By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer
Nelson Morales figured that he could easily die when flames filled the engine room of his Cuban cargo ship during a voyage from Montreal to Havana one stormy night last winter.
Morales knew that the 5,000-ton Star Island, like many Cuban ships, had no fire extinguishers and that its fire hoses were rotten. And he expected that, as in many Cuban ships, the lifeboats would be rusted and useless.
``Like 90 percent of all Cuban ships, that ship was a wreck. It was completely rotted, with pipes bursting, everything leaking,'' Morales said. ``I still don't know how it didn't explode.''
The ship survived, thanks to a jury-rigged hose. But Morales' brush with disaster underlined the appalling crisis battering the Cuban merchant marine since the island lost its Soviet allies in 1991.
Vessels today sail ``blind'' because there is no money to fix radars. They flush oily sludge into the sea because they can't afford legal disposals. They sail without critical engine parts because they have no spares.
Sailors plug their ears while they sleep because there's no money to fumigate for cockroaches. Many complain about their food, about long delays in rotating crews. Record numbers are defecting, literally jumping ship.
Yet most sail on, pleased to be earning $2 a day atop their average 300-peso monthly salaries -- equal to about 1,300 pesos, an excellent income in a country where the official average salary stands at about 200 pesos -- and under pressure to deliver critically needed imports and exports for Cuba.
``They tell you the cargo must go, to buy milk for the children,'' said Juan Quintanar, 51, a Havana ship captain who asked for political asylum in Holland last year. ``What can you do but sail?''
Cuba's merchant marine -- about 50 major cargo ships from 3,000 to 25,000 tons, plus about 1,000 smaller craft -- once lured top-notch sailors with its promise of travel outside the communist world. Many were the relatives of government officials, and an estimated 20 to 30 percent were communist activists.
It was a profitable job. Sailors smuggled Cuban rum and cigars outside, traded them for Western consumer goods, smuggled those home and sold them at huge profits. They call the trade pacotilla, Spanish for trash.
But then the Soviet Union collapsed and the fleet ran into a crisis that has already caused the deaths of 37 sailors and a slew of safety, pollution and health horrors, said six defectors interviewed by The Herald.
A port-safety umbrella group made up of 18 European countries and Canada, known as Paris MOU, reported that 34 of 81 Cuban-flagged ships inspected in its ports from 1992 to 1995 flunked and were detained until repairs were made.
``That's fairly high, but certainly not among the worst,'' said Richard Day of the Canadian Transportation Ministry's marine safety department.
Deceptive practices
Defectors say those are only problems caught by foreign inspectors and tell many tales of captains keeping fraudulent records and shifting equipment around to hide problems from the inspectors.
``In my last few trips, we had bad food, many breakdowns and virtually no safety at all,'' said Roberto Capote, 46, a first officer who defected four years ago. ``I felt we were risking our lives.''
Captain William Figueroa recalls his radar breaking down on a fogbound British Channel, one of the world's busiest sea lanes, and restarting just in time to spot a huge object 200 yards in front of his ship.
``Only by chance did we miss the oil-drilling platform in front of us, but by no more than four arms' length,'' said Figueroa, 45, who left Cuba in 1993 and now lives in Miami.
Safety equipment is often useless, all defectors said. Extinguishers are out of date or empty, fire hoses leak, emergency flares are damp or missing and the davits used to lower lifeboats rusted solid.
Ships with broken emergency water pumps often fool foreign inspectors by temporarily hooking up secondary pumps, somewhere out of sight, to pump water through the emergency systems, the defectors said. But such secondary pumps would not be powerful enough if a major fire enveloped the ship.
Safety usually last
``In most Cuban ships, the safety equipment does not work. It's pure decoration,'' said Capote, who now lives in Holland. ``In some ships, the equipment is not even there at all.''
Only the best ships are routed to Western ports such as Montreal to avoid being cited by port inspectors, Capote said. The rest are routed to countries like Mexico, where they can more easily avoid inspections.
At times, Cuban ships are forced to sail with broken or missing engine-room equipment to urgently deliver or pick up cargo -- or merely to reach a port where repairs are cheaper.
That might be what happened in the case of the Guantanamo, a 3,000-ton freighter that sank in a howling Atlantic storm, drowning 37 crewmen, on a trip from Cuba to Spain in 1995. The lone survivor was rescued by a passing Greek ship.
The survivor later told Cuban television that the ship lost its main engine, the cargo shifted, and the ship tipped over. But two defectors put at least part of the blame on negligence.
Ordered to continue
Morales said shipping officials in Havana told him the ship had engine trouble and radioed home for permission to make emergency repairs at the nearest port but was ordered to continue to Spain and make repairs there.
