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Cuban balseros
helped change the political flavor of Florida
By Daniel de Vise and Elane
de Valle. The
Miami Herald, August 3, 2004.
MIAMI - Ten years ago, 1,500 Cubans who
had cast themselves adrift in homemade rafts,
bound for Florida and freedom, found themselves
waylaid at a dusty military camp back on
the island, sunburned and thirsty, captured
pawns in a political standoff.
They were the first of 30,000 Cubans detained
at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba,
in a migration crisis that would reshape
southern Florida.
Those "balseros," and the 200,000
or so who followed legally in a visa program
prompted by the rafter crisis would rejuvenate
Cuban Miami. Their sheer desperation - for
every three rafters who won this game of
Cuban roulette, experts say, at least one
lost - also inspired rapid and far-reaching
change in American immigration law.
"I'll just tell you one thing,"
said Isaias Alonso, a rafter who brought
his family to Miami 10 years ago. "If
I had to do it again, I'd do it again."
When the crisis was over, Cubans had lost
their exclusive status among American immigrants,
no longer automatically welcome. And Miami's
exile community was about to lose its unanimity
as a political force, Fidel Castro no longer
its singular focus.
The rafters ushered in a new generation
of Cubans in Florida, molded in the classic
immigrant tradition, a group more interested
in home ownership, sport utility vehicles
and suburbia than in talk radio and trade
embargoes. Consider: Among the dozens of
exile political and social groups still
active in southern Florida, balsero membership
is close to zero.
If the old-guard exiles still fixate on
Cuba, the balsero generation is obsessed
with Cubans: wives and husbands, sons and
daughters, sisters and brothers and aunts,
uncles and cousins, all the people they
left behind.
Ninety-five percent of immigrants from
the balsero generation have relatives still
on the island, compared with just more than
half of those who arrived in the dawn of
the Castro government, according to a recent
Florida International University poll.
This may be why, on questions of travel
to Cuba or sending money and care packages,
polls show the two groups sharply divided.
The FIU poll showed 68 percent of immigrants
who arrived since 1985 support unrestricted
travel to Cuba, compared with only 28 percent
of those who arrived between 1959 and 1964.
As more balseros become citizens, register
to vote and find their voice, Cuban America
may look less and less like a monolithic
voting bloc.
The rafter crisis brought an influx of
entrepreneurial, risk-taking Cubans to Clinton-era
Miami. Nearly 80,000 Cubans, including the
Guantanamo rafters and the first wave of
post-balsero visa holders, came to the United
States in 1994 and 1995, according to Census
data. Two-thirds, 54,173, settled in Miami-Dade
or Broward counties in Florida. The rest
scattered around the nation.
They had worked under a communist system,
and they arrived with skills that didn't
necessarily transfer to the United States,
particularly among the four in five balseros
who spoke no English.
Many of the 3,000 balsero children entered
the Miami-Dade public school system; at
one point in early 1995, the district was
admitting 400 Cubans a month.
Even as the balseros re-Cubanized southern
Florida, infusing the region with art and
culture and inspiration, their exit seems
to have helped the Castro government. The
rafter crisis delivered Castro into a political
compromise with the Americans that provided
an escape valve for his disaffected countrymen:
a quota of 20,000 visas a year for entry
to the United States.
"That escape valve has been a crucial
factor in the survival of the regime,"
said Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla. "Castro
has basically converted Cuba into a place
where people are dreaming about the possibility
of winning one of the 20,000 visas. That
is a very important control mechanism."
Anyone watching the Florida coastline in
the early 1990s could see the crisis coming.
Following the collapse of his Soviet communist
sponsors, Castro and his government were
flagging. In the towns of Cuba, where food
and staples seemed scarcer than ever, discontent
brewed.
Cuban rafters, who have been a phenomenon
since the Kennedy administration, began
to cast off in alarming numbers: from a
few hundred rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard
in 1990 to 1,936 in 1991, 2,336 in 1992
and then 3,687 in 1993.
It was aquatic insurrection, and the Castro
government closed in. On July 13, 1994,
Cuban government boats sank a commandeered
tugboat seven miles out of Havana Harbor.
At least 39 people died.
On Aug. 5, outraged Cuban citizens watched
the government retake a hijacked ferry in
Havana Bay to thwart another escape attempt.
Rioting erupted. People chanted anti-government
slogans, carried signs that said "Assassin"
and "Down With Fidel" and threw
stones at police and shop windows.
Castro blamed the United States for encouraging
hijackings and threatened to unleash another
mass exodus. Then he drew back the Frontier
Guard and forced the U.S. government into
a bizarre and deadly game of chicken.
By inviting his citizens to leave, Castro
launched a junkyard armada, sending 30,000
Cubans to America on vessels built from
inner tubes, Styrofoam and rusted car parts.
Thousands more went to their deaths.
On Aug. 15, the Coast Guard rescued 282
Cuban rafters at sea, the most in a single
day since the 1980 Mariel boatlift.
"We used to see patches of seaweed.
Now we were seeing patches of human beings,"
recalled Jose Basulto of Brothers to the
Rescue, the exile group that patrolled the
straits by air to locate rafters.
On Aug. 19 - as the Coast Guard set a new
record with 745 Cubans rescued at sea -
President Bill Clinton announced that all
intercepted rafters would be sent to the
Guantanamo naval base, detained indefinitely
or sent home.
Instead of stopping the rafters, the announcement
encouraged them. A four-day raft voyage
to Florida was now a day trip to the waiting
American ships, a dozen miles off Cuba in
international waters.
The Coast Guard collected 2,338 rafters
on Aug. 22, and 2,886 more on Aug. 23.
"I knew we were going to be picked
up. I knew it," recalled Alonso, whose
family was spotted by a Coast Guard helicopter
eight hours after their departure on Sept.
2.
Back in Miami, the heart of Cuban exile,
the news was far more sobering.
Clinton's pronouncement, a decision colored
by an era of backlash against illegal immigration,
marked the first time that an American government
would deny Cuban refugees entry to the United
States.
Miami Cubans, burned by the Bay of Pigs
disaster three decades earlier, lost another
measure of trust for the government of their
adoptive home.
There was also a palpable tension, as hundreds
of Florida Cubans awaited loved ones who
never made it.
How many rafters died in August 1994?
Basulto's pilots found one empty raft for
every three they found bearing live cargo.
Arturo Cobo, founder of the now-defunct
Transit Center for Cuban Refugees, filled
out hundreds of 4x6 cards with notes from
Cubans who called him looking for relatives
who had left in rafts.
"I can tell you," Cobo said,
"that 80 percent of the calls, they
never showed up."
Most who managed to survive the voyage
endured the better part of a year at Guantanamo,
living behind barbed wire in tents that
felt like prison camps.
Not until May 2, 1995, would Clinton allow
most of the detainees into the United States.
About 500 Cubans with criminal records or
physical or mental defects were sent home.
For many rafters, the difficult task was
adjusting to life in the United States.
Books and documentaries portray some balseros
chasing the American dream and others descending
into drugs, prostitution and poverty.
University of Miami researcher Holly Ackerman
believes many rafters still suffer from
post-traumatic stress. That could explain
why several rafters contacted by The Miami
Herald did not want to share their memories
of August 1994.
"I want to close that chapter in my
life," said Guillermo Armas, who was
featured in a cinematic documentary about
the balseros. "That is something that
is over. I suffered a lot. It was an incredible
experience. I lived it.
"And I don't want to relive it over
again."
(Knight Ridder Newspapers
correspondent Tim Henderson contributed
to this report, which was supplemented with
data from www.ipums.org)
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