The dream. The journey. The reality.

Due to the increasing economic and social degradation of Cuba after the fall of communism in Russia, known as the Período Especial, Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro decides to open Cuba’s doors during the year of 1994, allowing 50.000 Cubans to leave the island on improvised rafts aiming Florida in search of a better life.

Carlos Bosch and Josep Maria Domènech followed some of these Cubans in their adventurous journey to the US and kept contact with them in years following their arrival.  The first half of the documentary is filmed in Cuba and in Guantanamo Bay, where many “balseros” were kept in detention for several months by the US authorities. Some of the detainees were allowed to leave to the US because they were the winner of a local lottery carried out by the authorities. The second half of the film is about the lives of those who managed to get to the USA, how they were distributed over the country. These people were filmed again seven years later, showing their difficulties adapting to a new type of society and the resulting homesickness, a “human adventure of people who are shipwrecked between two worlds”.

A good quality version of the documentary with English subtitles can be downloaded using the link below. The following online version is Spanish spoken.

Downloads:

torrent 1 [703MB] (What’s a torrent?)

rapidshare: file 1, file 2, file 3, file 4, file 5, file 6, file 7 & file 8

“Balseros” @ IMDb

“Balseros” @ Wikipedia

The official site

A site dedicated to the “Balseros” exodus