Miami’s Merman Is One of the Fastest Swimmers in the World

Ceren, a natural athlete who once trained for the Cuban national basketball team, tried to supplement the family's rations by spear-fishing grouper, which he cooked in the back yard. Then, one night in 1979, he headed for Miami on a small boat. Fearing reprisal, he didn't say a word to his family, which only learned he had made it three days later. "Life changed completely," Armas recalls. The local Communist party loyalists kept a wary eye on his family after that.

A month or two later, Armas's mother, Maria Hernandez, and several other family members decided to take to the sea to join Ceren in Florida. They organized a trip with a local boat captain. At 2:00 one early morning, Armas — who was about five years old at the time — and his family slogged through the mud of a mangrove to the beach. They didn't want to take the road for fear of being detected. They arrived at the boat just as the police did. The captain turned out to be a snitch.

Armas remembers the next few hours clearly: "They took us to the police station; then they gathered the whole town. People started throwing rocks at us, calling us gusanos (worms), screaming, "kill 'em, kill 'em."

Armas's mother was fired from her teaching job and sent to work in the sugar cane fields. His grandfather was ordered to clean sewers. At school, kids jeered him. "I was confused," Armas says. "All I knew was that we were trying to follow my father."

One day a swimming coach stopped by Armas's classroom. "Who would like to be on the swim team?" she asked. Armas raised his hand, remembering how proud he was when his father emerged from the ocean with a big grouper. Later that day Armas and a few other kids walked around the pool. "Who wants to jump in first?" the coach asked. Armas said yes — and the coach pushed him into the deep end. She made him swim a length. "I struggled, but I did it," he says.

Armas, then a rail-thin kid — all ribs, elbows, and knees — was a natural champion. He won the 25-meter backstroke at his first swim meet and then at the regional competition. He was eight years old. Within two years, he dominated the national contest in Guantánamo. When he was 10 years old, local authorities decided he should go to Havana to live, study, and train at the National Aquatic School. There would be better living conditions, more food, and other perks.

He trained six-plus hours a day. "I never had a childhood," he says. "I never had a chance to play with toys. All I knew was to be a champion." For the next five years, Armas racked up a neck full of medals. In 1990 he was honored as one of the top young athletes in Havana and finished second in the backstroke; the one guy ahead of him was an adult (who later went to the Olympics). Then Armas joined the national team to train for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. His coach was a Soviet-trained monster whom all the swimmers called "The Serious One."

When Armas turned 16, he stood five feet 11 inches tall and weighed 130 pounds. Yet his times weren't improving in the pool. He was exhausted and angry — about his father having to leave, his mother's banishment, the teasing, the constant scrutiny. He decided to quit swimming as soon as he finished high school.

After graduation, Armas couldn't find a job. He went from being an Olympic hopeful, eating in a special dining room in a tony section of Havana, to chopping wood back in Santa Cruz and selling it for charcoal on the black market. "I got to the point where I said that I was not going to move a finger for that system," Armas says. "Swimming, something that I loved, was no longer fun. It was sadness and psychological torture."

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August 21, 1994: Armas remembers the full moon, the silence of the black water near Santa Cruz. He sat on a raft with 13 other adults and five children. They were all as soundless as the ocean.

He took nothing with him on the journey, wearing only a plain white T-shirt, jean shorts, and sneakers. His grandmother had tucked a Saint Barbara medallion in his pocket.

They were on the ocean for 13 hours, never eating or sleeping. Armas stayed at the front of the raft as a lookout. On the 14th hour, a Coast Guard cutter spotted them. The others on the boat cried as they were loaded onto the ship; as it turned out, the rafters were only five miles from Key West.