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Refugees add realism to drill

By ALEXANDRA ZAYAS
Published March 9, 2007

As federal and local law enforcement agents sailed into the second day of an exercise simulating a mass exodus from the Caribbean, officers picked up 40 real Cuban refugees on South Florida's shore.

Some media members covering the event were confused when they learned the migrants weren't actors, but agents knew what to do.

"This is what we do, every single day," said Zachary Mann, special agent and spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The patrol got news at 4:15 a.m. Thursday that 21 Cubans arrived on Miami Beach, then learned at 7:30 a.m. that another 19 arrived at nearby Haulover Beach.

Neither group was found with a boat, and officials are investigating the possibility that they were smuggled by land and told to pretend they came by sea, Mann said.

The large-scale exercise was designed in part to stop smugglers, who make thousands of dollars in the human trafficking business. But Thursday, it didn't.

"The smuggling organizations are going to continue their criminal enterprise regardless of what we're doing," said Border Patrol spokesman Steve McDonald.

Some Cuba experts theorize that there could be a mass migration when Fidel Castro dies, larger than the 1980 Mariel boatlift and 1994 Cuban rafter crisis.

Andy Gomez, assistant provost and senior fellow at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, is one of them.

If Raul Castro cannot control social unrest when his brother dies, "we can see as many as half a million Cubans leaving the island in all directions," he told the Times in December after a group of Cubans landed on Longboat Key.

With thousands of migrants arriving on shore every year from all Caribbean nations, Thursday's pickup provided extra practice.

"It enhanced the realism of the exercise," McDonald said.

Alexandra Zayas can be reached at 813 226-3354 or azayas@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 9, 2007, 01:58:30]