CUBA: Distraught mom grieves for executed son

Sometimes in the late afternoon, when her bare room is filled with a warm glow, Rosa Maria Garcia still half expects her son to drop by after work, pat her on the back and coax a smile from her with one of his songs.

"This is the time when he would normally come over," she says, gazing out the narrow balcony from her worn, wooden cot. "I dream of him so much, I think he's going to walk through the door. I still don't believe he's dead."

B�rbaro Sevilla Garcia was the youngest of the three hijackers executed last month, nine days after they commandeered a Havana Bay ferry in a failed attempt to cross the Florida Straits.

Until the early morning of April 2, when he and the others boarded the flat-bottomed Baragua ferry with hidden knives, a gun and extra fuel, his goals were no different from those of many young Cubans: Sevilla Garcia, 22, dreamed of Miami.

The one-time carpenter who most recently worked at a sidewalk pizza stand, wanted to get a job in "El Norte," save some money, take care of his family and treat his friends to bottles of aged Cuban rum on visits back home.

Garcia often argued with her only son about his wish to leave Cuba. She wanted him to stay by her side. He wanted to make his own life abroad.

"He would tell me: `You don't want to accept I have to leave. From there [Miami] I can help you. Not from here.'" Garcia recalled. "He used to say `Mima, I'm going to be famous. I'm going to be very famous.'"

But his mother never expected it would happen this way.

On his block in a rundown central Havana neighborhood, the tall, quick-tempered Sevilla Garcia is now known as one of the "fusilados," those executed by firing squad.

The executions ended a moratorium on the death penalty on the island, brought international condemnation and have even been criticized by many average Cubans who are otherwise supportive of the government.

No one was injured in the hijacking.

President Fidel Castro has defended the harsh punishments, which were upheld by the Cuban Supreme Tribunal and the ruling Council of State. "We Cuban revolutionaries also abhor capital punishment," he said during a speech earlier this month, adding that the executions were necessary to end a "a wave of hijackings" which could have provoked a confrontation between the United States and Cuba.

"It had to be stopped," Castro said.

Two plane hijackings had preceded the ferry incident.

Garcia is at a loss to explain why her son attempted such a brazen and dangerous exit. He never tried to leave the island as a rafter, she said, and he was too young to have applied for the last visa lottery issued by the U.S. Interests Section in 1998.

She doesn't know what sparked his decision to board that ferry, precisely on her 45th birthday, and offers her only answer as she looks around her barren room.

"It was my need that made him do it," said Garcia, who ekes out a living running a fruit and vegetable stand in one of Havana's neighborhood markets. "He would say, 'I can't stand to see you get up at 3 a.m. with that cart on the street.'"

As she talks into the early evening, the sunlight dims and the room goes dark. She and 2 daughters rely on the light from the kitchen since the bulb that hangs over the living room is burnt out and there is no money to buy another.

Today Garcia is pulling her life together after her son's execution. She spends most of her days in her small apartment, nursing her chronic migraines on the cot she and her family pulled from a trash bin -- the only furniture in the room save 3 chairs.

She says she worries about being watched by Cuba's security, and that many of her neighbors have stopped talking to her.

Now she plans to apply for an exit visa to the leave the island, saying the "rage in my heart" over her son's execution is so great she can barely breathe some days. Last week, she contacted one of Cuba's leading opposition activists, Elizardo Sanchez, and Cuba's Cardinal Jaime Ortega for help to begin the process.

"The only hope I have is to leave," she said. "I want to realize the dream he didn't see."