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

They were taken to a holding camp in Guantánamo, Cuba. Andy Ramos, a principal working at one of the camp's schools, remembers Armas most of the 30,000 people in the camp. "He would stick by me and want to practice English," says Ramos, who now works as the chess coordinator for Miami-Dade County Public Schools. "'How do you say this? How do you translate that?' He wouldn't stop. He was very persistent ... always happy and positive."

Ramos, a fourth-generation Mexican-American, had grown up in Texas. He was a huge baseball fan and talked to Armas about the sport. Within a few months, they formed a team. Though Armas had played only a few street games, he "had a rocket arm," Ramos recalls. "Definitely one of the sports leaders in the camp."

Armas stayed at Guantánamo for 18 months and was one of the last to be granted permission to enter the United States. "I'm off to La Yuma," Armas said to Ramos the day he left; the Cubans called the States "La Yuma" because of Yuma, Arizona, in westerns they had seen on television. The U.S. military flew the 21-year-old to Homestead Air Force base in 1996. His father, whom he had seen only once in 16 years, picked him up. "Papa, why are the streets so huge?" he asked. "Why are there so many cars?" Armas would later describe his journey from Cuba to Miami as "like going from black-and-white into color."

Armas found a job as a lifeguard at West End Park in Miami, and soon tried out for the Miami Dade College baseball team. "He's the best hitter I've ever seen at that level," says Tony Garcia, a family friend. "In our social leagues, our beer leagues, he would average .661, .714, .707 at bat. It was unreal what Joel could do." Garcia even took his young friend to try out for the Mets, and a coach there told him to spend some time playing college ball.

The next few years were a blur. Armas studied at Florida Memorial University and Florida International University; dropped out to help support his family, who had just arrived from Cuba; and dabbled in singing salsa. In 2002 he won a Ford Focus on Sábado Gigante for singing. That same year he enrolled in firefighter-paramedic school and was hired by the Broward Sheriff's Office. He was also a part-time lifeguard. One day in 2005 he was at Flamingo Pool in Miami Beach. He noticed a tall, bald guy swimming fast laps using a strange-looking fin, like a whale's tail, unlike anything Armas had ever seen. The guy was Cayetano Garcia, a lifeguard on the beach and a fellow Cuban. "¿Puedo probar ésas monaletas?" Armas asked Garcia. Can I try those fins? Garcia said yes.

Armas swam a length, and then Garcia asked if the young man could swim 25 yards underwater. Sure, Armas shrugged. Stopwatch in hand, Garcia told him to begin. "I couldn't believe it," Garcia says. "Seven-point-five seconds. He was faster than I was."

Garcia, who is about 15 years older than Armas, was no newcomer to the monofin. He was trained by Russians in Cuba in the early Eighties and won several competitions on the island as well as for the United States after he emigrated. In fact, when he met Armas, he was the U.S. monofin champ. "I want to give you this monofin," Garcia told Armas that day in the pool. "I've got a feeling that you're going to be a world-ranked champion in the sport."

Under Garcia's tutelage, Armas began to train for his first world competition in Ravenna, Italy; his daily routine was unlike the torturous regimen in Cuba. There was no one telling him what to do, what to eat, and how to think.

He had just started dating his now-fiancée, Teresa. She recalls that he spent four hours at the pool every day — beginning at 5:00 a.m. "He was so positive about everything in life, so motivated," says Teresa, a Miami doctor who is also from Cuba.

Armas came in 17th in that Italian competition and broke Garcia's U.S. fin swimming record. He has placed in the top 20 in more than a dozen races around the world since then, but has never finished in the top five.

Earlier this year, in Hungary, he placed ninth. This summer, at a contest in Bari, Italy, he came in 17th. These days, when Garcia has to work on the beach, Armas cajoles the Hialeah Gardens pool lifeguard to time him. He has spent his own money to buy two pairs of fins (around $700 apiece) and figures he has shelled out more than $20,000 on travel. He has tried to enlist companies such as Red Bull and Nike as sponsors, but the answer has always been no.