Florida Straits Territorial Waters (Off Key West)

Salt brightens under a hard sun as a narrow, exposed sweep of sea stretches between Havana and the Florida coast. Patched rafts bob like fragile punctuation on the horizon while Coast Guard cutters mark an invisible, contested line of jurisdiction. The water tastes of distance and urgency: binoculars, radio static, and the small human shapes that convert policy into crisis. The space functions as a liminal maritime corridor — a legal and moral no-man’s-land that compresses humanitarian peril, operational decisions, and political optics into a single, watchful expanse.