Published Friday, April 21, 2000, in the Miami Herald
In Mariel, massive boatlift a national embarrassment
`Those were sad days' but memories put aside
Herald Staff Report
MARIEL, Cuba -- At the end of a concrete pier where 20 years ago thousands of desperate Cubans lined up to go into exile, hungry boys dangle bait into an ocean stinking of oil.
There is no memorial at the docks in Mariel, nothing to commemorate the extraordinary exodus of 125,000 people to Florida, a surge of humanity that to this anniversary day is known only by the name of the harbor town that was the floodgate.
It is not mentioned in classrooms around the city, or, for that matter, by school teachers anyplace else in Cuba.
In Mariel, the boatlift is an embarrassment, like the pollution from its heavy industry.
``They might as well be ghosts,'' says Emetrio Garcia Martin, 56, who works at a Mariel pharmacy, about the thousands who left through the harbor here. ``I remember the faces, but I have forgotten the names. And who would want to know anyway? They were the riffraff, the prostitutes, the crazy
ones.''
Today, the energies of Mariel, a city that prides itself on its allegiance to Fidel, are focused not on the past, but the new free trade zone which offers sorely needed jobs but also fouls the air and daubs everything in beige grit.
Second only to the capital city as the most important port of commerce on Cuba's northern coast, Mariel is home to many retired military and their families. Armed guards prowl the perimeter of the naval installation, power plant, scrap metal works, oil storage facility and other enterprises
ringed with chain-link fences.
``Today the Revolution is Much Bigger, More Solid and Indestructible Than Ever!'' reads one of dozens of huge signs that dominate the landscape.
Today in Mariel, say most of its denizens, the boatlift is best left alone.
``Here we are with Fidel,'' declares a woman at the bus station used by workers commuting from Havana, 25 miles to the east. She asked not to be named.
``Don't ask me about those days,'' says Vladimir Abrue, his work clothes soiled with dust from his job at Cuba's biggest cement plant, managed by the Mexican firm Cementos Mexicanos S.A.
``I never think about those people. They were not from Mariel, anyway. They just used this place to go to Miami.''
REGRET AND GUILT
Still, among some older people -- especially those rare souls who have always called this transient port home -- there is a philosophical recollection, often tempered by regret and guilt.
``I felt bad for them,'' said Vicente Cubillas, 58, a mechanic whose tiny roadside tire repair shop is decorated with framed photos of guerrilla heroes. ``They were terrified of people throwing stones at them or beating them up.''
He said members of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution -- pro-Fidel stalwarts who keep watch on each block -- were given the green light at one point to rough up the emigres.
``I regret that,'' Cubillas said. ``It did not look good for the revolution. Those attacks did a lot to discredit all the good work we did [in getting rid of dictator Fulgencio Batista]. It was a low point for Cuba.''
Antonio Delahoza, and his wife, Amalia, recall the families camping out in the marshlands around the harbor and under trees in the small park next to the waterfront.
A bronze bust by the water's edge commemorates the first solo flight from Key West to Mariel done in 1913 by daredevil Cuban aviation pioneer Agustin Parla.
`PREFER TO FORGET'
``A lot of people will tell you they don't remember,'' said Delahoza, a graying former construction worker. ``Those were sad days. People would prefer to forget. The way things worked out for our nation, some of them might wish they had gotten on a boat, too. But here, most of us are loyal,
believing in the future.''
Except for an occasional bitter mention by President Fidel Castro, the boatlift has been mostly obliterated from official memory in Cuba. The anniversary has not spawned conferences. Cuban television has not revisited Mariel. Even the Peruvian Embassy building on Havana's Fifth Avenue where the
sorry saga began has been razed, the ultramodern Novotel Miramar Hotel rising in its place to snare the tourist dollar.
``It is not part of the curriculum,'' says a former Education Ministry official. ``In school, they focus on what's happening now. Mariel, Grenada, Angola -- those were current events. But when it is over, it is over . . .
``After 10 years, if something is favorable to the revolution, maybe they'll say something about it in a textbook. But the [Communist] Party wants to look forward, forward, not back at these kind of things.''
HISTORY ASIDE
Many of the 41,000 citizens of Mariel cite the need to put history aside and get on with life, as they shrug off the memory of those five months in 1980 when, as one man put it, ``we flushed the toilet.''
One woman said her uncle told her one of his friends was a Marielito. ``He says it was a kind of madness. People went, just like that. That friend returned for a visit a few months ago wearing gold chains, like the mafia. It was disgusting!''
