The Legacy of Mariel

The Miami Herald.

Mariel: New leaders were forged in heat of Mariel crisis

Mariel raised the profile of Cubans in local public office, who were forced to deal with a massive crisis demanding quick but sound decisions and sensitivity to the community's needs.

By Elaine De Valle, edevalle@herald.com. Posted on Mon, Apr. 04, 2005

As the first wave of more than 125,000 Cuban refugees suddenly headed for South Florida, Miami Assistant City Manager Cesar Odio found himself thrust into a new role as he tried to keep the city together and Cuban exiles calm.

He had been on the job barely four months, but because then-City Manager Joseph Grassie was away on business, Odio found himself front and center in one of the biggest crises ever to hit the region, as a human shepherd for the refugees, setting up their tent city homes, getting them fed.

Almost six years later, he became Miami city manager, catapulted into that post thanks in part to his steely nerves during the Mariel exodus.

''I felt that I had an obligation to help my people out. I knew my people. This was a Cuban thing,'' said Odio, whose parents spent 10 and seven years, respectively, in Cuban prisons. "Every turn that I took was with one thing in mind: Let's get this problem solved.''

The exodus came with plenty of problems: The Mariel boatlift brought about 2,000 or 2,500 criminals and, perhaps, 500 mentally ill people. There were language barriers and a housing shortage. But there was plenty of good: a wave of talented artists -- painters, sculptors, poets and playwrights often celebrated at art shows and literary fairs.

The events also ushered in some new Cuban American political, civic and community leaders: Odio and former assistant county manager Sergio Pereira are joined by former Miami Mayor Maurice Ferre; Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez; educator Eduardo Padrón, who at the time was president of just one Miami Dade College campus, where he started a program to retrain the refugees.

Odio said he wasn't thinking about his future at the time. ''I wasn't looking for power at all. I guess my life took the turn to be able to help out and then in 1986 they appointed me [city] manager, but I wasn't looking for power,'' Odio told The Herald.

Odio ran the city's refugee assistance program for two years and opened camps at the Orange Bowl and under the Interstate 95 overpass in downtown Miami.

TRIAL BY FIRE

The tasks at the city's refugee assistance program gave Odio, and others, a trial-by-fire crash course on crisis management -- a lesson that was helpful throughout the rest of their lives.

''You don't read that in books. You don't learn that in university,'' said Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez, who was a second-term city councilman during Mariel.

''You gotta be calm. You gotta be cool. You gotta be collected,'' Martinez said. "You gotta make sound decisions. Sometimes those are not the most popular decisions.''

He remembers the first sign of trouble -- a telephone call from a police major.

''He called me to let me know we had people protesting on West 29th Street and Eighth Avenue and blocking intersections. Somebody needed to come out,'' Martinez recalled. 'I told him to call the mayor. He said, 'I can't find him. You're the only one that has answered the phone.' ''

'I JUST TOOK CHARGE'

Martinez doesn't know where then-Mayor Dale Bennett had disappeared to. ''But nobody wanted to face the issue,'' he told The Herald. "I just took charge and did what needed to be done, and that was it.''

He went out to the corner of West 29th Street and Eighth Avenue, where a crowd had gathered to demonstrate and demand that the Mariel refugees be allowed to come.

''I asked people to follow the rules and not disrupt the traffic,'' he said.

But Odio, who would later go to prison for obstructing a federal probe of corruption at Miami City Hall, and Martinez, who went on to be elected mayor of Hialeah in November 1981, don't think Mariel shaped them into leaders.

''There were very few elected officials at the time that were Hispanics or Cuban-Americans,'' Martinez told The Herald. "We had to take the role and responsibility of dealing with the issues that resulted from the boatlift.''

Experts agree.

''It's not that they came out of that episode as leaders,'' said Juan Clark, a Miami Dade College professor of sociology who has studied Cuban immigration issues for years. "Some of them already were exercising leadership functions. The only thing is that they took an additional responsibility and acted on something that was perceived as a very deeply felt need of the community.''

What the events of 1980 did was, perhaps, give them more confidence -- and give the community more confidence in them, Clark said.

''A crucial element of leadership is assuming responsibility when the need arises. That's when you distinguish between people who have leadership qualities and those who are simply followers,'' Clark said.

"You see the true leaders in moments of crisis. This is when those persons emerge.''

German Muñoz, chairman of the social studies department at the school's Wolfson campus, agreed.

STEPPING UP

''It is a matter of people measuring up to the challenge. The fact is that some of these people were in governmental positions already,'' Muñoz said.

"Whoever is big in government or the church, because of their function or position, have to step up.''

