Cuban woman bleeds to death on migrant boat, exile advocate says
A woman from Cuba died last week after suffering an injury on a migrant boat that the U.S. Coast Guard found off the Florida Keys. The Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the woman as Madely Gamboa Rios. Her date of birth was not known, but Tiffany Fridley, director of operations for the medical examiner, said she was born in 1973, making her either 48 or 49 years old.
Ramón Saúl Sánchez, leader of the Miami-based Cuban exile group Democracy Movement, said she was struck in the leg by the homemade boat’s propeller shaft, which broke during the dangerous journey.
“She bled to death on the way here,” Sánchez said.
Sánchez worked with local authorities to help locate the woman’s relatives, who live in Caimito, a municipality in Cuba’s Artemisa province.
Gamboa Rios also has relatives in South Florida, and they are trying to raise enough money to send her body back to Cuba for burial. Most funeral homes in the Miami area charge up to $8,500 to transport deceased people back to the island, Sánchez said.
“Most of these people are poor. They’re working people. Many have just arrived. They don’t have that kind of money,” he said.
The Coast Guard stopped the boat about 70 miles off Key West on June 21, said Petty Officer Nicole Groll, a Coast Guard spokeswoman. Groll said she could not provide details about Gamboa Rios’ death but said a person among several on board was “unconscious.”
The Coast Guard is dealing with the largest exodus of Cuban migrants en route to South Florida in more than six years. Since the beginning of October,
3,016 people from Cuba have been stopped along the Florida Straits.
To put that number in perspective, the Coast Guard intercepted just 49 people between Cuba and Florida over the course of the 2020 fiscal year, a time period running from Oct. 1 to the end of September.
The recent surge is driven by a deteriorating economic and political climate in the country.
On Monday alone, a Coast Guard cutter returned 106 Cubans who were intercepted during several incidents off the Keys last week.
Also, the most people since the early 2000s are leaving Haiti by boat, with the Coast Guard reporting Wednesday that it has interdicted 6,114 people from that country since Oct. 1.