A Place Where Every Week Is ‘Shark Week’

ghThe Discovery Channel just ran another of its wildly popular “Shark Weeks” without mentioning what is probably the shark attack capital of the Western hemisphere—the Florida straits.

“Getting attacked by a shark just might be the scariest event in nature!” gasped a Discovery Channel narrator during Shark Week. “Australia recorded 56 fatal shark attacks between 1956 and 2008!”he gasped again. “Find out what it’s like from people who’ve lived to tell the tale!”

So the Discovery Channel goes back over half a century and to a distant continent to interview the victims and dramatize the attacks. But why the distant timeline and setting, ask many people in south Florida?

“The Florida Straits probably record 56 fatal shark attacks every few years,” says Matt Lawrence, who spent years rescuing desperate Cuban rafters. “Probably every month during the early ’90s,” adds Bay of Pigs vet Arturo Cobo who ran the rafter rescue center in Key West and for years heard the sobbing, gut-gripping details of these attacks almost daily.

“Something was moving in this raft,” recalls an airborne rescuer.

So I went in lower. The water all around the raft was turning red…the cloud spreading. Then I saw the shark—about the same length as the raft. The rafter was in fact a Cuban woman in her early twenties. Upon her rescue we found she had two bullet wounds in her legs from Castro’s frontier police. All others in the raft, including two infants had died, as did the shark, from being repeatedly stabbed by the pointed end of a broken oar by Maria. The Shark had bitten the oar in half as Maria pounded him…I started flying rescue missions full-time after that.

“The boys’ father, delirious from thirst and exposure, finally jumped in the water,” recalls another rescuer.

So the sons threw him a rope tied to the raft and he clutched it. They turned away for a second, slightly relieved—but only to spot a huge shark approaching, then another. Soon an entire school surrounded the raft and they ripped into their father…The water turned red as their father was eaten alive….. I can tell you from decades of and heart-breaking work from our center here in Key West that in the Florida straits every week is shark week.

Were the “root cause” of this drama and horror more politically-correct can you imagine its popularity in movies? Docudramas? Reality TV? But as usual, Castro also escapes censure for this form of torture and mass-murder.

The waters surrounding Cuba are famed for their hordes of sharks. Most people entering them for extended periods (all those showboat swimmers and surfers) insist on a defense against them. Yet a quarter to a half million Cubans have crossed these waters with little between them and the sharks than thin rubber or canvas — and knowing the odds were close to 50-50 that their craft would overturn or crumble.

Not that (given the media silence) most of you would have any reason to know this, but right off the southern Florida coast an estimated  70,000-80,000 people have perished since 1961 on the high seas, a large but unknown number of these at the hands (jaws, actually) of sharks. To this day most airborne rescuers report seeing sharks in the vicinity of most Cuban rafters. Many have observed attacks. Most survivors mention sharks and shark attacks often during their terrible voyage.

So here’s one of America’s most populous states and one bounded by beaches crammed with tourists. You’d really think this setting right off the U.S. coast could provide the Discovery Channel with material much more dramatic and relevant (titillating) for its U.S. audience. But where’s the Discovery Channel on this?

Perhaps the Discovery Channel’s budgets remain unscathed by Obama-nomics and the expense of flying production crews to Australia, South Africa, etc. rather than to Miami seems trivial?

On the other hand, upon viewing a Shark Week segment set in Florida, some viewers might ask: “But why is it that for over half a century so many thousands of people have risked the ‘scariest event in nature’ in the Florida straits?”

Ah! And there’s the rub.

The Discovery Channel, you see, is a major business partner of the Castro regime. So such a show would probably not sit well with their communist client. When it comes to the U.S. media and U.S. celebrities, after all, this communist client is much more accustomed to seeing such items as Newsweek hailing Cuba as among the “best countries in the world to live,” to hearing Jack Nicholson hail Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom as “a paradise” and to hear Bonnie Raitt commemorate Cuba in song as a “Happy Little Island!”

Never mind that ten to twenty times as many people have died attempting to flee Castro’s Cuba as died trying to flee East Germany, who—best we can tell — won no awards from Newsweek for its “quality of life.” What makes these stats even worse is that prior to Castroism Cuba took in immigrants at a higher rate than did the U.S. And mostly from Europe. Indeed more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S.

The Discovery Channel’s “Buena Vista Fishing Videos” dramatizes their business partnership with Castro. This show features sport-fishing videos filmed in full partnership with the Stalinist regime’s ministry of tourism. These attract a large number of well-heeled sport fishermen from around the world to Cuba’s “unspoiled” and “fish-filled” coastal waters.

