The Haitians’ arcane faith sustained them. “Good, this will bring us luck,” the captain said when he found a skull in the water. Between bouts of vomiting, the boat people sang and prayed to “Papa” for help in reaching Miami. When the first dawn broke, two men had vanished overboard. Would-be pirates sailed up and demanded women and cigarettes, but backed off when the refugees brandished machetes. Then a storm whipped up 15-foot waves. The captain turned back. That night, the skiff was wrecked on a Haitian reef. “I don’t know if anybody drowned,” said Chauvel, who swam to shore with a child. Two other refugee boats apparently were lost–and police arrested the survivors they could catch.
On a second voyage, another group of 140 people packed aboard a 30-foot trading sloop. Half had to crowd into the hold as human ballast. “Tell our story,” one of those in the hold implored, and the others began to sing. The refugees were convinced that their “juju” would quickly get them by the U.S. Coast Guard and to Miami. “I become invisible,” said the captain. But on the third day a U.S. jet spotted the sloop. By nightfall, the refugees were taken aboard a U.S. cutter and searched; their boat was scuttled. “They were not singing anymore,” said Chauvel. All were taken to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they joined some 6,000 other Haitians awaiting a court ruling on whether the U.S. government should grant them political refugee status or send them home. But otherwise they might well have perished. When it was intercepted, the sloop was at least 20 days away from Miami, headed in the wrong direction.
