Carlos Francisco Rodríguez González and Yusuan Fundora Massaguet were swept away by the current and rescued near the Bahamas

14ymedio, Mexico, 30 January 2025 — “How did we survive? Nature is great.” Fisherman Carlos Francisco Rodríguez González, 55, tells how he was shipwrecked and set adrift with Yusuan Fundora Massaguet, only 15 years old, for seven days, until they were rescued near the Bahamas. “I, who am neither Catholic nor a Christian, prayed to all the virgins, everyone,” he said in an interview with the newspaper Girón. What he thought would be a “quick fishing trip, got complicated.”
At midnight last Thursday, January 16, Rodriguez left his home in Cerro (Havana) alone, planning to return at nine in the morning. After fishing in Havana Bay, however, he wanted to go to Chivo Beach, “but my legs were giving out on me,” he said. A young man he knew on another raft tried to help him, but the wind pushed them both out to sea.
“The current was taking us east and toward the sea, and nothing was there, not even a boat to give us a hand. The boy didn’t have experience either. We were overcome by the current and fatigue,” said the fisherman.
At nightfall, Rodríguez’s polyfoam cork boat broke up completely, so he got onto the boy’s raft, and “that’s how we both were stranded for a week, without eating or drinking water.”
“The boy at some point even told me that he wanted to just jump in the water, that he couldn’t go on any more. But I didn’t let him give up.”
With barely three years of fishing experience, he said that when he usually goes out, he carries a gallon of water or a bottle of soda. On this occasion he didn’t bother. After the first day on the high seas, Carlos Francisco threw in a hook and caught a goldfish. “We took out the bones with a knife, laid it down on the cork to dry a little and ate it raw. The boy even ate the egg sac, which disgusted me. He also drank some salt water.”
The fisherman said there were many sharks. “You saw the big ones jumping and fins in the water.” Rodríguez says that he is not afraid of sharks. “If there is no injured fish around that is bleeding, there is no need to be afraid. I was more afraid of dying from dehydration than from being bitten by a shark.”
As the days passed, despair took hold of the fishermen: “The boy at some point even told me that he wanted to jump in the water, that he couldn’t go on. But I didn’t let him give up.”
Rodríguez says he was reborn when the current took them in sight of a ship. “On unsteady legs, one of us kept rowing and the other steering towards the center of the boat,” he said. “Then we started screaming at the top of our lungs: ’Help! Help!’ Someone appeared and called the captain. And that rope they threw to us was a life-saver.”
Carlos Francisco Rodríguez González was admitted to the Faustino de Pérez provincial hospital, while the youngest fisherman was taken to the pediatric Eliseo Noel Caamaño. “After this I told everyone: ’I’m done’. But I’m not going to die of hunger either; if I have to go back (to fish), I will. And I’ll have to respect the sea.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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