In brief: On 2 Goons (Sept. 21), Adrianna Eves described leaving Cuba via Ecuador, a boat crossing she said other boats didn’t survive, robberies and a Mexican detention, and starting over in the US with nothing.
Contains adult themes: the embedded podcast video discusses adult-industry work.
Most 2 Goons guests arrive with a funny story about a fan. Adrianna Eves brought a month-long overland migration, a jungle, a knife and, somehow, a stint as a co-pilot.
The creator, tagged @adriannaeves in the episode description, told the story to Che Durena and JJ Liberman in “She Fled Cuba, Got Robbed by the Cartel & Crossed the Ocean on a Raft – Adrianna Eves on 2 Goons” (Sept. 21). She said it happened about “10 years” ago, “or like nine years or so,” and that this was her first time telling it on a podcast.
‘I felt like I was in a jail’
She said she first left at about 17 to visit a sister in Russia, where she had internet for the first time and decided the history she was taught at school was “very different from the reality.” Coming home was worse: “When I get in Cuba, I felt like I was in a jail.”
“Ecuador was the only country that was open, visa open,” she said, so she sold everything, “even sell my clothes,” and raised about $3,000. Life in Ecuador was hard, she said, and her friends decided to head for the US. She planned the route from maps people shared on Facebook, and split her cash into hidden stashes so nobody would see how much she had.
The crossing
Entering the jungle toward Panama meant a boat. Her account (13:07):
There were three boats. The boat that made it was mine.
“Every other boat they they flipped, they capsized,” she said. She also described being abandoned in the jungle by guides after her group refused to pay full price, getting lost, and a man holding a knife “very close to my face” on the way into Nicaragua; she ran when he looked away. Soldiers at a military camp, she said, also wanted money, and her group paid $20 instead of $100. Honduras had armed trucks in the streets after curfew. Mexico meant crossing a dark river on a tire, then about a week in a detention center where people fought over beds and the food was tortillas.
The light relief: in Panama, waiting a week for a tiny plane, she was told, “Okay, so you’re going to be the co-pilot.” Her reaction was the same as yours.
Her budgeting held up. “If I had 3,000, I remember getting to the US with a,000,” she said, as captioned. “In the 30 days, I spent only 2,000.” Others, she said, spent $5,000 to $10,000 on coyotes.
Starting from zero
Border processing in Tijuana and San Diego ended with her alone in a park, with no English. An aunt in Miami told her to come, she said, then told her as she was boarding that she couldn’t stay. Later, she said, a friend she lived with while working at what she called “more like a strip club” had been “stealing my money during all that time.” She went on to work for a company that sent her traveling, then into modeling, and later into content, which she said made money “right away.” She said she has an OFTV volleyball show coming.
The legal background she described is real, with one difference. Under the wet feet, dry feet policy, followed from 1995 to 2017, Cubans who reached US soil could generally stay and seek residency, while those intercepted at sea were generally sent back. That differs from her description of “wet feet.” Her route ran through the Darién Gap, a roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama that is widely reported as one of the most dangerous migrant routes. The episode’s title and description say she “escaped on a raft”; on camera she described boats to Panama and a tire on a Mexican river. The capsized boats, the deaths, the robberies and the detention are her own account, and we found no outside coverage of them.
She crossed seven countries on a budget that wouldn’t cover a weekend in Miami, haggled with soldiers, and still had a thousand bucks left. If OFTV needs someone to run its finance department, we have a name.