The 1980 Mariel Boatlift was a massive Cuban emigration to the United States. The exodus was driven by a stagnant economy that had weakened under the grip of an American trade embargo and by Cuban President Fidel Castro’s exasperation at dissent.
“Those who don’t have revolutionary genes, those who don’t have revolutionary blood … we don’t want them, we don’t need them,” Castro said in a May 1, 1980 speech. a position that overturned the closed emigration policy of the Communist regime, Castro told Cubans who wanted to leave Cuba to leave and ordered potential emigrants to go to the port of Mariel.
Some 125,000 Cubans took Castro at his word and boarded the fishing and shrimp boats, crossed the Straits of Florida, and arrived on US shores. Their arrival – over the course of five months – has imbued the United States with a dynamic group of new immigrants and raised alarm bells about tensions on resettlement facilities and the American economy.
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Under the cold war: the vulnerable Cuban economy
Castro’s surprise opening of his country’s border followed a series of events demonstrating the desire of Cuban dissidents to leave the country. As other world powers allied with the United States in a cold war against Cuba, the island’s foreign trade was crippled. Cuba faced an economic crisis brought on by the pressure of an American trade embargo that began in 1962 and the slow dissolution of its main trade supporter, the Soviet Union.
Cubans – even those who initially supported the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – began to lose faith in the nation. Asylum efforts began in the late 1970s and continued through the 1980s with attempted forcible entries into the Venezuelan and Peruvian embassies along Havana’s Embassy Row.
On May 13, 1979, a group of Cubans crashed into a bus in the Venezuelan embassy to seek asylum. Later that year, on June 11, the Cuban Revolutionary National Police (Policía Nacional Revolucionaria, PNR) opened fire on a group of Cubans who were attempting to break into the Venezuelan embassy. And on July 16, 1979, two Cubans applied for asylum at the Venezuelan embassy. The following year, on April 1, 1980, six Cuban dissidents seeking political asylum crashed into a bus in the fence of Havana, the Peruvian Embassy in Cuba.
Cuban PNR officers fired machine guns at the bus full of dissidents marching towards the Peruvian embassy. But one of those bullets ricocheted off the bus and killed PNR policeman Pedro Ortiz Cabrera. Fidel Castro wanted the Peruvian embassy to hand over the people who had requisitioned the bus so that they could stand trial for the death of Ortiz Cabrera. But embassy officials refused the request and granted asylum to the dissidents. Frustrated by this response, Castro withdrew all PNRs guarding international embassies in Cuba.
“In view of the regrettable death of a guard at the Peruvian embassy and the tolerant attitude of the Peruvian government towards these criminals”, indicates a statement published on April 4, 1980, “the Cuban government has decided to withdraw the guards from the Peruvian diplomatic mission. . From now on, embassy officials will be solely responsible for what happens in their embassy. We cannot protect embassies that do not cooperate with this protection. “
With the withdrawal of PNR sentries, even more Cubans took the opportunity to abandon the island’s economic turmoil. Some 10,000 Cuban political dissidents have started to gather in the premises of the embassies in the Cuban capital.
Castro opens the border at the port of Mariel
It was then, on May 1, 1980, that Castro announced that the port of Mariel – the port closest to the American coast – would be open for the next six months to all Cubans wishing to leave – if they could obtain a means of transport outside the island. Castro dismissed dissidents as mere parasites, living off the Revolution. If they want to go, he said, they should go.
In Granma, the official journal of the Cuban Revolution, dissidents were considered “criminals, lumpenproletariats, anti-socialists, tramps and parasites”. And civilian members of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution of Cuba (Comités de Defensa de la Revolución) carried out “acts of repudiation” by parading in front of embassies and chanting: “They should go! They should get out!
Cuban exiles in the United States sent a flotilla of 1,700 hastily rented shrimp boats and fishing boats to pick up their parents. But when these boats arrived in Mariel, they were forced to take the relatives of the exiles as well as other asylum seekers.
