Jorge Gonzalez and Kristy Gonzalez

[00:06] KRISTI GONZALEZ: My name is Kristi Gonzalez. I'm 39 years old. Today's date is Saturday, April 20, 2024. Our location is Storycorps at Linda. My interview partner is Jorge Gonzalez, and my relationship to him is. I am his daughter.

[00:21] JORGE GONZALEZ: My name is Jorge Gonzalez. I am 71 years old, and today's date is Saturday, April 2024. We are at Story Corps Atlanta, and the name of my interview is my daughter, Kristi Gonzalez.

[00:38] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So I always tell everybody that my dad has the best stories. And the adventures of your life never cease to amaze me. And one story that's always stuck with me is the story of getting your family out of Cuba. When I think about what my life was like when I was 13 years old, it was so frivolous, and I had so much privilege, and I was preoccupied by silly things. And yet there you were at 13 years old, and you had to leave your family. And I want to know more about what that experience was like for you and also what it was like when you were reunited.

[01:23] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, this story pretty much happened because my family had been trying to get out of Cuba for years. They did not agree with the government, and so they could not leave the country because Castro passed a law in 1965 preventing every male between the age of 25 and 30 from leaving the country. And my brother turned 15 that year. My family couldn't leave the country, so there were really no options for the family to leave the country. And that was the situation for many people. But in April of 1980, a family hijacked a bus, and they ran the peruvian embassy in Havana. And as they ran the walls, one of the guards got killed. And they. One of the ways that people escaped Cuba was to get into a foreign embassy and then get that country to get you out of there. So what happened was this happened. Castro got furious and demanded that they return the people who had gone into the peruvian embassy. And actually, the peruvian embassy refused. So Castro told them that they were going to take the guards off the embassy. And in a period of about 36 hours, 10,000 Cubans decided that they didn't want to live in Cuba anymore. And so this was a big embarrassment for Castro. So he comes up and decides that he's going to take the embassy guards off, and anybody can leave Cuba. But going back to my story is when I was 13, since my family couldn't leave until that happened, my parents decided to send me out of Cuba. So for me, a boy from a small town was very exciting to be able to get on an airplane and go to Spain as an immigrant. Then come to the United States. My uncle Julio in Puerto Rico was the one who was getting us out, me and my uncle. And then the day came for the big event when I was going to leave the country. To be honest with you, I was so excited being a country young man. I had never seen an airplane, a jet airplane or anything like that. So for me, it was, like, exciting. But then something happened. I remember my mom crying. I remember my dad being very serious about the whole thing. My brother was kind of jealous of the whole situation. He's a year older than me. And my little sister, who was fired, didn't know what was happening. She was just surprised to see so many people around. So my mom pulled me aside and cried and told me, I said, I want you to promise me to write me a letter a week. And I promised that to her. And her name was Claudina. And my dad called me aside. He said, son, you leaving the country? We don't know how long it's going to be before we see you again. We need you to be strong and get ready if no opportunity comes for you to get us out of Cuba, for you to do it. So, as I said goodbye to them, and I walked to the airplane, then I saw them on the balcony, my mom crying at everybody. And I said goodbye to them. And little did I know that it would be 14 years before I saw them again.

[04:54] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So you were 13 and you had to leave your family, and you said your brother was jealous because he couldn't leave and you were getting out. Is that right?

[05:07] JORGE GONZALEZ: Yes.

[05:09] KRISTI GONZALEZ: And so what was it like when you finally got the phone call after the incident in the peruvian embassy, when you found out that there was going to be an opportunity to rescue your family? I mean, it had been so long. You were a teenager now you're a grown man, and mom was pregnant. So what? I mean, I can't even imagine what getting that phone call's like and saying, go rescue your family. Figure it out.

[05:38] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, it was really surprising what happened, because for many years, I had thought of many ways of how I could get them out of Cuba. And when the situation with the peruvian embassy happened and Castro said that any Cuban who wanted to leave the country, all they needed was for their family to come pick them up at the port of Marilla. So I got a call from my uncle, Diomedes Rodriguez, and he said, I had just got back from college. I was going to college at the time. And he said, get as much money as you can, because we can go to Cuba and get the family. This is in April 1980. So I started making calls to family members to do that. And so I got enough money, what I thought was enough money to go. I had no idea how it was going to be. I flew to Miami and I met with my uncle. And then the search began to try to get a boat to go to Cuba. Boy, imagine so many Cubans. Everybody was excited about going to get their family out. We had no idea at the time what was happening in Cuba with the people. We only knew that we could go to Cuba and get the family out. And this is around the end of April, about April 2726, and we couldn't get on a boat or anything to go to Cuba. But it ended up that a friend of my uncle Diomedes, and his friend was Emisel. I don't remember his last name. He partnered with my uncle to buy a boat to get the family out of Cuba to go down there.

