Skip to main content

Yahoo! News - Cubans in Car-Boat Are Stopped at Sea

Yahoo! News - Cubans in Car-Boat Are Stopped at Sea: "Eleven Cubans trying to sail to Florida in a 1950s Buick converted into a tailfinned boat were intercepted at sea by the Coast Guard and will be sent back to their homeland, exile activists said Wednesday.



Marciel Basanta Lopez and Luis Grass Rodriguez, the two men who turned the classic car into a floating vessel, tried a similar stunt last summer and got caught: They set out for Florida in a 1951 Chevy pickup with pontoons made out of empty 55-gallon drums and a propeller that pushed it along at about 8 mph.

On Monday, the men set out again, with four other adults and five children, relatives said. The Coast Guard intercepted the group late Tuesday en route to the Florida Keys, picking them up off Marathon, about 90 miles southwest of Miami, activist Arturo Cobo said.

Coast Guard officials refused to confirm the floating car's status, but Cobo said the Buick sank.

'My uncle is very brave. He is not irresponsible,' Eduardo Perez Grass, a nephew of Grass Rodriguez, said in Havana. 'There is no danger to the children. The car is very safe.'

He said the others on board were Grass Rodriguez' wife and son; Marciel Basanta's wife and their two children; and a third couple with two children.

The Buick's doors had been sealed to keep water out and it was powered by its original V-8 motor, said Eduardo Perez Grass, who was among those on the earlier attempt to reach the United States.

'My cousin isn't crazy. He wants to be free,' Basanta's cousin Kiriat Lopez, who lives in Lake Worth, told The Miami Herald. 'That's how crazy he is.'"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings : "BallDroppings is an addicting and noisy play-toy. It can also be seen as an emergence game. My brother Marc takes this software seriously as an audio-visual performance instrument. Balls fall from the top of the screen and bounce off the lines you are drawing with the mouse. The balls make a percussive and melodic sound, whose pitch depends on how fast the ball is moving when it hits the line."

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to ...

USATODAY.com - NASA docks contractor $45.2 million for Columbia

USATODAY.com - NASA docks contractor $45.2 million for Columbia : NASA penalized the contractor that maintains and operates the space shuttle fleet $45.2 million for its role in the shuttle Columbia accident, according to a letter NASA released Thursday. The United Space Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, had to forfeit the money even though NASA said the contractor did nothing specific to cause the accident. But a letter from a NASA official said the contractor was "an integral member" of the "team that reached flawed conclusions about the relative safety of Columbia and crew before and during the flight." The letter from NASA deputy associate administrator Michael Kostelnik was sent Jan. 7 to United Space Alliance president Michael McCulley, a former astronaut. The contract spells out performance bonuses based on safety, cost-effectiveness and other factors. For Oct. 1, 2002, through March 31, 2003, the alliance was eligible for $81.2 ...