This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Everyone in Hanois neighborhood had a secret in their garage.

Each family worked under cover of night, bringing strange materials from their workplaces,

foil drums, styrofoam, old car engines. They used whatever they could find. It was August of 1994 in Havana, Cuba. Food and other resources were scarce. The people longed for a better life,

and it was only 100 miles to Florida, 100 miles of choppy, shark-infested water. But they were

willing to take the chance.

Many garages house secret balsas, makeshift rafts that families could use to send loved ones to

America. The name is derived from the cheap, flimsy balsa wood some Cubans used to construct

their rafts. The government didn't approve of its citizens leaving the country, though,

so they kept tight control over materials such as plywood and inner tubes. And so the people

used what they had. The rafts were as numerous as they were strange. Some were barely better

than a cork bobbing in an ocean, truly just a square of foam and aluminum. But some were more elaborate, too.

Entire cars were hollowed out and then placed between two rows of floating oil drums.

Hanoi and his family members worked on their raft in secret. They used tar as an adhesive to attach

blocks of styrofoam to a wooden frame, an old shower curtain was used to line

the interior, Hanoi would travel alone in the small compartment. The thought filled him with

anxiety and despair. He might drown or die of thirst or be eaten by sharks. Even if he was successful,

...