[07:18] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Did you know anything about sailing a boat or how to.

[07:23] JORGE GONZALEZ: No, I have no idea. I didn't know anything about navigation. I only. I read that Cuba was 90 miles away. But we found a young man that was in the same situation. He wanted to go get the family in Cuba. So I had gone to get six family members out. Emicel had gone to get six family members out. And this young man who said he knew how to drive a boat and how to navigate was going to get two or three people, I can't exactly remember. So we made a deal that if he drove the boat, we could get his family. So we left Miami, headed down to Key west. And Key west was madness. With all the boats going to Cuba, we had to buy a lot of gas to head out to there. Now, I had.

[08:09] KRISTI GONZALEZ: I mean, what other supplies did you. How did you even know how long you were going to.

[08:13] JORGE GONZALEZ: No, we had no idea. There were stories of people, you know, maybe it's going to be a week, maybe it's going to be ten days or so on. So we started buying cans of Vienna sausage and sardines and some bread. Not after. Not after two weeks eating the same thing. No. So we started buying those things and kind of stuck in the boat for about a week. And so there was bad weather in the Strait of Florida. So finally this man who knew how to navigate said, it's good weather to go to Cuba. So we just sailed, went down south to Cuba and actually reached Cuba. It took all night. Half the next day, it's 90 miles from when you're going so slow. Time just goes by pretty fast. So we actually reached Cuba on the 1 May of 1980.

[09:14] KRISTI GONZALEZ: How did you feel? How did you feel when you saw your homeland?

[09:18] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, I saw my homeland and coming in from the ocean and seeing big buildings of Havana and everything else was really exciting. What scared me was when we got to Mariel Bay, and they had some coast guard cutters in there, some boats over there guarding the entrance to the bay. And then they came with a little boat, taking your boat name, getting your passport information and all of that. And I actually felt we were walking into the lion's den, you know, I was kind of scared because we're like, we're at the mercy of these people here as we went in. And it turns out that we were given a number, like 1500 and something. That means there were 1500 some boats before us that had gotten there. So we were told to go into the bay and that somebody will come to negotiate.

[10:14] KRISTI GONZALEZ: To negotiate releasing your family?

[10:17] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, the negotiation was the 10,000 people that had gone into the embassy of Peru had been given a safe pass to go home and to be able to leave the country. So they were sending those people out in boats coming back to the United States. But the negotiation was okay. How big is your boat? You have about 30ft, so you have one person for each feed. So that means you can take 30 people out. But we went to get 1415 people. So when we had 30% of 30, that's nine persons, so somebody has to stay behind. And so.

[11:04] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So you had to decide which of your family members you were gonna leave.

[11:08] JORGE GONZALEZ: There was a place in one of the piers in there that you could actually go in there. You had to pay to get there. And they have phones that you could call. So I called my family. I asked my parents, this is the situation that we have, because I had gone to get six people. My father, Alberto, my mother Claudina, my brother Carlos, his wife Martica, my sister Noiris, and my brother's daughter Johannes. And Emicell went to get six persons too, and we only had to take nine. So the guy who took the boat down wasn't even thinking about him, because we have paid a lot of money for this vote, so we really couldn't accommodate him because we had to leave people behind. So my father told me, I said, the important thing is for you to get your brother out because he's not allowed to leave the country. He's not 30 years old yet, so you need to get him out and his family out. So my dad said, we stay behind. It's going to be easier for us to come out later on, and because we were older and we're a burden to the government, so technically, my parents stayed behind, and I got them out of Cuba three months later through Venezuela. But that's another story. As we negotiated the deal, I volunteered to help the cuban communists to. To negotiate with the boats, different boats, the people coming in with their needs and so on. And really everybody was short. There were a lot of people who had gone in shrimping boats, like the ones that you see on the movie Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump, yeah. There were some people that weren't in those boats down there, and they were getting 2300 people. And then they found out they couldn't get everybody out, and they were giving what the Cubans government called people from the embassy, the 10,000. But what the cuban government started doing was sending out all those persons that they considered undesirables in society with a communist regime, like very religious people or criminals, common criminals, or maybe some hardened criminals, people that they consider on the saddle because they were homosexuals or whatever the government thought that they were going to get rid of. So this is, you were rescued, rescuing.

