Houston Chronicle

Eerie mystery lies in heart of exhibit honoring history

‘Freedom Found’ reconstruc­ts refugee raft

- By Molly Glentzer

No one knows how the raft got to a Texas beach, who rode it or if they survived their trip. But its journey has ended, for now, in an unlikely place: an art gallery at a Houston shopping mall.

The tattered vessel and its contents strike visitors as terribly sad: two rusted machetes, a plain canvas duffle bag, two straw sombreros, a spoon and a galvanized pail with a handforged bottom, a big pair of black leather work boots. The raft and its refugees clearly came through some sort of hell.

Melissa Gonzales and Angela Garza stumbled onto the exhibit Thursday during their lunch break from retail jobs at Memorial City Mall.

“It brings up a lot of questions,” Gonzales said. “It’s not only a piece of art, it’s a piece of history. ... It’s incredible that there was still so much stuff on it when you think about where it came from.”

“And of course you wonder what was the end of the story,” Garza said. It made her think of her parents, who came to Houston from Mexico more than 30 years ago. “I hear stories,” she said.

This chapter of the raft’s

story began in June at Sargent Beach, about 24 miles from Bay City, on a sliver of land between the Intracoast­al Waterway and the Gulf of Mexico. It was nine days after Tropical Storm Bill made landfall a few miles south on Matagorda Island.

Suzanne Williams found it first. During years of beachcombi­ng, the Bay City resident has collected dead sea turtles, morphine ampoules, buoys from Denmark and Italy, a wicker fish trap, hard hats, a life preserver and other detritus.

“But this raft, the way it was made, was so cool,” Williams said.

‘Extreme poverty’

The boat had catamaran-like hulls made of stacked Styrofoam blocks held together by sheet metal and strips of Ushaped rebar, with a deck of rough-cut pine that still had bark in places. A small, three-bladed propeller and a drive shaft that probably came from a car powered the craft at some point, although it looked like it had undergone a hasty repair, fastened with ragged strips of wire, rubber and rope.

Its mast was broken, its metal awning frame mangled, its deck strewn with a mess of burlap, tarp fragments and rope.

Items left behind — a spoon stamped “Hecho en Cuba,” a straw hat painted with the logo of the Isla de la Juventud baseball team — hint that the boat set sail from the Caribbean island.

When Williams first saw it, she thought the riders had just stepped away. In the disarray on top of the raft, she discovered the machetes, somberos and boots, among other beachcombi­ng prizes, on a foam

mattress.

She scoured the sand for footprints or tire tracks: nothing. Whoever had been on the raft was gone.

By the time Maureen “Mo” Huddleston happened upon the raft three days later, the rudder was half-buried in the sand.

Huddleston, a Houston artist and retired nurse, often searches the beach for driftwood and other objects that she makes into tabletop sculptures. She first wanted the raft’s canopy frame; its rebar looked like good art material.

But the raft deserved better. Rudimentar­y handles made of rubber, fabric and rope hung from the boat’s rusted stanchions. At least eight people could have held on.

Huddleston and her sister, Shay Dunnohew, found a work glove with a Cuban label and a small bottle of the mosquito larvicide Bactivec, along with the boots and T-shirts and shredded canvas and plastic. A gray Fruit of the Loom T-shirt with repair stitches under the arms fascinated them.

“Here, it would have been a rag. It wasn’t even like your favorite Beatles T-shirt that you’d wear until it fell off your body. This was extreme poverty,” Huddleston said.

She reported her find to the Matagorda County Sheriff ’s Office. They told her she could have it. She was barely off the phone when three carloads of teenagers climbed onto the boat and threw the mattress into the water.

“They just didn’t understand what it is — what people go through to get to the United States and enjoy the freedom we have,” she said.

Thinking the raft could be the most important art project of her life, she wanted to save it and get it to a museum.

“I wanted to honor the people who put this together and made this journey,” she said.

Whether the passengers were alive or dead, they’d found some version of freedom, she said, so she named her project “Freedom Found.”

When Huddleston and Dunnohew returned the next day, Stephen Bell was there with a trailer and tools. An Alvin plumber who’d come to check on his boat and beach house after the storm, he wanted the raft’s stainless steel hull plates.

