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

To stabilize it, six empty oil drums made of steel were lashed to each side to form pontoons, and a small prow was fabricated to sit ahead of the front bumper and cut through the water. Another section of hull was lashed behind the truck to balance the vehicle relative to its height and width. Power came from the truck’s ancient 236-cubic-inch six-cylinder engine (rated at 92 horsepower when it was new, before a half-century’s seasoning in Cuban agriculture) with a transfer case behind the transmission feeding a second driveshaft and ultimately a 16-inch propeller Grass had scavenged. Cables attached to the tie-rod ends ran back to a fabricated rudder so that turning the truck’s steering wheel moved it appropriately (there was also a tiller, should the cables fail).

To launch the truck, all Grass and his crew had to do was drive across the hard-packed sands of Havana’s Brisas Del Mar beach (a popular departure point for rafters) into the Atlantic and then head north. Once they hit another beach in the U.S., Grass figured, they would “drive directly to a gas station, buy some gas, and drive it” to Miami. That’s the clear advantage sailing a truck to Florida has over a raft.

Laden with about 106 gallons of surreptitiously accumulated gasoline and enough provisions to sustain the 12 people aboard, the Chevrolet entered the surf at 3 a.m. in the darkness, at high tide, on July 15, 2003, and started its slog across the strait. It turns out that 1951 Chevy two-ton trucks aren’t hydrodynamically efficient. Although the truck was stable and might have been capable of three or four knots under ideal circumstances, during this 31-hour voyage, the Chevy only made it to within about 40 miles of the Florida coast.

Grass spent most of that time in the truck’s cab as pilot and captain, while the passengers held fast in the truck’s bed, protected by a canvas cover and eating cold cuts and crackers. Sometimes one or two would wander onto the pontoons, but even though the seas were unusually calm, most of them got seasick. Although it was hardly a luxurious voyage, the Chevy was slow and stable and chugged on reliably. It never came close to sinking.

But it was spotted by a U.S. Customs aircraft and intercepted by the Coast Guard.

“They lied,” Grass claims of his first encounter with the Coast Guard. “They told me they had an immigration official on board [the cutter] and that we might be able to get into the United States. But I didn’t want to give them the truck because it was my property. And they said, ‘We’re not going to sink it. We’re going to put it in a museum.’”

“He may have misunderstood because he doesn’t speak English,” says Luis Diaz, a public-affairs official for the Coast Guard. “We would not take out a cutter just to be a tow service.” The Coast Guard’s district commander at the time, Rear Admiral Harvey Johnson, also told the Miami Herald that the truck had been sunk because its survival and probable public display (in a museum exhibit or otherwise) would have been “an encouragement for people in Cuba to think they need to make it to the United States.” The Coast Guard ends up caught between enforcing immigration laws and a law that grants a direct path to citizenship to Cubans who make it to dry land.

So after everyone was off the truck and safely aboard the cutter, the Coast Guard used the automatic fire of their deck guns to sink the ancient green truck. “It was sinking,” Grass recalls painfully, who was given earplugs before the shooting began, “and you could still see, like, the top of it. Then they came back and kept shooting at it, and it kept coming back.” But eventually, it went down and stayed down.

By the time the Coast Guard took the truck’s occupants to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for three days of processing back into their native country, their story had gotten a lot of press in Florida, and a new word was forged to describe them: camionautas. In English, that translates to “truckonauts.”