Ballplayers, 5 other Cubans rescued at sea

By OLANCE NOGUERAS
Herald Staff Writer

Four Cuban baseball players and a coach, lost at sea for 10 days after fleeing their homeland, were rescued by a fishing boat Friday night near tiny Ragged Island in the Bahamas, baseball agent Joe Cubas said Saturday.

He said they were in the hands of the Bahamian coast guard Saturday night, along with four other people who fled Cuba with them.

Vernon Burrows, the Bahamian deputy director of immigration, confirmed that a group of Cubans was handed over to officials by fishermen.

``We have nine Cubans at Ragged Island, but I don't know who they are,'' Burrows told The Associated Press. He said there was no telephone at the Ragged Island police station where the group was being held.

Sparsely populated Ragged Island, one of the southernmost Bahamian islands, is about 80 miles north of Cuba's Holguin province, where the refugees reportedly began their voyage March 10.

``Thank God we can confirm that they are all on solid land, out of the sea,'' Cubas told reporters in an improvised press conference outside Miami International Airport. ``After a very long odyssey, they are alive and well.''

Cubas' statement contrasted with his remarks Friday, when he said the players were in the Dominican Republic but at a location he would not disclose.

The Dominican Republic is more than 300 miles east of the group's point of departure from eastern Cuba.

The athletes are shortstop Michael Jova, 17; first baseman Jorge Luis Toca, 23; catcher Angel Lopez, 25; second baseman Jorge Diaz Olano, 23; and pitching coach Orlando Chinea, 41.

Cubas, who arrived in Miami from Tampa Saturday, said he was able to communicate from Tampa with the 53-foot fishing boat Justice, which rescued the men, using a telephone relay to the vessel's ship-to-shore phone.

``Toca and Jova couldn't hear me but I could hear them,'' he said. ``They were all picked up at a point north of Las Tunas [Cuba] in international waters.''

Cubas said the skipper of the Justice, Whitney Bastian, identified the other four Cubans as Ernesto Perez and Giovanni Peña, both 28; Pedro Ferrer, 30; and Jorge Roche, 27.

Toca's mother was relieved to hear news of the rescue, especially after a day of uncertainty during which Dominican authorities said they could not confirm the earlier report that placed the refugees in the Dominican Republic.

``But I won't be satisfied until I hear his voice,'' Francisca Gomez, 56, told AP from the central Cuban town of Santa Clara. ``Please, if you talk to him, tell him to call me. Because I feel I'm going to die.''

Cubas said he planned to leave as soon as possible for the Bahamas, where he planned to ask Bahamian officials not to repatriate the defectors. He said he also planned to ask Costa Rica to grant visas to the entire group.

``I've told them to do everything legally and hand themselves over to the authorities,'' he said.

Bastian's wife gave a somewhat different account of the rescue in a phone interview with the AP from Nassau on Saturday night. She said the Justice was anchored in Bahamian waters Friday night when the small boat carrying the nine defectors drifted into the larger vessel.

``My husband gave them some money so they could call their families. He said they were doing fine,'' she said.

The four players and the coach were all banned from baseball in Cuba last July because Cuban authorities suspected they were planning to defect.