President Jimmy Carter takes the political heat
US President Jimmy Carter had promised that Mariel’s Cubans would be welcomed “with open arms” in the United States. In June 1980, he created the Cuban-Haitian Entry Program (CHEP), which granted temporary status and access to processing asylum requests and community assistance to Cubans and the thousands of Haitians fleeing to United States. The United States had a long tradition of welcoming dissidents from the Cuban Revolution, and Carter initially proposed granting American asylum to 3,500 people under the Refugee Act of 1980.
Castro, taking advantage of Carter’s open-door policy, had forcibly evicted convicted felons, mental hospital patients, LGTBQ people and prostitutes – people Castro had crudely referred to as “escoria” (trash) . In total, some 125,000 Cubans left the island during the Marial Bridge: up to 20,000 had criminal records and thousands had spent time in mental institutions.
In the span of five months, 125,266 Cuban exiles from Mariel arrived in Florida as part of the largest Cuban migration to the United States. In October 1980, the Carter administration negotiated with the Cuban government to end boat lifts. But the large number of refugee arrivals and the government’s difficulties in managing them have led political opponents to claim that the Carter administration was unprepared to handle the influx.
Cuban refugees at Eglin Air Frorce base in May 1980 after the Mariel lift.
Ted Thai / The LIFE Photo Collection / Getty Images
“ Marielitos ” represented new types of Cuban Americans
The refugees who arrived faced a shortage of support from their new host country. Amalia Dache, assistant professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, says the so-called “Marielito” refugees had less time to benefit from refugee assistance and received fewer jobs, education and jobs. federal aid than former Cuban exiles.
“The Marielitos stood out from other Cubans in several ways: they had darker skin and there was also a part of the community that was homosexual – at the time, it was in the 1980s, there was still a huge stigma in Cuba about homosexuality. So this part of the Marielitos has conditioned the American media to see them as this dark group, in various senses like sexuality, race, criminalization – okay, think of ‘Scarface’ – these are the types of negative attributes which they chose to use to categorize Marielitos. “
“ Marielitos ” changes the image of Cuban migration
Formerly incarcerated Afro-Cubans, working class, LGBTQ, and former psychiatric institute patients who were all part of the Mariel Boatlift have transformed the image of Cuban migration to the United States. The already established Cuban-American community of Miami, Florida had to find a way to incorporate the Marielitos, and later the more than 35,000 Balsero Cubans who immigrated in 1994 (many on makeshift rafts), into their ranks.
Ultimately, Cuban Americans who immigrated to the United States during the Mariel Lift and subsequently developed a broader understanding of Cuba, its people, and island politics. In the 1980 US Information Agency documentary In their Own Words, Cuban refugees spoke of surviving the Mariel lift.
Among those interviewed was novelist Reynaldo Arenas, who described his experience of leaving Cuba for his new home country.
“In reality, what I feel is by no means a victory, as if we are arriving with great happiness. But I can say that I feel at peace. I made my own way and I am alive,” he said. -he declares. . “It’s the same feeling you get when your house is on fire. You escaped… but still, the house burned down.
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“A 35 años de la embajada de Perú”, March 4, 2015, 14ymedio
Harry S. Truman: The Rise of the Cold War by Nicole L. Anslover, published by Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
“En recuerdo a un joven combatiente: Pedro Ortiz Cabrera”, April 3, 2010, Granma Año 14 / Número 93.
The Impact of the Cold War on US-Cuban Economic Relations, 1946-1952, Library of Congress.
“Pedro Ortiz Cabrera, una vida arrancada por el odio” by Reinier del Pino Cejas, Emisora Provincial Radio Artemisa, April 1, 2020.
“Declaration of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba.” El Gallo, flight. 12, no. 2, 1980, p. 3. JSTOR.
Cuba-chronology. Cinco siglos de historia, política y cultura by Leopoldo Fornés Bonavía, published by Editorial Verbum, 2008.
“In Their Own Words,” C-Span, October 30, 1980.
“90 Miles”, written and directed by Juan Carlos Zaldivar, 2001.
“Refugee Act of 1980”, Kennedy, Edward M., The International Migration Review, vol. 15, no. 1/2, 1981, pp. 141-156. JSTOR.
