"BALSEROS"

Balseros (Rafters) is a 2002 Spanish documentary co-directed by Carlos Bosch and Josep Maria Domènech about Cubans leaving during the Período Especial after the financial support of the former USSR stopped. This resulted in so much poverty that in 1994 50,000 Cubans left, unimpeded by the Cuban government, using anything they could find or build to get to the nearest land, Florida in the USA. This even included hijacking a ferry, but most left with improvised rafts, which were often not quite seaworthy. In the intro, Carles Bosch claims that these were not political but economic refugees.

The documentary consists largely of interviews with the raftbuilders (the 'Balseros'), and traces over the course of seven years the lives of seven of those refugees, from the building of their rafts to their attempts at building new lives in America, giving insight in daily life in Cuba in those years (including some beautiful cinematography and sometimes amusing moments) and in the USA.

The documentary is 2 hours long The first half is filmed in Cuba, with in the end some scenes of the rafters' months long detention in Guantanamo Bay, where lotteries were used to decide who would be allowed to go to the US. All the while, their families didn't know about their whereabouts. The last hour is about the lives of those who managed to get to the USA, how they are distributed over the country. These people were filmed again seven years later, showing their difficulties adapting to a new type of society and the resulting homesickness, a "human adventure of people who are shipwrecked between two worlds".