Slaughter on the Seven Seas

Through the 90-mile-wide Straits of Florida separating the U.S. from Cuba runs some of the most bizarre traffic ever seen on any body of water in the world. Desperate Cubans flee north in sailboats, rafts--even inner tubes. At night, weird vessels churn among the mangrove and coral cays on secret missions for no one is quite sure whom. One morning last week, a U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat 65 miles off Cuba drew alongside one of the strangest yet: an aged, 165-ft., grey-hulled converted yacht named the Seven Seas, adrift and seemingly unmanned--until a ragged youth crawled warily from a hatch. "The captain," he shouted, "is dead!"

Blood on the Bridge. The boy was Burywaise Elwin, a 17-year-old Honduran, and the only one of an eight-man crew left alive on board after a fury of politics, mutiny and murder. Elwin told the Coast Guardsmen that the Seven Seas was a banana trader on her way from Miami to Tampa. Shortly after 10 o'clock the night before, he left the hot crew quarters aft to get some air. As he was leaving, he passed Cuban Crewman Roberto Ramirez, 35, who seemed in a big hurry. "I heard a shot and turned around. Roberto was shooting Hinds, the first mate. I ran upstairs to tell the captain. He was dead, lying crosswise on the bridge." Elwin ran to hide in the chain locker. After two hours, he heard the engine stop. Then nothing--for 16 hours--until he heard the patrol boat's siren wail.

The Coast Guard boarding party found three bullet-riddled bodies in the aft cabin. The body of Captain Rogelio Diaz, 38, was not on the bridge, but a trail of blood led over the side. Gone were Ramirez, Second Engineer Salomon Franco and Cook Gerald Davison--and the ship's 14-ft. dinghy.

A Coast Guard search of the Straits found nothing. Then, just after midnight three days after the shooting, a ship bound for Europe picked up a Cuban in a dinghy 60 miles south of Miami. In the dinghy, crewmen found a bag of clothes, a pistol and ammunition.

Over the Side. The man was Ramirez, and under interrogation in Miami he admitted killing everyone on board the Seven Seas except Elwin and the cook, Davison. "They called me a Communist and a thief," he said, "so I shot them." He said that Diaz and most of the others had been bullyragging him mercilessly for his pro-Castro sympathies. He had fled Cuba last fall in a boat, leaving behind his wife and three daughters. Now he longed to return. On the night of the shooting, he had the helm on the bridge when Captain Diaz started going at him again. Diaz, he said, sneered that in Tampa next day the crew would hand him over to "the people in Ybor City," a section of town jammed with Castro-hating exiles. Ramirez pulled a .38 and shot his tormentor, then, wild with fury, dashed aft to kill Franco and the others, sparing only the Honduran youngster and the cook "because I had nothing against them."

He then hurled the bodies of Diaz and Franco into the Straits and swung the ship toward Cuba. Two hours later, the diesel stopped. Ramirez set off in the dinghy. Inevitably, the Gulf Stream carried him back toward Miami.

And inevitably there were still questions. No one knew whether Ramirez had gone berserk, as he claimed, or had deliberately planned a hijacking. What happened to the cook was unknown. It was fairly certain, at least, that the bloodbath occurred in U.S. jurisdictional waters. At week's end the Justice Department charged Ramirez with five counts of murder, one of piracy.

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