Bell had never seen anything like the raft.

“It looked like Third World stuff,” he said. “I didn’t see how that boat was still sitting upright. It was a pretty good catamaran.”

‘There’s a reason’

When Huddleston explained her plan to save the raft, Bell offered to help.

“I feel like there’s a reason I met her on the beach that day,” he said. “They must have been coming from a really bad place to risk their lives on a raft like that.”

Huddleston left a note on the raft to other beachcombe­rs. She heard from a man who’d taken a sack of dried-up rice stamped with the seal of Alimport, the Cuban import regulatory agency.

A few weeks later, Larry Keast, a benefactor from Unity Church, where Huddleston is a member, sent a truck and two men to help her bring the bulky structure to a storage facility in Houston. She ended up with all of the Styrofoam blocks, the T-shirts, the boots, the canvas, the rope, five of the grip handles and two shoeboxes of small items that offered scant clues about its passengers: a broken mirror, a chewedup pencil, a thorny twig and a scrap of newspaper.

Last year, more than 25,000 Cubans arrived on U.S. shores and border crossings without a visa. An even greater number are expected this year, after President Barack Obama’s December announceme­nt that he would re-establish diplomatic ties with the island nation. Many are anxious to leave because they fear the U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which affords migrants from that country a fasttrack to permanent residency, will end.

The U.S. Coast Guard intercepte­d 893 seafaring Cuban refugees between January and May this year, on track to equal the 2014 total of 2,111 intercepti­ons, most off the Florida coast. But an unknown number of refugees also cross the Yucatan Channel to Honduras or Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula before making the arduous land trip to the U.S.

The Coast Guard has not intercepte­d any Cuban refugees along the Texas coast this year — or perhaps ever — said Petty Officer 1st Class Andrew Kendrick of the HoustonGal­veston sector. He said he’d never heard of refugee rafts washing ashore in Texas.

Questions unanswered

The Sargent Beach raft’s mysteries may never be solved. Was it left on a Yucatan shore, eventually drifting as far as 600 nautical miles? Were the refugees intercepte­d by Mexican authoritie­s? Could they have been rescued by sympatheti­c fishermen? Did they swim ashore near Matagorda? Were they tossed overboard by the storm?

Huddleston has reassemble­d a “scrunched” version of the boat at Galerie Spectra, a community artists’ co-op at Memorial City Mall. It sits under a ceiling fan on beige carpet in a windowless room with plantation shutters — a space built as a model showroom for high-rise condos. Huddleston’s 12-minute video of the raft on the beach loops from an iPad on a stand, with a New Age soundtrack that adds a funereal aura.

Even wildly out of context, the raft moves people.

Ray Dickinson and Vicky Castro, who work at the mall’s visitor services desk, stopped in to see the exhibit. The raft’s constructi­on impressed Dickinson.

“For them to weld something like this and get it across the ocean — what guts, what bravery,” he said.

Sentiments ranging from awe to gratitude fill the pages of Huddleston’s comment book.

“Wow!” wrote Armando Chacon, who left Cuba 48 years ago. “Tears are there, but I’m not going back. What a tragedy we had to endure as a people. I hope this opens peoples’ minds about what Communism is about. So many families broken apart, so many lives lost. Bless you for bringing this part of so many Cubans’ journeys to light.”

Huddleston hopes to find “Freedom Found” a permanent home.

“I feel like my whole life has been leading me to this place,” she said.

 ?? Jon Shapley / Houston Chronicle ?? Artist Mo Huddleston exhibits her latest, “Freedom Found,” items salvaged from a Cuban refugee raft.
Jon Shapley / Houston Chronicle Artist Mo Huddleston exhibits her latest, “Freedom Found,” items salvaged from a Cuban refugee raft.
 ?? Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle ?? Artist Mo Huddleston’s latest installati­on, “Freedom Found,” can be seen at Galerie Spectra. The raft, believed to be used by Cuban refugees, was discovered washed ashore in Matagorda County in late June, after Tropical Storm Bill.
Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle Artist Mo Huddleston’s latest installati­on, “Freedom Found,” can be seen at Galerie Spectra. The raft, believed to be used by Cuban refugees, was discovered washed ashore in Matagorda County in late June, after Tropical Storm Bill.

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