles? Where did they get the sails, the caulk, the expanding foam or the time and know-how to pour a hand-cast aluminum propeller?

''To get fiberglass, to get the bolts, to get the material, to get the valves for intake and ex-take -- this is all hand-done,'' Bruce marveled. ``The time it takes to manufacture one of these things is incredible. Just think of any job you try to do, just try to put a bathroom together, and now imagine building one of these and taking on this journey.''