So people in a natural position to lead included Auxiliary Bishop Agustín Román, who was already considered the spiritual guide of the Cuban exile community, and Eduardo Padrón, who began a training program for the Marielitos -- as well as about 20,000 Haitian refugees who arrived that year -- when he was vice president of the Wolfson Campus.

EDUCATION A PRIORITY

Padrón, today the president of Miami Dade College, also shrugs it off as just part of the job.

''This institution did what it is supposed to do, which is to open doors of education to people,'' Padrón said. "We knew that education was going to be very, very important in order for them to be able to successfully redirect their lives in the United States.''

He established a program to not only teach the refugees English, but also train them in with fast-track job skills so the refugees could get jobs.

"We saw this as an opportunity to provide the people who were coming in as new immigrants to Miami with an opportunity to become what you would call productive citizens, as opposed to becoming liabilities.''

On the first day refugees started arriving at camps at Tamiami Park and the Orange Bowl, they got fliers that let them know about the courses.

''To our satisfaction, a lot of these people immediately reacted very positively, and we were able to develop special programs for them as well as get some of them into regular programs,'' Padrón told The Herald.

He said thousands of refugees, probably tens of thousands, took courses at Miami Dade College.

''Many of whom today are leaders,'' Padron noted.

I saw joy, sadness, weariness and hope

By Tim Chapman, Herald Staff. Posted on Sun, Apr. 03, 2005

On the day so many boats arrived, I drove straight from Miami to the Key West docks. I found boats of every type -- shrimp boats, speed boats, fishing boats -- and they all were crowded to the gunwales with refugees.

I knew I was witness to a great event. It was like being allowed to watch Ellis Island in a different century. So much joy, sadness, bewilderment, weariness and hope.

I stayed on the docks a month and photographed children alone, women alone, families who had left someone behind. I saw the faces of Miami relatives clinging to fences waiting to get a glance of a loved one they had heard was coming, faces of Miami relatives who had hocked houses for money to hire boats to pick up their families.

Then all of a sudden, I was photographing all men, alone -- lots of them, eyes red from the seawater and thirst. Many had been herded out of prisons straight onto boats bound for Key West. One minute in a Cuban hellhole and the next on a boat crossing the straits to freedom.

U.S. Customs inspectors were already frisking these men on the docks -- starting the downward spiral of the image of the Mariel refugees.

I followed the boatlift refugees to Eglin Air Force Base in Okaloosa County, where thousands of Marielitos, as they were becoming known, were sent to be processed. I photographed a sea of men holding up a baby in the joy of freedom and all it entailed, photographed men and women receiving a priest's blessing for the first time in their lives.

Even before I shot the pictures in Key West, I had been sent to Peru to wait for the arrival of the group who had crashed the Peruvian embassy in Havana. It was another dramatic scene. The group was brought off the plane in the middle of the night with Peruvian guards holding the press back with Uzis. They let us see the refugees the next day at a park, receiving boxes of food and being housed in tents.

Years later, I went back to Lima to photograph these bold Cubans who had first stormed the embassy. Ironically, they were far worse off than the refugees who came to Florida.

They were being denied employment in Peru. Some of the young girls were forced to sell themselves on the streets to help out their families, who still couldn't get to the U.S.

For several years, I continued to follow the boatlift refugees in Miami -- first the joy, then the resentment from Anglos, then the resentment of the established Miami Cubans, then the resentment of the Mariel refugees because they did not have what other Cuban Americans had. Crime waves were publicized in movies and written about over the years. I photographed a federal prison burned to the ground in Oakdale, La., by Mariel refugees who took it over after being imprisoned for years.

I know about the image of the Mariel refugee, but it is not the true image. The true image is to be found in the face of an old woman with a coat too large for her and her daughter smiling with her hand over her shoulder, comforting her and whispering, "It's OK, mami, we are free.''

To get the story, I hid on a boat near Mariel

By Janet L. Fix, For The Herald. Posted on Sun, Apr. 03, 2005.

It all began, as things often did in The Conch Republic, with a rumor.

"Castro wants us to come! Fidel's heart has changed! A boat bringing many Cubans will arrive tonight!''

When I heard, I was at my desk in The Herald's storefront Key West bureau, sipping the café con leche that fueled my work as one of two reporters covering the 32-mile stretch of the Florida Keys.

Then, as if proof, sometime after dark a fishing boat crammed with refugees neared a Key West dock. It was the first of a rag-tag armada that would make an historic 90-mile trip in the spring of 1980 and return with 125,000 Cuban refugees.