[13:43] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Your little sister, and you have no idea who you're going to invite in on your boat to sail back?

[13:48] JORGE GONZALEZ: No, we had no idea who was going to come in our boat to come back, but we didn't negotiate right away. It took a few days to be able to do the so called negotiation with the government, where they pretty much was the rules, and you had to accept whatever they were telling you. So, you know, at that time, we had no idea how long it was going to be. We finally did the negotiation around the fourth or 5 may, and I stayed in that place where they were doing the negotiations longer to try to help. Manolo was the guy that brought the boat down, and we couldn't find anybody because everybody was short. He actually went to the port, to the pier, where they were loading the people back to the United States and came back to the United States, and then we're over there, and I have no idea how to sail or drive a boat. I had never done it.

[14:48] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So Manolo left the captain of the boat just.

[14:51] JORGE GONZALEZ: Yeah, he came back because he couldn't get his family, and the deal was for him to get his family back, but.

[14:57] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So he was upset that he couldn't get his family back.

[14:59] JORGE GONZALEZ: Of course he was upset.

[15:01] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So you guys were short a captain.

[15:03] JORGE GONZALEZ: That was a tough decision. But, I mean, I was leaving my parents behind, and this is what I tried to tell them. I said, maybe we can go back, take the people that we had, go back and come back to Cuba and get your family. But he thought he had gotten a rotten deal out of it. And, I mean, we felt really bad, but he did come back and all I asked and said, can you show me how to turn on the engines? I mean, I hadn't absolutely no idea how to turn on the engines or anything in there. So we kind of settled down to wait and see what happened on the next coming time. We had no idea when they were going to give us our family.

[15:56] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So how were they communicating when your family was coming? Was it completely up in the air? Did you know, like, if your number was 1500, did they call numbers all the time, or.

[16:07] JORGE GONZALEZ: No, we have no idea. They had a cuban ship park in the bay. The name of the cuban ship was Comandante Linares. I really don't know who it was, but it was like a cargo ship that had a little pier and you can actually go there. And then from there you had to pay like $5 to go to this other pier that they had, where they had phones that you could call the family and so on. But then you have to pay to get back to the Comandante Linares so your boat could go pick you up. And that's how we had to do things. We had to go to the comandante Linares, grab that little boat and go to the pier that they have where you could actually buy food in there. Everything overpriced. The other one was your dollars, and then from there you had to pay to call your family. So we thought it was going to be a lot faster than that. I mean, we were in the boat ready from the moment we finished the negotiations to get the family.

[17:08] KRISTI GONZALEZ: And so how long was it?

[17:10] JORGE GONZALEZ: It was about over two and a half weeks.

[17:13] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Two and a half weeks sitting in.

[17:14] JORGE GONZALEZ: The bay of Marriott, sitting in the bay. And one of the things they used to do, they had the bay divided in different areas, and then as your number got closer to whatever they were going to call, they moved you from one area of the bay to the other. And one of the things that happened was you had to move the boat and it takes gas. And we had, I believe we found out when we were going from Miami to Key west that two tanks of 40 gallons each on the ship was not enough to go to Cuba. So we bought a lot of cans for gas and drums for gas, and we had about 400 gallons of gas that we had bought. But it was slow going. And then we realized we were very short on gas, so we tried to ration the gas. But probably you don't know or people don't know that every boat catches water and then the boats have a pump that turns on with the battery and then pumps the water out the boat. That's why if you leave a boat docked for too long, it will eventually sink because of that, because the battery will run out of your pump. So we have to run the boat to charge the batteries.

[18:38] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Okay, so you have no idea how long you're going to have to run the boat. You're running short on gas and you're down a captain, but at least you know how to turn on the engines.

[18:48] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well.

[18:51] KRISTI GONZALEZ: And you have no idea how much longer it's going to take.

