Crossing North: Tribulations of a Cuban Doctor

By Betty Viamontes

Since Joel Camacho was a child, he knew he didn’t want to stay in Cuba. Becoming a medical doctor turns into his ticket out. But it also propels him into an elaborate labyrinth of modern-day slavery, gangs, corruption, and international human trafficking from which he must escape. For him, there is only one haven. Trying to reach it becomes the most difficult challenge of his life.

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Despite the horrors, Crossing North is ultimately a tale of love and family. Its characters are strikingly familiar. They are parents and children like our own, clinging to each other while their world falls apart. Their lives, struggles, and deaths are a lesson and a caution for the modern world.

Allen A. Witt PhD, Lead Author of America’s Community College: The First Century

• Language: English
• Publisher: Betty Viamontes
• Release date: Aug 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005989279

Betty Viamontes

Betty Viamontes was born in Havana, Cuba. In 1980, at age fifteen, she and her family arrived in the United States on a shrimp boat to reunite with her father after twelve years of separation. "Waiting on Zapote Street," based on her family's story, her first novel won the Latino Books into Movies award and has been selected by many book clubs. She also published an anthology of short stories, all of which take place on Zapote Street and include some of the characters from her first novel. Betty's stories have traveled the world, from the award-winning Waiting on Zapote Street to the No. 1 New Amazon re-leases "The Girl from White Creek," "The Pedro Pan Girls: Seeking Closure," and "Brothers: A Pedro Pan Story." Other works include: Havana: A Son's Journey Home The Dance of the Rose Under the Palm Trees: Surviving Labor Camps in Cuba Candela's Secrets and Other Havana Stories The Pedro Pan Girls: Seeking Closure Love Letters from Cuba Flight of the Tocororo Betty Viamontes lives in Florida with her family and pursued graduate studies at the University of South Florida.

Book preview

Introduction

Igrew up in the shadow of the Cuban Revolution. When I was nine years old, the first wave of exiles arrived in my home state of Florida. These early travelers expected a short stay until the danger passed. They never returned. After the regime banned migration, exiles fled in leaky boats, rafts, and inner tubes. We will never know how many migrants fed the sharks of the Florida Straits. Six decades later, that flow has not stopped. On the contrary, since 1999, over five million Venezuelans have fled communist tyranny, and the Cubans keep on coming.

The geopolitical impact of Castro’s revolution is well documented. Few authors, however, have portrayed the desolation that this upheaval brought to individual families. For 21st century readers, the concept may be hard to understand. Why would a population, nearly as large as New York City, leave their homes, family, and possessions, fleeing into the ocean and jungle? Why would people desert their families forever, knowing that friends had died on the same route? No author has created a more compelling answer to these questions than Betty Viamontes.

In a sense, Betty was born for her task. She was a child of the Cuban Revolution, born five years after Castro seized power. In her teens, she saw her homeland devolve into a police state. Spies infiltrated every block, reporting their neighbors to the political police. Gangs of thugs roamed the neighborhoods, threatening and stealing as they pleased. On an island of lush vegetation, basic foods became a luxury. Prisons filled with patriots who dared to question the all-powerful Comandante. Nobody knew if their family would be next. This was the world in which Betty spent her formative years.

At fifteen years old, Betty’s family escaped Cuba with only the clothes on their backs. The decades that followed were good to her. Settling in Tampa, she built a family of her own and a successful career in hospital finance. After her mother’s death, however, her heart turned to the stories of her youth. She began by adapting her mother’s journals into her first novel, Waiting on Zapote Street. This simple homage to a mother’s resilience caught the attention of readers around the world. Its success led to nine other works chronicling the Cuban exile experience. From labor camps to freedom flights, her works became a defining voice for exiled families.

In her latest novel, Crossing North, Betty has taken on a more ambitious task. Based on true accounts, she follows the life of a Cuban physician who was exported to Venezuela. His story documents the descent of that oil-rich nation into an impoverished prison-state. Threatened with return to Cuba, his only escape is through desert, ocean, and jungle. The journey is a road of death, peopled with evil coyotes, corrupt officials, bodies, and casual barbarity.

Crossing North is not the record of some distant time—the holocaust or the inquisition. Its horrors took place in 2021 and 2022, only a few miles from the United States. They have not ended. As I type these words, other families are following this same route. Many of them will fall along the way.

Despite the horrors, Crossing North is ultimately a tale of love and family. Its characters are strikingly familiar. They are parents and children like our own, clinging to each other while their world falls apart. Their lives, struggles, and deaths are a lesson and a caution for the modern world.

