Published: 01/12/92
Section: FRONT
Page: 15A
Inova Lara, child of the Cuban revolution, lived out her fantasies as a capitalist princess for 15 days every month.
She held a glamorous, $30-a-day job as scuba-diving host of underwater
documentaries. She hobnobbed with wealthy tourists visiting Cuba's pristine
islands. She sipped fine wine and
gorged on lobster.
Then the 24-year-old model would go home, back to Havana and the grim reality of a decrepit communist system: empty store shelves, copies of the Communist Party daily Granma for toilet paper, electricity for three hours a day, useless ration booklets and, worst of all, dead-end ambition.
Cuba's tourism boom and her scuba job with foreigners allowed her an extended sojourn into a world few Cubans ever see.
And she liked it, enough to want it all the time. Enough to think about risking her life and that of her 5-year-old daughter on an inner-tube raft. Instead, her mother, Maria de la Caridad Carrazana, pleaded for patience -- and concocted a brazen escape plan. On Jan. 3, Lara, her daughter, her three siblings, her mother and 28 others stole a helicopter and landed at Kendall- Tamiami Executive Airport at 9 a.m.
Now she is living with her aunt and the rest of her family in a tiny Opa-locka house. She worries about finding a job, learning English, renting a room for herself and her child, Indira. But she is determined and optimistic. As a Cuban citizen, she will receive the U.S. government's blessing to permanently live and work here in one year, a privilege the government does not readily bestow on most immigrants.
"In Cuba, I had all this money, and I couldn't buy a chicken, or clothing," Lara said on the doorstep of her aunt's home. "I couldn't go to the movies, or dancing. But it was the humiliation that really destroyed me, the belief that I deserved better."
Lara grew up entrenched in the ideology of Lenin and Marx. Her father is a colonel in the Cuban air force. Her stepfather, the pilot of the helicopter, was decorated six times for his service in Angola from 1986 to 1988.
For years she benefited from the regime. She got degrees in accounting and psychology. She started modeling clothes and jewelry in shops for tourists at age 12. At 17, she married to get out of her house and away from her parents. Two years later she had her child. A year later she got divorced.
"We've always been very communist," she said. "But as I started to get older, I started realizing that communism was heading in the wrong direction."
Three events pushed her over the brink, she said: the birth of her child, entry into the segregated tourist playland and the languishing economy.
"There is no future in Cuba," Lara said. "My daughter, what will she do? She will study hard and there will be nothing. And if she has money, what will she invest it in? What will she gain? Cuba is supposed to be so medically sophisticated. But, you know, we can't even find aspirin to bring down a child's fever."
As the proletariat dictates of Lenin fell to free-market philosophy in Eastern Europe, Lara cringed and waited. Things got worse.
To bring in desperately needed cash, Fidel Castro began turning Cuba into a Club-Med of sorts, only the tourist traps were a Machiavellian ploy that natives found hard to swallow: Tourists -- capitalists -- were pampered and cared for by the man who reviled them most, Lara said. Cubans, except for high- ranking party members, stood in line all day to buy goods. They washed without soap. They rationed their three eggs a week. All for the revolution.
In a country that has been largely isolated from noncommunist society for 33 years, the so-called "tourist apartheid" has generated despair and outrage throughout the island. Many recently arrived Cubans have lambasted the Cuban government for pampering tourists and ignoring its own people.
The high-rise hotels, fully stocked stores and fancy restaurants catering only to tourists and their dollars eviscerated any remaining illusions of equality, Lara said.
"It didn't make sense," she said. "And it bothered me that government officials had everything they wanted without working. They bought things in the diplo-tiendas, the shops for tourists, with checks and foreigners' credit cards. I worked so hard, and once I got home I got nothing."
After months of sacrifice with no payoff in sight, frustration mounted.
"I was afraid to complain," she said. "You just can't say anything negative about the government because then you're against the government and you lose the little you already have. "Since I couldn't talk to anybody, I would scream to myself in my own house."
Lara was far from poverty-stricken. But, at 24, she felt numb to the core.
When she wasn't working for the tourists, she lived for her daughter, ushering her to and from school. She cooked, cleaned and chatted with her mother. In the evenings, she sat on the porch and watched neighbors amble by. She watched TV, took a bath and went to bed by 8:30 p.m.
She would wait in line for food, only to find none at the front of the line.
"I just wanted the days to go by quickly," she said.
But at work, she visited Cuba's small islands, sleeping in big houses or on the beach by the shore. In the morning and afternoon, she dived. In the evening, she played billiards, frequented discotheques or relaxed at tourists-only restaurants.
"When I went back home there was nothing -- no good food, no discos and, to top it off, no liberty," she said. "And you couldn't ask why do they, the tourists, have it and not me? Why do they get it all? This is our country. We were born here, not them. We couldn't even enjoy our own island. "There was such a contrast between how I could live and how I was living."
In September Lara began plotting her escape. She rode her bicycle into other neighborhoods, searching for a boat. She rented a car to drive to other provinces. Finally, in Santa Fe, where many Cuban rafters push off from shore to Miami, she found an inner-tube raft.
She told her mother she would float her way to Miami.
"I was ready, and I was taking my daughter," Lara said. "I know the sea very well. I was confident and I was desperate. My faith is so strong. I knew God would lead me here."
Her mother wasn't so sure.
She convinced Lara to wait, then talked to her husband, German Pompa, a 27-year-old pilot who worked for the Cuban government flying tourists around the island in a helicopter.
Pompa, a longtime avowed Communist, initially resisted.
"It was such a great risk," he said. "There were so many things that could have gone wrong. But I decided yes." That was on Dec. 15. Carefully, Lara and her mother spread the word to family and a few very close friends. Pompa memorized maps and kept close tabs on security guards at the Varadero airport where the copter was kept.
Twice the escape attempt failed. The first time, a fuse had been removed from the helicopter to avoid sabotage. The second time, Pompa discovered the helicopter had been flown to Havana. The third time, on Jan. 3, everything fell into place.
Pompa and two relatives wearing borrowed pilot uniforms walked onto the tarmac at the Varadero airport, three hours from Havana. The rest of the family had taken a bus to a prearranged spot one mile from the airport. Pompa landed the helicopter on the field, and 31 more people filed into the copter made for 18. Some sat in the aisle; others shared seats.
Lara brought only pictures of her modeling career and two changes of clothing for herself and her daughter. Pompa brought his six medals for valor and distinguished service in Angola.
"The trees were the problem," he said. "I thought the helicopter was not going to lift off. There were too many people on board. I thought I might not be able to maneuver up and out."
At 9 a.m., after U.S. radar picked up the copter, the group landed at Tamiami airport. A short time after the helicopter touched down, Lara and Carrazana stood on the field clutching a reporter's cellular phone. They had arrived in Miami.
"It's so different here," Lara said. "We left everything behind. But I'm so driven. I have hope. I have faith that I will triumph here."
She dreams of being able to scuba dive for a living. The Seaquarium, maybe. If not, anything will do, she said.
"Whether life here is hard or not doesn't worry me," she said. "No matter how hard it is I will get what I want. And I will give my daughter what she deserves. Things that come through sacrifice always taste better than those that don't."
C.M. GUERRERO / Miami Herald Staff
AT AIRPORT: Inova Lara, right, with her daughter as her sister Viviana Espinosa joyfully speaks on phone to her grandfather; mother is at left.
© 1996 The Miami Herald.