Dangerous crossing: life in Cuba has become so desperate that thousands of Cubans are risking death to flee to the United States.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Leonardo Heredia tried and failed eight times to get from Cuba to the shores of Florida, just 94 miles away.

In October, on his ninth try, the 24-year-old baker finally made it. He and 21 friends from his Havana neighborhood applied lessons learned from their previous attempts and made a boat from a Toyota motor, scrap steel, and plastic foam. They used a pocket-size Garmin GPS to navigate the shark-infested waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

"Things that were bad in Cuba are now worse," Heredia says. "If there was more money in Cuba to pay for the trips, everyone would go."

He's part of a rising tide of Cubans fleeing the island nation--many in rickety cobbled-together boats. About 25,000 Cubans arrived in the U.S. last year without travel visas. In the past two years, the number of Cubans attempting the dangerous crossing to Florida has nearly doubled. Hundreds have died when their boats capsized.

U.S.-Cuba Relations

Why are so many Cubans risking their lives to get to the U.S.? It's a combination of growing frustration with life in Cuba and recent reforms that have loosened travel restrictions.

The exodus, as some are calling it, has reopened the debate about whether it's time for the United States to rethink its policy toward Cuba. Official relations between the U.S. and Cuba have been frozen since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (see Key Dates, p. 12).

At the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Communist powers, Castro aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union, embracing its repressive political system, state-run economic model, and hostility toward the U.S. He also nationalized, without compensation, American businesses in Cuba. In response, Washington imposed a trade embargo that remains in effect 55 years later.

Soviet aid kept Cuba's economy afloat until the early 1990s. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba went into economic free fall.

Castro and his brother, Raul, who became president in 2008 when Fidel's health declined, have long blamed the U.S. embargo for the woes of Cuba's state-run economy. And though the Communist regime has been credited with progress in education and health care, Cuba remains a totalitarian state that stifles dissent, jails political opponents, and violates basic human rights. The press is controlled by the state, and most Cubans have only very restricted access to the Internet.

There are often...