[18:54] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, one of the first adventures when that happened was the fact that when they make you move, I realized that you cannot cross another boat in front of them because your propellers will cut their anchor. So we had to give up one or two anchors that we have. So I had to learn the hard way. And what might be you learned the hard way? The hard way. We had to give up an anchor. My biggest fear was to how am I going to get this boat into a dock without destroying it? But then again, at the same time, I went to the comandante Linares and to the pier, and then I called my parents to say, they picked up your brother and the rest of the family. So we thought this was going to be pretty soon, unknown to me, what they were doing. They were picking up. These people had taken to a camp that they called the mosquito. Mosquito. And they kept them in there for a few days until they brought them to the pier where they were going to load up. So my brother, his wife, his daughter, my sister, they were in this pier in this camp for that time. But one of the things we noticed and we found out is that they were loading all these people on boats, and they were loading common criminals on the boats of the supposedly people from the embassy coming back. So we kind of got ready for it, and we found a knife on the boat in case one of these. I mean, somebody crazy, because they sent the people from the sanatoriums out, too. So I was kind of ready to defend ourselves if something happened. But on the 18 May, our boat got called. Twice a day, they will call the boats that were going to load the next day. So twice a day they will give the number and the name of the boats. Our boat was called Toye, or t o J E. We call it toje in Spanish. It was a 30 foot boat, and they called our number to go. But the first thing we had to do was go load up on gas, and we had to pay, like, at the time, $4 a gallon was a lot. It's not a lot now, although it seems that way. So we had to buy a lot of gas.

[21:17] KRISTI GONZALEZ: And were you worried about running out of money?

[21:20] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, Michelle had money. I didn't have any money. Michelle had money. He had a gas station. I was dependent on my family's money. We had to buy food in there. They sell a little box with rice and beans and a little piece of pork for $6. And we ran out of Vienna sausage and sardines. So we had to buy that once a day. I think I lost about 20 pounds in those.

[21:48] KRISTI GONZALEZ: I remember you were already very skinny.

[21:50] JORGE GONZALEZ: From the pictures I've seen, I'm very dark from the sun all the time.

[21:56] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Finally, the day they called the boat. But wait, I remember you saying something about spending a night in a cuban jail.

[22:02] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, one day when I went to the commandante Linares and so on, they had moved the boat, and I did not, I was not able to get back to the boat. So I thought they had called them and they had gone to the pier where they loaded people. So I paid somebody to take me there. And when he took me there, I found out that our boat had not been called. So I said, I need to get back to my boat. He said, no, everybody who comes to this pier has to go to the United States. I said, I'm not going to go to the United States. My boat's out there. I need to get to my boat. And I remember some commandante or mayor or something told me, from here to the United States. So there was another guy in there pretty much in the same situation. And we decided that we were going to walk from the loading pierde to the pier where you could make phone calls. And we saw the gate open, and we just walked out. And we were walking out on the street when a policeman comes by and said, what are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here. So they arrested us, took the comment post, and they couldn't believe our story. They wouldn't believe our story. And they interrogated us for a long time. And then they finally found our boat. They told us, if you ever do this again, you're never going to leave Cuba. So they took us to the loading pier, and from there paid the money and got back to the comandantele nares and another boat I had to pay another boat to take me to my boat because Emisel didn't know how to run the boat. So we spent that night in that camp scared to death.

[23:40] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Oh, no. Yeah. So a night in jail and hungry and nearly broke, and it's taking forever, so. But they finally coil your boat and so you're reunited.

[23:53] JORGE GONZALEZ: We got the gas, and then we went to the loading pier. Now, remember, they had said that we were going to have 30 people on the boat. So when we got to the loading pier, they come over and looked our boat. They checked our papers and so on and, and they said, you know, you, oh, your vote is big. You can take 36 people. I said, wait a minute. The deal was for 30. If I'm going to take 36 people, you got to give me my parents, you know, because that was not the deal. But, you know, I'm totally at their mercy. So the guy looked at me and said, you either take what I give you or you go back empty. And I said, load them up. What I remember how emotional was when I saw my brother and his wife, my niece Johannes, and my sister walking up, how emotional it was that I was able to see them and to share with them and to get him there and to be with us that day and how they got in the boat. Out of the 36 people, they gave us twelve men that were, I believe, common criminals. They gave us some families of Jehovah witness and our family. So they told us to go to the entrance to the Mariel bay and wait. Well, that night, wait.

[25:27] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Your family had been waiting for a while, too, in the camp. How long were they in the camp?

[25:31] JORGE GONZALEZ: About a week and a half, ten days or maybe longer. And they were hungry, and we had saved a can of ham for when they got to the boat. And we fed them that night. And you remember, we went for a week. So my clothes all was smelly. We had spent pretty much almost a month without taking a shower because there was no facility for that and the bay was dirty. So when they actually, we got, we waited that night, my brother and I were talking, and he was telling me the story how they suffered in this camp, how they took the common criminals and they let dogs on him, bite him and abuse them. And some of those guys who were given to us as twelve guys, they had dog bites in their bodies. And so I remember how cold my brother was. So I gave him my shirt and he gave me a shirt he has. And that thing was so smelly, I couldn't wear it because he had been in a rougher situation.

