Like a vanished handprint that reappears when condensation coats a windowpane, foggy mornings on the beach recall for me the wave of Cuban rafters in the summer of 1994.
I can still see a tiny raft aslant on the beach, shreds of a handmade sail hanging limply in the fading shadows just before daybreak. Handmade oars lying beside a damp notebook streaked with ink and what had once been handwritten Spanish words. Final thoughts for a loved one? Directions to a relative’s place in Miami? A prayer?
Surely prayers were on the lips of the mostly Haitian immigrants dumped into the Gulf Stream by human smugglers in May.
As I hustled down the beach, cell phone in hand, in an attempt to photograph the rescue boats arriving through the Boynton Inlet, the news continued to unfold: a large boat overturned, two people dead. A boat loaded with immigrants sunk overnight, search and rescue under way. Immigrants found floating in the Gulf Stream 15 miles from shore, at least 10 dead including infants, 16 survivors.
As this news reached me I passed some of the most beautiful homes in South Florida on some of the most private and pristine beaches in the state. It’s no wonder humans whose lives are spent in poverty and fear would feel compelled beyond reason to risk their lives, and the lives of their children, to come here.
These stories of desperation haunt me each time I see an old shoe or water jug washed ashore. Like the Statue of Liberty that served as a beacon for previous generations, now our sparkling coastline beckons the tired, the poor, the huddled masses of our island neighbors.
If conditions in their home countries don’t improve, there will come a morning when the flotsam found on the beach is not the detritus of a desperate life, but what was once life. Gone. Vanished like a handprint wiped from a windowpane.
— Mary Kate Leming, Editor
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