We raced to the Key West Naval Annex dock and jumped the fence surrounding the military base. We were stopped short of our goal by a good stretch of sea. My colleague dropped into a motor boat, intent on ''borrowing'' it.

I had broken few laws since leaving Lincoln, Neb., where I grew up, graduated from the University of Nebraska two years earlier and was recruited by The Herald as a summer intern.

So I opted to flag down a passing yacht, a 46-foot Bertram appropriately named Touche. Being young, blonde, and if crazed perhaps harmless, helped.

The captain pulled up, checked us out, and dropped us off on the Naval dock in time to witness the refugee boat unload. In the chaos, I asked the captain to give me a lift on to Mariel, and he agreed. (My reporting colleague reluctantly stayed behind in Key West to cover events unfolding there.)

The captain, Jose Manuel Carbonell, hoped to reunite with the father he left when he fled Cuba in 1958. His daughter, Martica, and her husband accompanied him.

Within hours of leaving Key West, I was whispering terse ship-to-shore radio reports from Mariel harbor, while hiding under a tarp.

My daily dispatches ran without my byline. Armed Cuban police had boarded our boat, logged our names and ordered us to stay off our ship's radio -- on threat of imprisonment.

The Herald published my dispatches as supplied ''by an anonymous crewman.'' They carried breathless headlines quoting Americans stuck in Mariel: ''We're Sitting on a Powder Keg'' and "Food Running out; We could starve.''

Our day trip became a week of waiting. Boats left only after being forced to take on refugees. Desperate refugees swam from shore to waiting boats. Tempers flared. Hired boat captains, who had been paid handsomely by Cuban exiles to make the 90-mile trip, demanded $400 more each day they were forced to stay.

I returned to Key West on another boat after the captain's food and water supplies had run low. But by then, patience had also run out. My last dispatch, May 1, 1980, captured the shared sense of betrayal in Mariel: "Fidel Manipulating Boatlift.''

Janet Fix worked as a Herald reporter from 1978 to 1983.

Miami's Cuban stations a key force

By Fabiola Santiago. fsantiago@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Apr. 03, 2005

In the intoxicating days of the Mariel boatlift of 1980, Miami's Cuban radio stations played a pivotal role.

Radio station WQBA La Cubanísima broke the story that launched the boatlift: The Cuban government would allow exiles to travel to Cuba by sea and pick up relatives.

One journalist remembers the voice of Jorge Luis Hernández, WQBA's news director, clamoring with emotion at a key moment: "¡Qué vengan todos! ¡Qué vengan todos!''

"Let them all come.''

Immediately, Miami Cubans responded. Boats began to leave from Miami docks en route to Havana.

Cuban radio stations went to all-news formats, broadcasting around the clock the names of arrivals in Key West, raising funds, food and clothing for the refugees -- cementing their place in the Cuban community as the primary source of information for exiles.

''The radio stations played a very dramatic, significant role,'' says Roberto Fabricio, then the editor of The Herald's Spanish-language supplement, El Miami Herald.

The plot to involve the radio stations in kick-starting the boatlift had been cooked up in Havana.

CUBAN PREPARATION

Long before Fidel Castro announced he was opening the port of Mariel, his officials were talking about organizing a boatlift with Miami car salesman Napoleón Vilaboa, who had been traveling to the island. When they were ready, the Cuban officials contacted Vilaboa, who tapped Hernández, one of the most recognized voices on Cuban radio, to spread the news.

Almost all of the radio commentators followed Hernández's lead, encouraging people to get their relatives out of Cuba -- except Emilio Milián, the newsman whose legs had been blown off by a car bomb because he denounced exile terrorism in the 1970s. Always the controversial voice of moderation, Milián warned people to beware of "playing into Fidel's hands.''

Few paid attention; family ties weighed more heavily.

When the boats began to arrive in Key West, Cuban radio again became indispensable as a primary source of news. ''Everybody wanted to know if their relative had arrived, so we sent people to Key West and we broadcast the names as they arrived,'' remembers Salvador Lew, then director of WRHC Cadena Azul.

People were constantly flocking to the radio station, then at Southwest Eighth Street and 22nd Avenue. ''I put the microphones outside; I took the studio outside,'' Lew said. 'All day long, it was, 'So and so has arrived and so and so needs a wheelchair,' and a wheelchair would turn up.''

The breathless broadcasts went on for months with WQBA and WRHC going to an all-news format. A Herald story on April 28, 1980 about efforts to process refugees said Cuban radio had collected about $500,000 earlier that month.

Hernández, who now works for U.S.-government-sponsored Radio Martí as its director, did not want to be interviewed for this report.

In her book Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus, journalist Mirta Ojito also pointed to Hernández as the radio personality who first told listeners that Castro was opening the port of Mariel.

