Mariel boatlift

Cuban refugees arriving in crowded boats during the Mariel Boatlift crisis.

The Mariel Boatlift was a mass exodus of Cubans who departed from Cuba's Mariel Harbor for the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980.

The event was precipitated by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy which led to internal tensions on the island and a bid by up to 10,000 Cubans to gain asylum in the Peruvian embassy.

The Cuban government subsequently announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, and an exodus by boat started shortly afterwards. The exodus was organized by Cuban-Americans with the agreement of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The exodus started to have negative political implications for U.S. president Jimmy Carter when it was discovered that a number of the exiles had been released from Cuban jails and mental health facilities.

The Mariel Boatlift was ended by mutual agreement between the two governments involved in October 1980. By that point, as many as 125,000 Cubans had made the journey to Florida.

Background

In the United States

The Mariel Boatlift had its origins circa 1977 during a period when relations between Cuba and the United States were improving. The Carter administration established an Interest Section in Havana and the Cuban government reciprocated by establishing an Interest Section in Washington, D.C.. Cuba subsequently agreed to the release of several dozen political prisoners and allowed Cuban Americans to return to the island to visit relatives – a privilege that had been denied previously to Cuban citizens living abroad.

Initially, the Carter administration had an open-arms policy in regard to Cuban immigrants. Cubans were immediately granted refugee status and all the rights that went with it. Additionally, public opinion towards Cuban refugees was initially favorable.

During the Mariel Boatlift, this situation changed because of the perception and reality that the refugees included some "undesirables" such as criminals and mental patients. Castro arranged for the inclusion of a minority of criminals and the mentally ill among the political and economic refugees in order to damage the image of Cuban exiles. The magnified and inaccurate public perception, which was fed by United States media accounts such as a May 11, 1980 New York Times article and the movie "Scarface," was that the refugees consisted largely of undesirables.

This perception served to heighten tensions between the United States and Cuba.

In Cuba

In November 1978, the government of Fidel Castro met in the City of Havana with a group of Cubans living in exile, where the government acceded, among other important decisions, to start authorizing Cuban exiles to visit their relatives on the island as early as January 1979.[1]

Prelude

In May 1979 a bus carrying several people crashed through the gates of the Venezuelan embassy in the upscale Havana suburb of Miramar. This was the first of several instances of forced entry into the Venezuelan and Peruvian Embassies, that took place between 1979 and early 1980, by groups of people seeking political asylum.

The use of vehicles as battering rams was common. The general population did not have access to a foreign mission without express consent of the authorities.[2]

Exodus

Cuban arrivals during the
Mariel episode by month

Month	Arrivals (#)	Arrivals (%)
April (from April 21)	7665	6
May	86488	69
June	20800	17
July	2629	2
August	3939	3
September	3258	3
Total	124779	100

The episode started when on April 1, 1980 one Hector Sanyustiz acted on a plan he had been organizing secretly for months. He boarded a bus, and along with four others (including the driver), stopped several blocks from Embassy Row in downtown Havana.

The driver, who was a friend of Sanyustiz, announced that the bus had broken down and emptied the vehicle, leaving the four others who were privy to the plan inside. Sanyustiz took control of the bus and drove it through a fence of the Peruvian embassy.

Some of the Cuban guards who were positioned to guard the street opened fire on the bus. One guard was fatally wounded in the crossfire. The five had taken desperate measures to ask for political asylum, so the Peruvian diplomat in charge of the embassy, Ernesto Pinto-Bazurco, granted it.

The Cuban government immediately asked the Peruvian government to return the five individuals, stating that they would need to be tried for the death of the guard. When the Peruvian government refused, Castro threatened to remove the guards at the entrance of the Peruvian embassy, and proceeded to do so on Good Friday, April 4, 1980.

The news of these events spread by word of mouth and by Easter Sunday, there were over 10,000 people crammed into the tiny Peruvian embassy grounds. The Cuban government quickly ordered a large number of guards back into place and blocked access along the perimeter of the embassy. Additionally, travel by motor vehicle was halted in the suburb of Miramar, home to most foreign embassies in the City of Havana.

Inside the embassy, people occupied every open space on the grounds, eventually climbing trees and other structures and refusing to abandon the premises despite the lack of basic service infrastructure. The dangers inherent in this situation were allayed somewhat by the actions of other embassies, including those of Spain and Costa Rica, which agreed to accept a small number of refugees.

Castro ultimately stated that the port of Mariel would be opened to anyone wishing to leave Cuba, as long as they had someone to pick them up. While news of the situation was not broadcast in Cuba, Cuban exiles in the United States rushed to Key West and to docks in Miami to hire boats to transport people to United States.

Effect on the Miami labor market

It has been argued by economists that the Mariel Boatlift's effect on the economy and labor market of Miami was not as detrimental as expected or commonly believed to have been.