[26:41] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So they were in a rougher situation. Wow.

[26:43] JORGE GONZALEZ: Yes. So we spent the whole night out there waiting and talking to leave the next day. I think. I think we loaded on the 19th, and we spent the night of the 19th in there. It was a time when Mount St. Helens had exploded and we heard this news and we also heard all the time Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter, telling the boats in Cuba to go back empty to the United States. That was illegal to bring people. Although in the beginning he said, go get them. But when they saw what was being sent, they tried to stop it, but we weren't going back empty.

[27:24] KRISTI GONZALEZ: They saw what was being brought into the US, that they were opening the insane asylums and the jails.

[27:31] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, basically Castro was doing that. And if you read the stories on the Internet, you will see that a lot of those common criminals were held in different jails, some of them here in Atlanta federal penitentiary, because they were actually, you know, the worst criminals in Cuba.

[27:48] KRISTI GONZALEZ: And so you weren't even sure when you sailed back if you would be let in?

[27:53] JORGE GONZALEZ: No, we weren't sure what was going to happen when we started to head back. But I do remember when that day came in the morning, there were a lot of boats that had gathered under entrance to the bay that had been loaded. And when we decided to start, they told us to head back. Everybody would start heading back. I didn't know how to navigate, but there were so many boats that I figured I follow everybody. And there was a person we had met in there, can remember his name, that he had a small boat, and then he got overloaded. And, I mean, there was maybe five inches from the edge of the boat to the water. And we tried to change these people to our boats, but the Cubans wouldn't let us do it.

[28:39] KRISTI GONZALEZ: And then they were afraid they were going to capsize.

[28:41] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, they eventually decapsized. They were rescued by the US Navy, the coast Guard, they decapised. And that's part of the story, that they had coast guard cutters and they had navy ships and they have everything. And actually my family was rescued. But we started out of going to Key west and the waves started getting really big, and the boat was going up in the waves and then crashing down, and it seemed like it was going to break in pieces. They were straight heading on. And remember, this is the 20th in the morning when we left, and around 04:00 in the afternoon where you're fighting that weather. One of the engines in my boat stopped working. By this time, everybody in the boat was seasick. My family had complained that I didn't let them go into the cabin. But I. From my personal experience, I found out that that's the first place where you get seasick. So we had them sitting in the back of the boat. The twelve men and my brother were on the roof of the boat, holding on for their life. The family of Jehovah witnesses were in the cabin inside. But within 20 minutes of sailing in the gulf, everybody started getting sick and throwing up. And I had a kid sitting on the captain's chair, strapped to the captain's chair of one of the Jehovah witness families. And he was throwing up in my back. So here I am, driving this boat and going on the waves, listening to all the mayday calls from different boats that they were rescuing. And I tell you what, the coast guard and the Navy did an amazing job rescuing people. So we. Around 04:00 in the afternoon when we lost that engine, then I had. I couldn't control the boat. And we did make a mayday call. And there were so many boats around, they couldn't find us. But there was this Marine Corps helicopter carrier or something like that that I had to light a flare so they will identify our boats. And they sent a boat out to us that was actually bigger than my boat, metal boat. And we were picking up people who were seasick and passing them over to the other boat. He kept bouncing against my boat. One of the things they did, they broke my antenna and cracked the side of my boat. And they took all the families except for the twelve men. They told us they would only take families.

[31:32] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So I'm picturing you in the ocean with an engine out. You're lighting a flare in these big waves, and everybody's seasick, and then putting out mayday calls. And then they break your antenna, which is, what, the only way that you can call for help, right? I mean, how many things. How many more things can go wrong?

[31:53] JORGE GONZALEZ: It did get worse. It did get worse than that. Okay? One day after they took the people and we started going, it was a storm that night. And we heard a lot of May days with that little antenna that we had. And I remember that I called your mom that was pregnant with your older brother, Jorge, that she hadn't heard from me the whole time.

[32:17] KRISTI GONZALEZ: I can't even imagine.

[32:19] JORGE GONZALEZ: They had no idea what was going on. So we told them. I said, listen, call the family in Miami. You call through the radio, the marine operator in Key west. The marine operator connects you with a collect call to a landline. And then they sent. You can speak to them. So I told them what happened that they had.