Nikita Khrushchev once told the world, History is on our side. We will bury you! At the time, he headed the USSR, the nexus of global communism. Although Khrushchev is long dead and the Berlin Wall is dust, that threat persists. Despite its spectacular failures, communism continues to entice new generations. Under many aliases, it flows from the lips of politicians from Latin America to Washington DC. Six decades after the Cuban Revolution, there is still no greater danger to western civilization.

Communism is ultimately more a religion than an economic system. Missiles and nuclear weapons offer little protection against its creeds. The only sure protection is knowledge. With this in mind, I commend you to Crossing North and the other works of Betty Viamontes.

Allen A. Witt PhD

Lead Author of America’s Community College: The First Century

Chapter 1

No Man’s Land

José, our middle-age cab driver, stopped at the checkpoint as ordered by an armed uniformed policeman who must have been in his twenties. The heavy-set, bald driver reached for his cell phone, texted something, and glanced at me through the rearview mirror. When I looked at him and saw his almost imperceptible smirk, I knew something didn’t add up.

Moments later, a policeman of about José’s age, who by the assertiveness of his walk appeared to be in charge, ordered the officer who had stopped us to step away. The older officer carried a cell phone in his hand, glanced at it, and placed it in his pocket. Then, he went straight for my door.

Get out of the car! Both of you! he yelled.

Quickly, we grabbed our backpacks, hung them over our shoulders, and exited the taxi, each carrying a large bottle of water.

It was Tuesday, January 25, 2022. For twelve years, I had lived in the city of Punto Fijo in the state of Falcón, an important port city with over 280,000 inhabitants.

After deserting from my medical mission without legal work papers, I worked whatever jobs I could find from security guard to nurse at a private clinic. Yet, staying in Venezuela was no longer an option as repressive measures had increased for someone like me, and I feared for my safety. So, I sold my used car—one of my few possessions—to begin the journey north with my wife Leila.

I needed to travel almost 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) to my destination, but I couldn't think that far ahead. My first challenge was to leave Venezuela.

I had paid the driver $300 for me and $74 for my wife to take us from Punto Fijo to La Goajira, no-man’s land, an area near the border between Venezuela and Colombia. We had traveled over 270 kilometers.

La Goajira Peninsula, the northernmost point of South America, is a hot and arid area with a limited highway system bounded by the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Gulf of Venezuela to the southeast. The Guajira Desert (how it is called in Colombia) was one of the principal gateways for Venezuelan immigrants to go into Colombia, a frenzied place where smugglers operated in the open.

I had to pay a higher price than my wife because I was a Cuban doctor trying to flee. The alternative would have been a Venezuelan jail—or worse, being forced to return to Cuba. José had explained that the higher price would guarantee my safe passage across the border.

I should have known better than to hire someone I knew nothing about, recommended by a friend of a friend. Later, I would learn that my driver had selected the most dangerous crossing because he never intended to fulfill his promise.

Once we exited the 2001 Ford Fiesta after a five-hour trip from Punto Fijo, the official hit the windshield with his hand and did a circular motion with his index finger, signaling to the driver to turn around. The driver nodded, placed the vehicle in reverse, and after he was about 50 meters from the checkpoint, did a U-turn and began to drive away.

Once the cab disappeared in the distance, I started to panic but did everything possible not to let Leila see it in my eyes. The official ordered us to get off the road and walk toward a shaded area. He and two of his men, much younger than he was, followed us.

My heart started to beat faster as we walked on the reddish clay soil sprinkled with patches of dried grass. I inhaled deeply to remain calm while my wife and I exchanged glances.

Get behind that big tree! he barked at us. And no sudden movements, you hear?

We nodded. I could hear our footsteps and the occasional sound of a chirping bird. Red dust lifted in the air as we walked.

Stop right there and turn around! he ordered us. I realized that where we were, no one could see us from the road.

We stood in front of them, scared, with drops of perspiration appearing on our foreheads. The two younger men stared at my Venezuelan wife suggestively.

Where are you going? the man in charge said.

To Colombia, I said.

Sir, I have a sick uncle in Colombia and need to see him. We mean no harm, Leila explained, tucking a strand of her highlighted hair behind her ear. At age 38, she still looked as beautiful as when we met, with brown eyes that conveyed kindness and the curvy figure that Cuban men preferred. Although we had been together for almost ten years, we had been married a few days because we had not found someone who would marry us. However, before the trip, my wife found a female notary who agreed to do it, at a price, even though I only had a Cuban passport.

If you want to cross to Colombia, you need to pay.

How much? I asked trying not to say too many words. Although by now I had mastered the Venezuelan accent, I feared my nervousness would allow my Cuban accent to emerge. Later, as I thought about the message my driver had sent, I realized he already knew I was Cuban.

Twenty-five hundred dollars, he said. I glanced at him in disbelief. This was an exorbitant amount, a fortune