Read Online The Longest Romance by Humberto Fontova - Free Book Online

their father from all sides. From what they told me days later at the local hospital, what erupted around their tiny raft was a feeding frenzy, like the ones you see on those shark shows where they bait the water for hours to attract the sharks. The water turned red as their father was eaten alive.... I can tell you from decades of heartbreaking work from our center here in Key West that in the Florida Straits every week is shark week.... ”
    â€œPeople who are attacked by sharks are exceptionally, almost absurdly unlucky,” writes Michael Capuzzo, author of Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916. From 1979 to 1986 Capuzzo worked at none other than The Miami Herald. So probably thousands of (extremely unlucky) people had been attacked by sharks not far from his office. Arturo Cobo and Matt Lawrence were a
brief phone call and short drive away. Instead Capuzzo wrote about an attack 1,300 miles away and 60 years earlier.
    â€œI kept waiting and waiting and waiting for this decades-long and seemingly never-ending horror to burst upon the national media,” says Matt Lawrence. “I mean, here are thousands upon thousands of people—men, women, children—right off our coast braving dangers as bad as, if not worse than, those of hundreds of East Germans five thousand miles away. And the Berlin Wall was just coming down when I started my rescue flights.
    â€œWhere’s the outrage? I kept asking.... And on every flight, upon every sighting of another empty boat, another tombstone at sea as I started calling them, and imagining what might have become of the occupants—of another body bobbing in the water surrounded by sharks—upon every encounter with the emaciated, sunburnt, delirious survivors, upon hearing their stories, upon watching them—in their stumbling, stuporous, emaciated condition—still dropping to the ground to kiss U.S. soil, mostly sand actually, when they reached Key West ... well ... my outrage grew worse and worse—against the Castro regime for sure, but also again Castro’s accomplices, witting and otherwise, in the international media.
    â€œWell, it never did burst upon the media,” continues Matt. “This astounding insensitivity still troubles me deeply, breaks my heart. I’d come in from those flights every evening and simply break down. Many of us would, and I’m talking tough guys, Bay of Pigs veterans, former Cuban political prisoners who stood up stoically to KGB-tutored torture. Just about anyone who would see what we saw on those rescue flights, and hear what we heard from the survivors, would break down.
    â€œThat said, helping save a few thousand lives still made it the most rewarding experience of my life. In fact maybe the knowledge that no one else would be coming in to help us, or to publicize this horror, hardened my determination to keep flying even in the most horrible weather, with Castro’s MiG’s constantly menacing us, and
continue saving the lives of people who, after I got to know so many of them, seemed no different from my own family and friends. Their only crime was having been born in Castro’s Cuba.”

SO WHERE’S THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL?
    For 25 years The Discovery Channel has charted its highest rating during its “Shark Week,” which exclusively features documentaries on sharks, especially the frequent attackers. Every year, tens of millions of viewers have tuned into the Discovery Channel to watch such programs as “Teeth of Death,” “Sharkbite Summer,” “Anatomy of a Sharkbite” and “Blood in the Water.” Indeed, the bloodier the better, as Discovery Channel producers well know.
    These shows feature, in gruesome detail, shark attacks from Australia to South Africa to California to northern Florida. “Australia records 56 fatal shark attacks between 1958 and 2008!” gasps one show’s narrator.
    â€œThe Florida Straits