[32:43] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Were you afraid that, like, that might be the last time you talked to mom?

[32:47] JORGE GONZALEZ: I didn't know what was going to happen because. Because, you know, we were going up in a wave, and we'll go down and we'll go back up. And I offered one of those guys that. Twelve out of the twelve guys that they left us $20 to the first one to see the Key west lighthouse. But they were also seasick, and. And Michelle was. All we were doing was pumping gas into the gas tanks all the time. Out of the 400 gallons.

[33:13] KRISTI GONZALEZ: You slept at this point?

[33:14] JORGE GONZALEZ: No, I didn't sleep. I was behind that wheel all this time. And finally, during earlier hours in the morning, the weather kind of got calm. We finally were reaching Key west. We didn't reach Key west until 04:00 p.m. so I wasn't since the morning of the previous day until about 04:00 p.m. behind that boat, driving it. And, you know, we saw a lot of coast guard cutters going into Key west with boats full of people that they had rescued during the night. It was probably one of the worst nights. I have no idea if anybody died or not. That guy with a small boat, 20 foot boat, they had sunk and the coast guard rescued them. So we finally got to Key west, and we were allowed into the bay. And pretty much almost when we got there, I had to steer the boat with just one engine. It was pretty hard. So I hit the dock pretty hard.

[34:16] KRISTI GONZALEZ: She ducked, but I ducked.

[34:18] JORGE GONZALEZ: On the mainland, I ducked. And all this time was on adrenaline without eating. I don't think I drank any water at all. If I drank any water, my lips and my eyes were all cut from the salt water. But I was glad. And actually, my family were flown from that helicopter carrier to Key west in a helicopter after we left that day before. So they got to Key west ahead of us, and they were picked up. And when we got to Key West, I had a cousin waiting for me there, and they impounded our boat. They were impounding every single boat. So the boat has served its purpose. From what I heard, it sank later on because it took water in. But, you know, we were happy.

[35:09] KRISTI GONZALEZ: So what did you do? What did you do when you finally got. What did you eat?

[35:13] JORGE GONZALEZ: I had a steak. I had a steak. They took me to a cuban restaurant, had a steak with french Friesen. I'll never forget that. And then I was able to call your mom and we had a family reunion because a lot of these family, uncles and aunts that we had hadn't seen our family for in Miami, 15. In Miami, 1520 years, and we had this family reunion. And, you know, I'm glad that my brother and the family got settled. And they're Marialitos, which is what they call the people who come out of Mariela, and they made a life in there. And I lost contact with everybody who went on the trip with us. But as I look back, if you ask me to do that again, I would probably think about it twice.

[36:00] KRISTI GONZALEZ: I mean, you had no idea how dangerous it was.

[36:02] JORGE GONZALEZ: I have no idea how dangerous it was. I have no idea how dangerous it was. I mean, it was something that we did out of ignorance, and we did because we had to do it. But the Gulf of Mexico is not the Strait of Florida, I think, is what it's called, is not an easy place to navigate and everything, but for my family, I will do it again.

[36:23] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Everything went wrong, and everything went wrong, but you were able to rescue your family. I mean, it's such a heroic story, and I'll never get over how much you sacrificed and how brave you needed to be to get them out.

[36:39] JORGE GONZALEZ: Well, it took almost 14 years to the day to get them out of Cuba, but praise God, we finally got them out and their cell and my parents left through Venezuela in September. I went to Venezuela and did all the paperwork in the embassy, and they arrived in Miami in December 1980, and we were all reunited. So we're just grateful for this country and for receiving all those refugees from Mariel and having the opportunities of becoming an american eventually.

[37:18] KRISTI GONZALEZ: Well, thank you for sharing the story with me. I have heard it many times, but I've always wanted to ask more questions and hear more detail, and I'll never. It never ceases to amaze me how brave you were.

[37:35] JORGE GONZALEZ: Thank you. You do a lot of things out of necessity, and I'm just thankful that I was able to do that and get my family out. Appreciate it, Kristi Thank you so much.

[37:50] KRISTI GONZALEZ: The name of the uncle was Diomedes.

[37:53] JORGE GONZALEZ: My uncle Julio

[37:55] KRISTI GONZALEZ: And the name of my mom is Marlene.

[37:58] JORGE GONZALEZ: Marlene. Okay.

[38:07] KRISTI GONZALEZ: We.