MARIEL BOATLIFT

MARIEL BOATLIFT of late April 1980 was named for the northern Cuban port from which thousands joined an unprecedented exodus to the United States, and was rooted in Fidel Castro's earlier announcement that anyone who wanted to leave Cuba could do so. The crisis began when Peruvian patrol boats sank two Cuban fishing vessels off the Peruvian port of Callao, worsening relations between Lima and Havana, and inspiring groups of would-be Cuban emigrants to seek refuge in Havana's Peruvian Embassy. Castro then ordered his police to cease guarding the embassy. After someone died in an accidental shooting, the police retreated, and hundreds and then thousands of Cubans entered the embassy grounds to seek asylum and assistance in emigrating. Within days, more than 10,800 desperate Cubans lacking food and water jammed the embassy. Thousands of others camped out in the swamps around the port of Mariel, waiting for permission to leave. Embarrassed and resentful, Cuban officials opened the door for emigration, although many dissidents seeking to leave were harassed, sometimes viciously, mostly by police and civilians at the port of Mariel.

Hundreds of boats, large and small, headed across the Florida Straits to pick up passengers and bring them to the United States. Some refugees in Miami sold possessions or took out second mortgages on their homes to buy a boat. Perhaps fittingly, the man who took command of the flotilla that eventually brought 125,000 Cubans to Florida was Napoleón Vilaboa, a car salesman and one of the members of the 1978 Committee of 75 that had journeyed to Havana as part of a Jimmy Carter administration–backed people-to-people "dialogue."

Having grown up under communism, the new arrivals assumed the U.S. government would give them jobs, housing, and sustenance, as they had come to expect in Cuba. South Florida's militant exile community, by then nearly half a million strong, distanced themselves from the new arrivals, and recoiled when the mostly young and mostly dark-skinned marielitos, some named Vladimir or Vassily or Irina because of Cuba's cultural relationship with the Soviet bloc, used socialist words like compañero (comrade). In response, the Carter administration released $10 million in emergency refugee funds to reimburse the voluntary agencies that were working night and day to take care of the newcomers.