Word: rafael
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...what the U.S. Immigration Service officially describes as "unusual transport"-hijacking yachts, diverting passenger planes at gunpoint or jumping off Cuban vessels transiting the Panama Canal. But even U.S. officialdom was prepared to admit last week that "unusual transport" hardly seemed adequate to cover the case of Jesus Rafael Saavedra...
...more than a year after he was demobilized from Dictator Fulgencio Batista's defeated army in 1959, skinny Rafael Saavedra supported himself by selling fruit and newspapers in the streets of the city of Santa Clara. In July 1960 he finally found steady work gassing and washing planes for a crop-dusting company at Santa Clara airport. He also found a friend, Ground Crewman Félix Montano Echevarria, 26. Together they dreamed of escaping to freedom and prosperity in the U.S., and Félix, who was taking flying lessons, thought he knew...
...Last Sight. At 6:20 one morning early this month, a Piper P18 duster plane with Félix at the stick rose over Santa Clara and headed into bucking head winds for the Florida Keys. Rafael, shivering in his thin vinyl jacket, was precariously perched half out of the narrow cockpit, with one leg braced against a wing strut. After two hours of buffeting, Félix, who had never flown in bad weather before, ditched the tiny plane a few hundred yards off Damas Cays, a string of small barren islets about 100 miles northeast of Santa Clara...
Stumbling ashore on Damas Cays, Rafael found a rusty, tumbledown radio tower, apparently a World War II leftover. He slept awhile, then began to build a raft of several large pieces of driftwood, which he tied together with some rusty electrical wire he found. On his third day on the island, the waves washed up a rusty but seaworthy 50-gallon drum. Placing the drum in the open center of his 6-ft. by 8-ft. raft, Rafael lashed it loosely with loops of wire so that it would not float off and left himself some slack wire to serve...
After 30 years of collaborating with Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the Dominican Republic's Roman Catholic hierarchy broke sharply with the strong-man last year. In a pastoral letter signed by all six of the country's bishops in January, the church called clearly and unequivocally for "freedom of conscience, press and assembly," for a climate of liberty, for an end to "anonymous denunciations." Last week the news filtered up from the Byzantine depths of Trujillo's country that the church had been forced to bend to the dictator again...