By the simple diktat of banning boat ownership under penalty of torture chamber and/or firing-squad for everyone except top-regime officials many other nations could boast fishing grounds every bit as “unspoiled” as those surrounding the Castro brothers’ fiefdom.

He’d be loath to admit it, being a Che-T-shirt-wearer and all, but Eric Burdon of the Animals wrote a song that resounds with many Cubans: “We gotta get outta this place — if it’s the last thing we ever do!”

The last thing, indeed, for an estimated one-in-three of the desperate Cuban escapes during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. This is according to a study by the late Cuban-American scholar Dr. Armando Lago. A consistently hot item on Cuba’s black market is used motor oil: poor man’s shark-repellent, they call it. Perhaps for a few minutes. I suppose we all cling to false hopes when desperate. And people get no more desperate than when striving to flee the handiwork of Newsweek’s “quality-of-life” winner.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

 

  • Marty Tannenbaum

    It sounds like the only way it could be any more dangerous is if the sharks had frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.

  • johnlac

    Good article….minor correction….”We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. From what I’ve seen of Burden, he’s probably a huge Castro fan as evidenced by the picture I saw of him wearing a Che tee-shirt.

    • Humberto Fontova

      Mucho thanks for the correction, amigo. “Performed by Eric Burdon,” is better.

      • American Patriot

        Great article, Mr. Fontova. Thanks for showing the truth about Cuba, especially the fact that there is no real embargo on the Castro family dictatorship. Too many people in America, particularly those in academia, keep believing the Castro dictatorship’s propaganda as the “official facts” on Cuba. I also recommend my friends to read Babalu Blog, which you regularly write articles for that website. Thanks again for the article.

  • El Cid

    The truth is that Cuba is nothing more than a Island prison run by a terrorist government. If it were a “paradise” there would be no reason to restrict people from leaving. How can that simple truth be explained away?

    The story about the sharks could be a great start for an upcoming film maker who wants to make a mark–it is so otherwise sensational that the “politically incorrect” aspect would be ignored by the media.

    • Fed Up

      Andy Garcia, call your office!

  • Thomas L. Stafford

    Florida beach tourism is also a major factor in this equation. I stopped watching Discovery Channel because of their politics a long time ago.

  • Fed Up

    Wow, I’m a Miami native and am old enough to remember the original exiles. We had Dr.s, lawyers, business owners and other leading men and women of Cuba washing our floors and dishes, serving us food in the resteraunts and any menial jobs they could get to make it here and provide a free and better life for their children. I had a business partner in the early ’90s who came over on a Pedro Pan flight and my first semi-formal Spanish lessons I received from a gay Marielito name Jose while we worked the poolside bar at Miami Beach’s most famous hotel in late ’80-’81. Informal teachers tend to teach the dirty words first. I have always liked and respected the Cuban people and knew of their many hardships but I had not heard of this, not on the news as Fontova details but also not from any Cubanos either. They are a friendly, optimistic and outward people but not overly demonstrative nor do they readily complain or find fault. I admire them.

    A more inspirational tale is Luis Grass and family who were returned to Cuba after driving automobiles across the straits not once but twice! You read that right. In 2003 he outfitted and waterproofed a ’51 Chevy pickup truck and got within 40 miles of the coast and again in 2004 in a Buick, a ’58 I think, and was also intercepted. I don’t know about anyone else but I wouldn’t drive a ’58 Buick across my neighbor’s 1/4 acre pond

    Since they didn’t actually reach shore they were returned under a pusillanimous US policy of appeasement but they finally made it in ’05 by how else? Crossing over our southern border like everyone else but having made it were allowed to stay and travel to Miami. God bless them. Grass and company I do not mind getting here because he shouldn’t have been turned back in the first place and any man who is that inventive, determined and courageous is the kind I’m happy to welcome here.

    I’ve watched it all of my life, the desperate and daring escapes from Cuba and it says something about a people who will cross 90 miles of shark infested, open ocean in old cars, rickety rafts, inner tubes and plywood or anything else they can make float. And it also says something about what they’re fleeing from that they would run such chances and also our politicians that they would return them there. They’re not risking all for “jobs”, social benefits and school for their kids like the hordes of unassimilable peasants we see in the news of late, they are fleeing and dying for life and liberty itself. And if ever you care to see their contributions to our nation, come down and visit Miami.

  • jewdog

    I think it’s ironic that a country that boasts of its universal health care can be so hazardous to one’s health.