A boat with more than 800 Haitians seeking to reach the United States landed the day before in a town in central Cuba, where the migrants said they had asked for help with light signals for being adrift after the abandonment of their captain.
They were taken to a temporary reception center, The Associated Press found on Wednesday.
“We had been on Tortuga Island for two months waiting for the trip until last Saturday at 5 in the morning in a yola (a small boat) they took us to the ship,” Joyce Paul, 19, one of the women, told The Associated Press. people who arrived on the ship packed with compatriots, including nursing children and pregnant women.
In those days “there were 15 people who threw themselves into the sea because they couldn’t stand hunger. There was a herring for (each) 15 and they gave us water, ”said Paul, who traveled with an uncle, his wife and a baby at a cost of 4,000 dollars per person.
842 people were traveling, including 70 children and 97 women -two pregnant-, indicated the journalist Máximo Luz, from the official broadcaster Telecubanacán on his Facebook portal.