The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera.

• Author: Tammen, Melanie S.

The Miami Herald calls it "the second wave of elite Cuban refugees" since Castro's takeover. Since 1989, when Cuba's communist experiment began imploding, an estimated 200 to 400 top-level engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists have fled for U.S. shores. The first elite wave--landowners, business people, executives, doctors, and lawyers--arrived in the 1960s. By contrast, the new refugees, frequently from the academic world, spent decades supporting and benefiting from Castro's regime. For them, the decision to flee often is made after years of silent confusion and inner struggle.

The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera is a novel about the accumulation of denial and disillusionment that precedes the decision to attempt crossing the 90-mile-wide Florida Straits on flimsy rafts--a decision made by thousands of Cubans each year. The tale's central character, Juan, is a physics professor whose father "disappeared" after the revolution. He is joined in his escape by two childhood friends: Raul, a fearless soldier who has just returned from the jungles of Angola, and Andres, who after 12 years as a political prisoner longs to be reunited with his daughter in Miami.

Juan was only 7 when the revolutionaries came and took away his father. His mother explained that the uniformed men had killed him, yet for months afterward Juan climbed his favorite framboyan tree each afternoon and watched for his father's return. When he and his mother moved to a government-assigned apartment in Havana, Juan began hiding his sweet childhood memories and, later, constructing the lies necessary to get ahead: His mother had been a maid, his father had been killed fighting beside Fidel, everything but the truth--that he was from a family of latifundistas (landowners).

Thirty years later, Professor Cabrera finishes his lecture at the university and drives to join his two friends on a North Cuba beach. They lash together three inner tubes and canvas with a few bits of rope and slip into the water. What follows is the three men's struggle atop their rafts--against hunger, loneliness, uncertainty, and the blistering sun--to keep from throwing themselves into the sea.

J. Joaquin Fraxedas's novel is a stirring depiction of the rafters' psychological and physical struggle. On the fifth day at sea, Juan's head is awash with "the deep, awesome voices of the beasts of the sea. They called to him and offered him pleasant things, as they did in the nursery rhymes...