For all the Fidelista loyalty, for all the sober perspective on history, there are those who say it could happen again.
In a street near the provincial Academy of Nautical Sports, Marta Riba Peraza and a young man who identified himself only as Vicente watched two windsurfers clad in black and fuchsia body suits head out into the glittering water of Mariel Bay.
``Do you see that?'' Riba asked. ``Do you know that sometimes one of those [windsurfers] just keeps going? They say that from here to Key West it is 18 hours if you go that way. People have done it. It is true!''
Her friend watched the brightly colored sails until they vanished in the surreal swirl of dust from the cement plant. ``If you complain about pollution here,'' he said, ``you can make an enemy.
`I WOULD GO'
``If they gave the word today,'' he said, referring to Cuban government assurances in 1980 that those who wanted to go could do so unmolested, ``I would go.''
He explained he had lost an opportunity to go to a government-run school for those who want to work in the tourist industry: a fiercely competitive job market where workers have access to dollars. He is ``making do,'' he says, using a term for those in Cuba who scavenge or steal to survive.
``Many call them traitors,'' he said of those long gone.
``But they may have had good sense. They are probably rich today, unlike me.''
Activist headed nuts and bolts of coordination
By Elaine De Valle. edevalle@herald.com
On this side of the Florida Straits, the Mariel exodus touched off an outpouring of generosity among local residents who initially welcomed the new arrivals.
Among the first to reach out and help coordinate efforts to assist the newcomers were many South Florida Cubans who had left the island in the 1960s and '70s.
Arturo Cobo, a Bay of Pigs veteran and Key West resident, was quick to recognize that the boatlift would turn into a massive exodus orchestrated by Fidel Castro.
``I had always maintained contact with people in Cuba, and these people told me that Castro was going to destabilize South Florida. The government's estimate was maybe 20,000 Cubans would come. But our people told me that Castro thought of sending no less than 100,000.''
Cobo went to the Key West city manager and police chief and ``told them we had to be ready to receive this massive exodus.''
CALLED FOR HELP
At first, ``they laughed at me . . . I knew it sounded ludicrous but I felt it was true. I told them, `Believe me. I need you to help me get a facility.' ''
Cobo, an activist on behalf of the Cuban exile community since the '60s and up to the present (he's among those regularly protesting efforts to send Elian Gonzalez to Cuba), got authorities to turn over Key West's Chamber of Commerce for the purpose of processing the new refugees, but that soon
became inadequate. Eventually, city officials expanded the refugee quarters to include an old abandoned Coast Guard base behind the chamber.
About 8,000 Mariel refugees were counted before the state and federal governments stepped in to assist the arrivals with food, medicine, housing and other basic needs.
Before they got help from the state, Cobo and the corps of volunteers he coordinated did everything themselves.
``We had to go rent housing. We got on radio to ask for transportation. We asked for doctors and medical staff to help us. The medicines? We had to buy them. We begged people to donate clothes. We went to all the restaurants to get food. To all the bodegas to get toothpaste and deodorant and
soap.''
The volunteers didn't sleep for days and when they did rest, they shared the same tents, the same cots, as the refugees.
``We spent months sleeping with them in the same tents . . . Sometimes whole days passed and we couldn't sit down to eat. But we did it with a lot of pride -- Cubans to Cubans. It is something we did with a lot of pride and a lot of warmth.''
Twenty years later, Cobo still gets emotional when he talks about it.
``The whole community -- Cuban and American and other Hispanics -- mobilized to confront this situation. It was one of the most beautiful things we've done in our 40 years of exile.''
At one point there were more than 1,000 volunteers. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency kicked in its resources, they were offered pay. They refused.
But there came a time that Cobo wanted to put a stop to the flow of people.
``When I detected a boat with common criminals -- I could tell by their shirts and their haircuts -- I took five of them to my office. I plucked them off the boat . . . They confessed that they were common criminals immediately. We took their photos to document everything and I went to Bill
Traugh [then director of the FEMA effort] and I told him, `I am all for the unification of families, but we have to tell the world that Castro is using Mariel to send mentally sick patients and criminals who have murdered, raped, assaulted children . . .
``This we couldn't tolerate.
``He got on the phone and called the White House. He said he had the general coordinator of the operation in his office who wanted to halt the operation.''
POLITICAL STANCE
But the word came back: This could not be stopped -- not in an election year.