Capote said he heard from other sailors that the ship had left Havana with only one starter motor for its three diesel engines, because the other starters were broken. When the diesel turning the propeller quit, crew members had to try to move the 20- to 30-pound starter from one diesel to the main one.
During that delay, the rudderless ship turned its side to the waves. A big wave could then have easily swamped it, Capote said.
Facing such critical maintenance problems, the defectors say, it's little wonder that Cuban ships regularly violate international pollution controls in Cuban ports, the high seas and foreign ports.
Ships in foreign ports cannot afford to pay local garbage haulers, so they store refuse in cargo holds until they can dump it at sea, the defectors said.
More serious are the dumping of sludge from fuel tanks and engine oil. International law requires ships to dispose of the sludge on land and to keep a hydrocarbons log recording when, where and how they drained the sludge tanks.
False sludge reports
But Cuban ships cannot afford proper disposal methods and almost always flush their sludge into the ocean, all the defectors said. The captains then make false entries in their hydrocarbons log.
``The word would come down -- dump, but don't write,'' said Morales, 48, who served with the merchant marine for 27 years, starting as a machinist and reaching the post of helmsman before he defected last year in Panama.
In Havana harbor, listed by United Nations environmental monitors as among the most polluted in the world, Cuban ships flush their sludge into the bay and write in their logs that it was transferred to a barge named Irene.
That barge simply does not exist, said Figueroa and Jose Luis Gonzalez, an officer who worked on Havana and Matanzas harbor tugboats until he defected in 1994. He now lives in Miami.
The fines for dumping sludge are huge. When the Star Island was forced to flush a propeller drive shaft flooded with oily water into Montreal's harbor last year, Canadian authorities fined it $50,000, Morales said.
Can't afford to debug
But Cuban shipping agencies are so strapped for money that they can't even afford the annual bow-to-stern fumigations required of freighters. Most of the ships are now allegedly overrun with cockroaches.
``You start up the engines, and you see millions scampering,'' Morales said. Many sailors have taken to plugging their ears with cotton when they go to sleep, afraid the roaches will crawl in.
Morales defected soon after learning that his brother, Pablo, had been one of the four people killed when a Cuban MiG shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes over the Florida Straits last Feb. 24. He now lives in Miami.
Figueroa argued that bad captains can make an admittedly dire situation worse by not insisting on proper repairs, allowing equipment to deteriorate and falling behind on crew-assigned maintenance tasks. Some of the small U.S. ships on which he has worked since arriving in Miami, he said, ``were real disasters, compared to the Cuban ships. To be honest, when I demanded something be fixed in Cuba, at least they tried.''
Government to blame
But all of the defectors said the Cuban government also bears blame because it controls Cuban port inspectors and the ships, even though Havana has long camouflaged its vessels to avoid U.S. sanctions and angry creditors.
Most of Cuba's largest and newest freighters are legally owned by private firms in Malta, Cyprus or Panama -- all flags of convenience with notoriously lax shipping regulations -- which are in turn owned by Havana.
The majority of the foreign-flagged ships, plus all of the freighters still under Cuban flags, are ``leased'' to a half-dozen government-run management agencies in Havana such as Poseidon, Mar America and FrigoCuba.
Officers and sailors are assigned jobs through the management agencies or two government-run crewing agencies, AGEMARCA and Guincho, and all are members of Cuban labor unions.
But the defectors complained of work conditions that they all described as ``virtual slavery.''
A contracted six-month sail often turns into a yearlong voyage if unplanned cargo turns up and Havana can't afford to fly in a replacement crew and fly back the old crew, the defectors all said.
Freezers don't work
Ships leaving Havana fill their kitchens with canned and preserved food -- freezer lockers break down too often to carry frozen food -- but are issued only a few U.S. dollars to buy fresh foods en route. One example from Capote: $1,000 for a crew of 30, on a three-month voyage.
Crews are often short-handed, forcing some sailors to perform double duties on single salaries. And any sailor who complains is likely be sent home and dropped from the assignment schedules, the defectors said.
Guincho hires out Cuban crews for foreign ships -- about 500 in 1996, according to one Havana newspaper report. But Guincho pays those sailors the same $2 per day, even though the foreigners pay Guincho according to world standards, some $1,000 per month for mess-hall waiters, the defectors said.
Guincho also collects insurance payments from crew accidents -- contractors must insure crews with Western agencies -- but does not pass on the money to sailors or relatives, the defectors alleged.
Jose Luis Gonzalez said he lost a relative aboard the Guantanamo, which was registered in Panama and under that country's laws carried life insurance policies on the crew.
The relative's wife recently wrote him, Gonzalez said, complaining that the ship's management company, Mambisa, had yet to pay out any part of the policy to the grieving family.
``She got a little bit of help after the ship sank -- his salary plus something like $25 to $30 per month,'' he said. ``But she wrote that even that has stopped now.''
Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald