CÁRDENAS, Cuba (AFP) — In the early hours of January 3, 2023, 32 people climbed onto a makeshift raft off southern Cuba and set out across the Caribbean for Florida, 170 kilometres (100 miles) away.

They were never heard from again.

Among them was an eight-year-old girl who was travelling with her mother, six members of a family from the central Cuban city of Camaguey and a couple from the south-central city of Cienfuegos who left their children behind for safety.

The boat’s occupants also included Yoel Romero, a 43-year-old bricklayer and father of three, Jonathan Jesus Alvarez, a 30-year-old truck driver, also with three children, and Dariel Alejandro Chacon, a 27-year-old maintenance worker.

Chacon’s mother Idalmis put some toast in her son’s backpack for the crossing to Florida, but he never got to eat it.

The bag washed up four days later on a rocky beach at a luxury golf club in the Florida Keys.

The Caribbean has become a watery grave for Cubans fleeing a severe economic crisis on the communist island and headed for Florida.

At least 368 Cubans have died or disappeared on the Caribbean migration route since 2020, when the International Organization for Migration (IOM) began gathering statistics on what it calls “invisible shipwrecks”.

The US Coast Guard repatriated a similar number — 367 — who tried to enter the country illegally in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024.

But residents of the cash-strapped island, reeling from the worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main ally and financial backer, in the 1990s, remained undeterred.

AFP spoke to 21 relatives of the 32 Cubans who went missing at sea on January 3, 2023.

All were desperate for news of their relatives’ fate.

“Nobody has given us an answer,” Alvarez’s mother, Osmara Garcia, said in an interview in her house in a low-income neighbourhood of Cardenas, a city in west-central Cuba from which many of the missing travellers hail.

“We need to know whatever the answer is… because the uncertainty is unbearable,” Romero’s mother Amparo Riviera said.

Cuba is experiencing the biggest emigration wave since the revolution that brought the late Fidel Castro to power in 1959.

The island has lost around one million inhabitants since 2012, census figures show.

Many try the well-travelled route across the sea to the United States, where President Joe Biden in 2023 began allowing legal entry for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — four countries with grim human rights records.

More than 700,000 Cubans entered the United States — legally or illegally — between January 2022 and August 2024.

But for many of those who do not meet the conditions for entry, including having a US sponsor, illegal entry by sea is the fallback plan.

The raft bearing Alvarez, Chacon, Romero, and their fellow travellers left from Playa Larga beach on Cuba’s southern coast.

The only clues as to their fate were the backpacks of Chacon and another migrant found within a kilometre and a half of each other on the Florida coast.

“From then on, my life changed… it was all about the search,” Romero’s mother Riviera said.

Unlike in the Mediterranean, where NGOs track migrant boats and organise rescue missions, the plight of people crossing the Caribbean goes largely undocumented.

At least 1,100 migrants from Central and South America have disappeared “without a trace” on the Caribbean migrant route since 2020, said Edwin Viales, regional monitor for the IOM Missing Migrants Project.

2022 was the deadliest year on record for Cubans trying to reach the US by sea, with at least 130 migrants perishing in the process, according to the IOM.

At the end of 2022 and start of 2023, home-made rafts were leaving Cuba daily, with videos shared online showing boatpeople cheering each other on at sea.

Little was ever said about those who never arrived at their intended destination.

The group that left from Playa Larga secretly built a raft measuring nine metres (30 feet) from bow to stern, with a sail, eight oars and 10 metal barrels to give buoyancy.

Alvarez’s mother said her son kept his departure a secret.

Would-be Cuban migrants often hush up their preparations because emigrating by sea is illegal in Cuba and they do not want their families to worry about them.

Only a few Cubans, like Oniel Machado, a 49-year-old blacksmith from the western city of San Jose de la Lajas, have survived a shipwreck in the Florida Straits to tell the tale.

He and 12 fellow migrants spent hours face down, clinging onto the boards of their raft, which was roiled by a raging sea, one night in April 2022.

“We prayed to God,” Machado told AFP a month later, “and we covered ourselves, and when we woke up, we were in US waters.”

That journey ended in disappointment for the group, however.

They were picked up by the US Coast Guard and returned to Cuba.