That stance shocked Cobo -- but there were more jolting experiences in store for him in the course of the weeks he spent ushering in the Mariel refugees.
``It was very tragic. We were trained to win or die in the war. But we were never trained for this. Do you know what it's like to see an old man come off a boat and kiss the ground and then have a heart attack right there and die? The happiness of seeing children and families reunited again?
``One old man came to wait for his daughter and grandchildren. We saw him day after day after day. And his family didn't arrive. He slept in the park and we told him to come sleep in the tents with us. And day after day after day, his family didn't arrive.''
Cobo remembers the overwhelming pain he felt for that man, whose family never arrived.
``I saw friends of mine die in the Bay of Pigs and I never shed a tear. In fact, it gave me strength to continue in their place. But with this, I had to lock myself in a room and I cried like a baby . . . ''
Black Cuban: `It's as if we didn't exist'
By Fabiola Santiago. fsantiago@herald.com
More so than any other wave, the Mariel exodus included a significant number of blacks from the island. As many as 22 percent of the new refugees were black, according to some scholarly studies -- a higher proportion than ever before.
``That's what defines our exodus,'' says Natividad Torres, a black Cuban who left with her husband and 7-year-old son. ``Before Mariel, people in the United States didn't know there were blacks in Cuba. Most of the immigration had been white.''
Until 1980, blacks had remained largely faithful to the Cuban revolution, which constantly boasted of the social benefits it had brought them.
``In Cuba, we were hammered with the exaggerated propaganda of the racial discrimination in the United States. They told us that when a black arrived here, they would let the dogs loose at the airport,'' says Torres, who worked as an information officer in the Ministry of Education in Havana.
``But the Cuban crisis came to such a point that we said, `No more,' and we left in droves to see for ourselves.''
Her view of the United States? ``I found the dogs tied and bound,'' she says. ``Some were loose, but they had been vaccinated. I found a great deal of discrimination, and a great deal of rejection.''
She says she felt the sting of disapproval of her mixed-race marriage (her husband at the time was white). And she had difficulties landing a job in Miami that would match her university education in information technology.
In exile, Torres has turned to her religion, santeria, and now earns a modest living as a consultant on the Yoruba culture. She is often called to speak at conferences.
Torres says black Cubans and their contributions are not given enough of a voice in discussions about the exile community.
She calls it ``the white silent noise.'' ``It's as if we didn't exist,'' Torres says. ``A lot of emphasis is placed on the Hispanic angle, but the origin of our music is black and our soul and our roots are black.''
Odyssey to an American dream
By Elaine De Valle. edevalle@herald.com
Adrian Mesa rode to freedom aboard the Lollipop on April 24 -- barely a few weeks after turning 18 and three days after the first two boats packed with Mariel refugees arrived in Key West.
As one of the earliest to camp out at the port of Mariel, he witnessed its overnight transformation into a virtual city.
``I got there on April 23 in the afternoon, just as it was getting dark. There were only two tents and government officials decided to only allow the women inside so they could sleep there,'' said Mesa, now a disc jockey at WCMQ-FM (92.3).
There were no more than 100 people at the port that night -- ``one of those nights that was very nippy.'' He was tired, though, and fell asleep fast.
Upon waking the next morning, Mesa found himself wondering if he was in the same place. He could no longer see the port. The ground was no longer part of the landscape. There was only green canvas as far as the eye could see.
``There were so many tents. Hundreds of them. And it was full of people. All of a sudden there were thousands of people walking around and sitting everywhere.
``It seemed as if I had woken up in un hormiguero -- an anthill.''
By contrast, Mesa remembers, things were calm upon arrival in South Florida. At that very early stage of the exodus, the number of incoming refugees was still small, their processing orderly.
``Immigration put us on a bus and sent us to Tamiami Park. And when we got there, there was nothing there. Just a processing center and a trailer for medical exams.''
One thing was immediately noticeable: The people who greeted him here treated him with respect, unlike how he and the other departing Cubans had been treated on the island.
In Cuba, said Mesa, ``the police treated us with much despotism. They shouted `Get out!' They said things to provoke you.'' At Tamiami Park, he noted, ``I began to feel like a person, like a human being.''
He and the relatives who had traveled with him -- his sister and her husband and her mother-in-law -- were processed and immediately released to their family here.
``Within two or three hours I was already free . . . It was a reality many people were anxious for in Cuba: to be in another country, free the next day. And I had attained that so easily that it seemed unreal.''
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