A memento of a moving event

Mountains

Back in the early 1990s I was living in South Florida. I was privileged to be involved with a bunch of fine folks who were performing search & rescue flights over the Straits of Florida looking for Cuban refugees who were coming across in droves. Most of these people went to sea in pitifully inadequate craft (if you could call them that). In 1993 I was involved in a flight that located a tiny rowboat which turned out to have six people on it. Through a series of very fortunate circumstances, we were able to direct the Coast Guard to them, watch them being picked up, and then later that evening actually meet these people in Key West. There were two young couples, each of whom had a little girl. They had been at sea for three days with virtually no food or water. As you can imagine, when they finally made it to Key West and were granted political asylum, they were extremely grateful. The meeting I had with them was at what was then known as Casa de Balseros (Rafters' House), run by the Cuban community in Key West. It provided a place for them to land, get some good food, clean clothes, and to contact relatives already in Florida. The leader of this band of refugees was a young man named Rene Rodriguez-Perez. He was so grateful for our having found them that he insisted on giving me all he had to give at the time - a still waterlogged Cuban 20 peso note, and his East German made military compass. Those two items, along with photographs I took that day, are some of my most cherished worldly possessions. All these years I've wanted to somehow do something with them rather than leaving them in a photo album on a shelf. So I decided to take a very old (ca. 1914) map of Cuba I had and have it framed along with the 20 peso note. Here's the result that I just got back from the frame shop today. I think it came out really nicely!

Peace

Mtns