A QUESTION OF RATINGS

Hernández, Ojito says in an e-mail about her book, decided to broadcast the news because he "needed to improve ratings and decided to back the boatlift as a way to attract and keep listeners.''

''He was also motivated by his feelings for Castro and Cuba and all that, but the importance of the ratings in his decision-making process cannot be ignored,'' Ojito says.

Lew acknowledges that Cuban radio, whose ratings were flojito -- soft -- played into Castro's hands.

''It started out as an embarrassment for Castro when a few people asking for asylum turned into 10,000,'' Lew says. "Then, it all turned into a way for Castro to solve a big problem -- he got rid of 125,000 people hostile to his regime, and among them threw in some criminals and insane people to wreak havoc.''

Now an afternoon show host at La Poderosa 670 AM, Lew says he has one regret: "Instead of the Cubans coming here from Mariel, we should have been the ones to have invaded Cuba at Mariel.''

Heady days for Herald: boatlift and major riots

By Fred Tasker And Fabiola Santiago. ftasker@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Apr. 03, 2005

For reporters, photographers and editors at The Herald, the spring of 1980 was the most thrilling, baffling, adrenaline-pumping time in their careers.

''Miami was the center of the universe,'' says Kevin Hall, then a special projects editor who led Herald coverage of the Mariel boatlift, today a journalism professor at Florida International University.

It was an orgy of news: 125,000 refugees from Cuba pouring into Florida from the Cuban port of Mariel; Dade School Board Superintendent Johnny Jones convicted of using school money to buy gold-plated plumbing for his vacation home; four white Miami-Dade police officers acquitted by an all-white Tampa jury in the beating death of black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie; the ensuing Miami riots.

The tumultuous events demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of The Herald. Many praised the coverage. But two academics later accused The Herald of ''spinning'' its stories and editorials to discredit the boatlift and the refugees -- a charge denied by Herald editors.

They were dangerous days. Herald photographer Tim Chapman hired a Cessna 172 and pilot to get photos of power boats from Miami speeding across the Florida Straits toward Cuba to rescue relatives. Straying into Cuban air space, the plane was nearly blasted out of the sky when two Cuban MiGs flew within 50 feet and turned on their afterburners.

''We were caught in the vortex,'' Chapman says. "It almost turned the plane upside down.''

Herald reporter Janet Fix, 24, just two years out of journalism school at the University of Nebraska, hitched a ride from Key West on a Mariel-bound boat. She spent a week in the harbor there, hiding under a tarp from Cuban and Russian guards who threatened jail time for undocumented reporters, whispering stories back to The Herald's City Desk on the ship's radio.

''My parents were so upset when they heard what I'd done,'' she says.

Earni Young, usually a consumer writer, found herself, a black woman, covering the McDuffie riots. She witnessed a gruesome scene in which two white motorists were pulled from their cars on Northwest 62nd Street and beaten to death; she saw one of them run over repeatedly by a car. Her cover blown when her companion dropped a two-way radio, Young had to run for her life.

They were heady days. Hall says with a laugh: "The White House would call every day and ask what was going on. Then an hour later, they would put out a statement saying what we'd said. How was I supposed to put that in the paper?''

Hall remembers that The Herald used 51 reporters on three continents, in six countries and in 13 states to cover Mariel and the riots. One major problem: Of those 51 reporters, only seven or eight spoke Spanish. Two of them worked for El Herald, the newspaper's Spanish-language edition; two others were unseasoned rookies. In a county that had gone from 5.4 percent Hispanic in 1960 to 37.5 percent in 1980, it was The Herald's biggest weakness.

TEEMING KEY WEST

It showed. One day when Key West was teeming with arriving refugees, a non-Spanish-speaking Herald reporter wrote a story about the economic boom it was creating for that city. It was all about the refugees, but it didn't quote one of them.

The headlong events forced The Herald and El Herald to cooperate on coverage -- something they had not done to that extent since El Herald was founded in 1976.

''Back then,'' says Roberto Fabricio, El Herald's editor at the time, "El Herald was in what they called la pecera -- the fish tank -- enclosed by walls that separated it from The Herald's city desk.''

The cooperation helped. Guillermo Martinez had just been brought from El Herald to The Herald and became the lead reporter covering Mariel -- reporting from Miami, Key West and San Jose, Costa Rica, when refugees were sent there.

''We were spread too thin,'' Martinez says. "But we had a lot of fun.''

On one story, Ileana Oroza, then an El Herald reporter, now a journalism professor at the University of Miami, was teamed up with Mike Winerip, a senior feature writer for The Herald.

