Published:08/31/93
Section: LOCAL
Page: 2B
Elizabeth Perez finds a little consolation in the odyssey of her cousin, Raisa Santana, a Cuban rafter who died in May after giving her son the only drinking water she had.
"I'm sure an event as dramatic as this taught something to a great many people," she says. "People are at least opening their eyes to the holocaust, realizing that people are dying."
Experts on the Cuban exodus agree that incidents such as Santana's death put the Cuban tragedy in context for those who know nothing about it.
The rafters who come ashore daily in Florida -- their faces burned by the sun, their thin legs covered with blisters -- have helped raise the curtain the Cuban government had lowered on the island.
The message of desperation becomes even louder when the rafters fail to arrive, or when their bodies are found floating in Gulf waters.
Experts believe that for every refugee rescued, two or three are captured by Cuban authorities or die on the way. That estimate is hard to confirm, they say, given the difficulty of communicating with Cuba. Humberto Sanchez, a Cuban American who has made a collection of the rafts, has compiled a list of 1,100 rafters who have died at sea since 1959. And that number, he says, "isn't even close to reality."
His eight-month investigation is based on the testimony of relatives, reports from activists on the island and news reports.
The names will be inscribed on the Column of Freedom, a 14- foot monument being erected in in Miami. Another plan to honor rafters and others who left Cuba in search of freedom is the Cuban Mausoleum, to be constructed at Graceland Memorial Park. Experts believe that the tragic deaths have little effect on Cubans who have made up their minds to take to the sea.
"The problem," says Juan Clark, a sociology professor at Miami-Dade Community College, "is that, in despair and facing an ever-deteriorating situation, many consider the raft as the only alternative."
© 1996 The Miami Herald