Taking the fact that fifty percent of Mariel immigrants decided to reside in Miami permanently into account, this resulted in a seven percent increase in workers in the Miami labor market and a twenty percent increase in Cuban working population.

Aside from the unemployment rate rising from 5.0 in April 1980 to 7.1 in July, which should be expected with such a large increase of workers, the actual damage to the economy was marginal and followed trends across America at the time. When observing data from 1979 to 1985 on the Miami labor market and comparing it to similar data from several other major cities across the United States focusing on wages it is clear that the effects of the boatlift were marginal.

The wages for Caucasians remained steady in both Miami and comparative cities. Likewise the wage rates for African Americans were relatively steady from 1979 to 1985 when in comparable cities it dropped. Aside from a dip in 1983, wage rates for Non-Cuban Hispanics were stable, when in comparable cities it fell approximately six percent.

There is no evidence of a negative effect on wage rates for Hispanics in Miami. Wages for Cubans demonstrated a steady decline especially compared to other groups in Miami at the time however this is to be expected when the market increases twenty percent.

In Cuba

Fidel Castro declared that those who were leaving the country were Lumpens (or undesirables) and the escoria (or scum) of Cuban society. Base-level cells of the Cuban Communist Party staged meetings at the homes of those known to be leaving the country. People were intimidated by these "Meetings of Repudiation" where the participants screamed obscenities and defiled the facades of the homes, throwing eggs and garbage, for hours. Those who opposed the intimidation became victims of the attacks themselves and lost their jobs or their seats at the college or university that they had been attending. Towards the end of the crisis, the "Meetings of Repudiation" were forbidden, but the damage had already been done. {{citation}}: Empty citation (help)

The end

The Cuban government eventually closed the Mariel harbor to would-be emigrants. Due to ocean currents and Cuba's proximity to the United States, the refugees who were able to leave headed to Florida, with the majority landing in Miami.

Approximately 125,000 Cubans arrived at the United States' shores in about 1,700 boats, creating large waves of people that overwhelmed the U.S. Coast Guard. Cuban guards packed boat after boat, without considering who the boats were carrying, and without considering weather or lifejacket safety, making some of the overcrowded boats barely seaworthy. 27 migrants died, including 14 on an overloaded boat that capsized on May 17, 1980.

Upon their arrival, many Cubans were placed in refugee camps. Others were held in federal prisons pending deportation hearings.

Crowded conditions in South Florida immigration processing centers forced U.S. federal agencies to move many of the Marielitos to other centers in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, Camp Santiago, Puerto Rico, and Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Riots in the Fort Chaffee center were a factor in the re-election defeat of then-Governor Bob Graham. President Jimmy Carter was also heavily criticized for his handling of the situation.

Some refugees were discovered to be undesirables; for example, criminals or mental patients who'd been released from Cuban prisons or other institutions. The exact number of undesirables that arrived in the boatlift is disputed, with estimates ranging from as low as 7,500 to as high as 40,000. The generally accepted figure comes from a 1991 Congressional report which estimates that roughly 10 percent of the 125,000 refugees, or 12,500 people, were undesirables of this type.

In the end, only 2% (or 2,746) of the refugees were classified as serious or violent criminals under U.S. law and denied citizenship on that basis.

Over time, the majority of the Marielitos assimilated into American society and went on to productive lives. They became college graduates, business owners, doctors, lawyers, engineers, pharmacists, nurses, writers, and journalists. Mirta Ojito, one of the journalists, eventually won a Pulitzer Prize.

Popular culture

The Mariel boatlift is depicted in the films Scarface (1983), The Perez Family (1995), and Before Night Falls (2000).

Some of the more famous and infamous Mariel boatlift refugees (Marielitos) include:

• Writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Mirta Ojito
• Writer and poet Reinaldo Arenas
• International Opera Singer Elizabeth Caballero
• Real World star Pedro Zamora
• Telemundo's Al Rojo Vivo anchor Jorge D. Bernal
• Oscar Gonzales Medina, Murderer of Christine Konda in Tucson, Arizona
• Hollywood actor and soap opera star Rene Lavan
• Julio González, arsonist responsible for the Happy Land fire that killed 87 people.
• Famous Cuban reggae band Arawak Jah with frontman (Ras Juan Perez}
• Jose Vigoa, ringleader of a gang that committed numerous armored car robberies in Las Vegas netting millions of dollars in the late '90's and early 2000s
• Luis Felipe, who eventually created the New York chapter of the Latin Kings
• Jesus Mezquia, murderer of Mia Zapata.

See also

• Cuban exile

• Atlanta Prison Riots
• Cuba-United States relations
• Garcia-Mir v. Meese

References

• Larzelere, Alex. The 1980 Cuban Boatlift. (Washington DC: National Defense University Press): 1988.
• Mariel Boatlift on globalsecurity.org.

External links

• Memories of Mariel: 20 Years Later.
• Six-year study of Mariel refugees
• Fleeing Cuba For a Better Life in USA