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Associated PressThe three migrants recover as they mourn five others who died on their harrowing journey by raft to the United States.
FORT LAUDERDALE - Three Cuban migrants, burnt by the sun and exhausted, lay in hospital beds Friday and talked about a weeklong voyage on makeshift rafts on rough seas without food.
They credited their faith for their survival and mourned the loss of five others who died in the desperate effort to reach the United States.
"I had faith in God, and that faith allowed me to be rescued," William Villavicencio Perez, 31, said in Spanish. "I was losing my grip in the final moments before I was found."
Villavicencio and Carlos Lazaro Bringier Hernandez, 38, were helped to shore by beachgoers Thursday as they approached the South Florida coastline. Milena Isabel Gonzalez Martinez, 37, was plucked from the ocean by a diver and a rescue helicopter Thursday.
All were in stable condition Friday at Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale.
The Coast Guard on Friday suspended the search for one Cuban and for the bodies of four others the survivors said were lost during the trip.
The voyage began March 18 from Jibacoa, Cuba.
Bringier said he told his wife he was going out for cigarettes that day.
"I left right away, and here I am," said Bringier, a former emergency worker with lifeguard training who had tried about a dozen times to reach the United States by sea. His wife and three children remain in Cuba.
Bringier and seven others, some members of dissident groups opposed to Fidel Castro's regime, embarked on one large raft. They were pushed parallel to the Cuban shoreline until the currents and strong winds shifted and moved them north.
"We spent many days at sea with bad conditions," Bringier said.
Roughly two days into the trip, the group's cache of water, bread, honey and sugar was tossed overboard when their raft capsized under a large wave.
"The wind played games with us. A strong wind came and overturned the raft," said Villavicencio, who left his wife and two children in Cuba. "We lost everything that fell in the water. And we had only one oar."
Without food and battered by swells as high as 10 feet, the group slowly began to lose strength and hope, Bringier said. They were forced to start drinking their own urine, he said.
"We all rowed. We took turns because we were all so weak," Bringier said.
Gonzalez's husband was the first to disappear, probably Tuesday, Bringier said.
"He was acting normally, then all of a sudden he says, "I'm leaving.' So he jumped into the water," Bringier said. "When we noticed that he had really jumped, we had lost him behind a large wave."
The group realized the sea had claimed its second victim overnight.
"We woke up, and he was just not there," Bringier said.
A decision was made to separate the raft into two, with the stronger members of the group - Villavicencio, Bringier and a third man - using one of the rafts to row ahead and look for land or passing boats. Gonzalez, the only woman on the voyage, was on the second raft with two other men, who were not identified.
Eventually, Gonzalez would see the two men on her raft release their grip and disappear into the ocean.
"They just went into the water on their own. They were desperate, but I stayed calm," said Gonzalez, her entire body, except for her face, wrapped in a cotton sheet in the hospital's intensive care unit.
Meanwhile, the three on the lead raft inched closer to shore. They rowed furiously.
In the struggle to reach the shore, Villavicencio and Bringier's companion disappeared into the ocean. The Coast Guard's search for him ended Friday.
Gonzalez recalled hallucinating several times that she was being rescued before the Coast Guard showed up.
"I made signals for them to be able to see me and come get me," she said. "I had just drank the last bit of urine. I was dying."
Gonzalez, who left behind twin 14-year-old boys in Cuba, said she was having trouble dealing with her decision to leave.
"It was craziness on my part," she said. "If I were in the same position again, I wouldn't do it. It's too risky."
Lazaro Guzman, a senior U.S. Border Patrol agent, said the agency would interview the three Cubans when they are released from the hospital. If they are found to be foreign nationals, they will be taken to the Krome Detention Center west of Miami, Guzman said.
Under the U.S. wet foot-dry foot policy, Cuban migrants who reach dry land are generally allowed to stay in the United States, and those intercepted at sea are normally returned to Cuba.
Jose Basulto, head of the Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue, said Friday that "extremely concerned" relatives told him of two other groups of rafters that had left Cuba within the past two weeks. One group made it to the Bahamas, he said, and another was intercepted by the Cuban government.