The Mariel Exodus 40 years later

We remember.

Source: CubaBrief
Forty years ago, on April 15, 1980, the Mariel boat lift began and would continue over the next seven and a half months ending on October 31, 1980. Over 125,000 Cubans and over 25,000 Haitians arrived in South Florida during the same period were given the same legal status through an administrative decision of the Carter Administration that created the Cuban-Haitian Entrant Program for the duration of the Mariel exodus.  Mariel marked a before and after in the history of South Florida, and contributed to President Jimmy Carter not being re-elected in 1980.

However, the immediate crisis that resulted in this exodus began on April 1, 1980 when a bus driven by Héctor Sanyustiz and a half dozen Cubans desperate to flee the island breached the Peruvian Embassy. Cuban guards at the Embassy fired, wounding the driver, and accidentally killing one of the police by “friendly fire.” The Cubans requested asylum.

Fidel Castro demanded that they be handed over, but when the Peruvian embassy refused the Cuban dictator’s order, the “Maximum Leader” sought to teach the Peruvians a lesson and retired the Cuban guards from the Embassy. During the next three days 10,856 Cubans entered the Peruvian embassy. It was a cross section of Cuban society.  Peruvian diplomats held their ground, and refused to turn over the asylees, and held Fidel Castro responsible for the crisis, citing that the Cuban dictator had removed the guards from around the embassy, in violation of international law.

Castro wanted to obtain Peru’s permission for Cuban military units to invade the embassy, but the request was rejected. Carlos Alberto Montaner has written an excellent account titled “40 Years have Passed since That Infamy”. President Jimmy Carter was in the White House and had been engaged in an effort to normalize relations with the Castro regime since 1977, and the Cuban despot was able to exploit that relationship to solve the self-created crisis.

Fidel Castro began by insulting those seeking refuge as “scum” and “worms”, and he took children and youth out of school to take part in acts of repudiation. According to Carlos Alberto Montaner, the students killed a teacher that they had discovered running away.

This was the first time that acts of repudiation were seen, when Cubans who simply wanted to leave the country were brutally assaulted and forty lost their lives in lynchings. A refugee at the time of Mariel Mirta Ojito, now a journalist and author, described what she had seen and experienced in an opinion piece for The New York Times:

Mariel marked the first-time socialist Cuba turned against itself. The government staged riots called actos de repudio -- street rallies in which neighbors turned against neighbors, harassing and tormenting those who wanted to leave the country. The victims were often pelted with rocks, tomatoes and eggs. Windows were shattered. Doors were knocked down. Some people were killed, dragged through the streets as trophies to intolerance and hate. Sometimes people trapped inside their homes chose to kill themselves rather than face their tormentors.

Granma, the Communist Party’s daily paper, compiled a list of 100 insults to scream at those who wanted to leave. Meanwhile Fidel Castro prepared to associate these refugees with the worse of the worse.

Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Fidel Castro's former bodyguard, wrote a tell all book published in May 2014 of his time with the dictator titled, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo that included a remarkable passage on the events of Mariel.

Brian Latell, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and academic at the University of Miami, in a June 8, 2015 op-ed in The Miami Herald reviewing the above book touched on how Castro dealt with the Mariel boatlift during the Carter presidency:

For me, Sánchez’s most appalling indictment of Fidel concerns the chaotic exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans in 1980 from the port of Mariel. Most who fled were members of Cuban exile families living in the United States. They were allowed to board boats brought by relatives and to make the crossing to South Florida.

But many of the boats were forcibly loaded by Cuban authorities with criminals and mentally ill people plucked from institutions on the island. Few of us who have studied Fidel Castro have doubted that it was he who ordered those dangerous Cubans to be exported to the United States. He has persuaded few with his denials of any role in the incident. Yet Sánchez adds an appalling new twist to the saga. We learn that prison wards and mental institutions were not hurriedly emptied, as was previously believed. Sánchez reveals that Castro insisted on scouring lists of prisoners so that he could decide who would stay and who would be sent to the United States. He ordered interior minister Jose Abrahantes to bring him prisoner records.

Sánchez was seated in an anteroom just outside of Fidel’s office when the minister arrived. The bodyguard listened as Fidel discussed individual convicts with Abrahantes.

“I was present when they brought him the lists of prisoners,” Sánchez writes, “with the name, the reason for the sentence, and the date of release. Fidel read them, and with the stroke of a pen designated which ones could go and which ones would stay. ‘Yes’ was for murderers and dangerous criminals; ‘no’ was for those who had attacked the revolution.” Dissidents remained incarcerated.

A number of the criminal and psychopathic marielitos put on the boats to Florida went on to commit heinous crimes — including mass murder, rape, and arson.

The author and former bodyguard of Fidel Castro, Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, passed away at age 66 on May 25, 2015.  Within a year of the Spanish edition of the book being published. Be that as it may his testimony remains for historians to examine. There are also documentaries, books, and other works that examine the Mariel Exodus, and one of the best is the 1980 documentary “In their own words” by Jorge Ulla for the US Information Agency that interviewed Cubans as they arrived in the United States.