Features Review: Sail to the U.S.A. in a Chevrolet

So it wasn’t long before he was looking for another way to get to Miami. He found it in the form of a derelict ’59 Buick four-door Electra hardtop.

Applying lessons he learned with the truck to the light-green Buick, he built the car-boat using a vee-shaped hull and a more pointed prow to make it faster in the water, and of course it had a Buick V-8 for power. The propeller ran off a transfer case and a second driveshaft and was placed inside a tunnel to maximize its efficiency. As with the truck, the Buick’s rear-mounted rudder was controlled by cables connected to the tie-rod ends. There was no need for the pontoons used on the truck.

“There was more technology in the Buick,” says Grass. “If the car would fill with water, there were pumps that would just throw the water out.” Loaded with 11 people (Grass’s family plus Basanta’s family and another friend, Rafael Diaz, and his family), the Buick set out for Florida at 7 p.m. on February 2, 2004. The oceangoing Buick got within 10 miles of the American coastline before it was again intercepted by the Coast Guard, which claims to have sunk the Buick. But Grass didn’t see it go down and doesn’t believe it did.

“So the Buick,” Grass asserts adamantly, “they wanted to sink it as well. But they couldn’t. Because we put Styrofoam into all the compartments. If you would drop it from a third floor into the sea, it would just come back. I think they have it stored. When I was in Guantanamo Bay, an officer told me, ‘They never sank your boat. It is stored somewhere, and they’re going to put it in a museum.’”

Wherever the Buick wound up, after convincing immigration authorities this time that the consequences in Cuba for them would be grave, the Grass family was interred at Guantanamo Bay while the rest of their fellow truckonauts were sent back into Cuba. And they stayed in Gitmo for a full 10 months while the U.S. government figured out what to do with them. They were treated well there, says Grass, but even a pleasant jail is still a jail, and it was particularly tough on his then-four-year-old son. Eventually, the Grass family forced the issue with a brief hunger strike during September of that year, and they were granted refugee status by Costa Rica. They were flown to that country on December 1, 2004, with the promise of financial aid from the United States to help them adapt to the new surroundings.

But the point of all Luis Grass’s efforts was always to get to the U.S., and Miami in particular. So they didn’t stay long in Costa Rica.

By early 2005, Grass and his family were in the process of hitchhiking the 2100-or-so convoluted miles through Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, to finally cross into the U.S. six weeks later in mid-March at Matamoras. That entire journey was done without passports, visas, or any other legal papers, although Grass did pick up financial help from relatives in the U.S. who sent him cash along the way via Western Union. It was a journey Grass says was much more harrowing than his sea voyages.

In Texas, the little group applied for political asylum, and after they were held in Brownsville for two days, it was granted. They went straight to Miami.

While Grass was making his overland journey, friend Rafael Diaz was back in Cuba modifying a blue 1948 Mercury airport transport car along the same lines as the Buick. On June 5, 2005, Diaz, his wife and two children, and nine others (including Marciel Basanta and his family) were intercepted just south of the Florida Keys, and because the Diaz family had already arranged U.S. visas, they were allowed into the country. The Coast Guard sank that vehicle, too.

The photographs of the truckonauts at sea make them appear almost cute. Their brightly colored vehicles are undeniably ingenious, and since they were built from ancient and familiar American iron, the affection is immediate. Plus, it’s flattering that so much effort would go into an attempt to make it to the Land of the Free. It all plays into our preconceptions of Cuba as a place filled with people yearning for freedom as well as classic American cars from the ’50s.

But that all conspires to downplay how seriously dangerous those voyages were. In April this year, the Cuban Coast Guard fired at suspected migrant smugglers and is believed to have killed one person. In April 2005, the U.S. Coast Guard rescued three severely dehydrated Cubans who survived the capsizing of another smuggling craft — their 31 shipmates are not believed to have survived being thrown into the shark-infested waters. The U.S. Coast Guard made 10,716 interdictions at sea (1499 of which were Cubans — third by nationality behind Haitians and Dominicans) during 2004, and no one really knows how many people are drowning trying to get here. The truckonauts were staggeringly lucky.

The Cuban community in and around Miami is a tight one, and the truckonauts were accepted into it. Luis Grass quickly found a job at Maroone Chevrolet of West Dade as a line mechanic and plunged into learning the latest diagnostic tools. His wife took a job making sandwiches at a deli in a Shell station. Diaz found work in a body shop. Basanta and his family, plus Grass’s two children from his first marriage, remain in Cuba.

Maroone Chevrolet’s general manager, Raúl de la Milera, a Cuban émigré himself, has been working with Grass and other mechanics at the dealership to convert a 1953 Chevrolet truck they located into a near duplicate of the original truckonaut machine. This new truck isn’t in great shape — there are places where the body has rotted through — but according to Grass, it’s in “much, much better condition” than what he started with in Cuba. It makes his accomplishment that much more impressive.

The Grass family lives in a large, nondescript Hialeah apartment building with Luis’s uncle. Their home is spotless, comfortable, and modestly furnished.

One of his first purchases after settling in Florida was a new Chevrolet TrailBlazer. He’s a firm fan of GM products, and there was a good rebate available. It would be an unthinkably luxurious vehicle in Cuba, where the per capita gross domestic product is only about $3300 — about 1/13th that of the United States — and new vehicles are rare and usually government-owned.

That TrailBlazer has also introduced him to that most American of consumer institutions — GMAC financing. Is it intimidating for him to owe that much money? “No,” he says. “In life you have to set goals. Whoever lives in fear doesn’t deserve to live.”