''I was upset I was being just a translator,'' she says now, "but then his story was wonderful and I was glad I could help good people. We really did team up.''

A MISS

But the newspaper's dearth of Spanish-speaking reporters made it miss at least one major story.

When Cuban officials secretly communicated to a Miami Cuban that Fidel Castro would permit Miami Cubans to come to Mariel by boat and pick up their relatives, it was the talk of Cuban radio for a day or two before The Herald picked up the story, alerted by hundreds of boats leaving local docks, Martinez says.

Another charge against The Herald came in a 1993 book, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami, by sociologists Alex Stepick of Florida International University and Alejandro Portes of Johns Hopkins University. They wrote: 'Through editorials, letters to the editor and the 'spin' it put on news stories, The Herald sought initially to prevent the new wave of Cuban immigration from taking place, and, when that failed, to discredit the fresh arrivals.''

'OVERWHELMED'

The book cites work by researcher Yohel Camayd-Freixas, who counted the number of ''negative'' and ''positive'' Herald stories. He said ''negative'' stories topped out at 90 percent at the peak of the boatlift and averaged 40 percent to 60 percent thereafter.

Says Hall: "We were overwhelmed. We were doing eight stories a day. There was no time to spin. There wasn't even time for real reflection.''

Says Fabricio: "Every paper has to reflect its community's reality. The Herald reflected its world and El Herald reflected the joy Cubans felt to leave Cuba. The common concern was about the undesirables. Many Cubans at this point started worrying that our city was being transformed.''

''With more time,'' says Hall, "we might have had less but better focused coverage. There was no time to sort through it all.

"We were snatching every fly out of the air.''

Fred Tasker and Fabiola Santiago were reporters involved in The Herald's coverage of Mariel.

I wasn't prepared for this huge story

By Edward Schumacher Matos. Posted on Sun, Apr. 03, 2005.

I went down to Pier No. 3 on a balmy evening under a shapeless sky in the rather unremarkable bay of Mariel. I was, to my knowledge, the only reporter inside the quarantined bay, and there were rumors about the ''scum,'' as Castro called it, that he was sending.

My wife, herself a Cuban exile, was desperately hiring small planes on behalf of my employer, The New York Times, in fruitless efforts to contact me by radio. She worried I would end up in a prison as her father had.

But I was discovering that Cuba was just another Third World dictatorship, cruel if you were caught in its vise, but otherwise lazy and inefficient.

I was blithely catching the shuttle to the also-quarantined Triton Hotel in Havana to file my stories by phone. A story is no good if you can't get it out, and so I risked it every day, though in furtive whispers.

But I wasn't prepared for the story I would be sending about what I found at Pier No. 3, and the reaction it would have in the U.S.

Tied to the pier was a 70-foot fishing boat called the Valley Chief crammed with 200 people, many if not most of whom were obviously common criminals or mentally disabled.

I began to interview them, taking out paper scraps to write quotes and then returning them to my pocket so as not to draw attention from passing authorities.

The first, usually uneducated response to my questions was invariably a single word: Embajada. Embassy. So as not to be arrested in Key West, the refugees had been instructed by Cuban officials to say that they were among the thousands who had overrun the Peruvian Embassy, as if they were among the political dissidents who set off the boatlift crisis. I found no one on the Valley Chief, however, with the safe-conduct pass given to those from the embassy.

I kept peppering one barely intelligible young man with questions but he kept mumbling the same: Embajada. Then I asked him how the food was in the mental institution. ''It was terrible,'' he said.

''Hey!'' barked a man next to him. My interviewee jerked his head. Embajada, he said.

With time, they all began to break down and began telling on each other. For what it was worth, I found no murderers, only thieves, vagrants and a few poor gays and unhappy souls the homophobic government was constantly framing.

Not wanting to push my luck, I left and returned early the next morning to confirm the boat was indeed leaving. There I found a double surprise. Next to the Valley Chief was a 120-foot red, white and blue catamaran called, of all things, America. It had a similar cargo of 420 refugees.

My article ran Page One in The Times, and hordes of cameramen were in Key West to greet the boats. I was unaware then of the eruption in the U.S.

Back in Mariel, my thoughts were more contemplative. Castro was perhaps having a last laugh, but that paled compared to the hope I had for the more deserving passengers that they would find the peace and generosity in their new country, my country, that this island and its delusional leader could never offer.

Edward Schumacher Matos was a reporter at The New York Times from 1979 to 1988. He was bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Madrid. Today, he is is publisher of the Rumbo newspapers in Texas.

Story's fallout was felt for decades

By Glenn Garvin, ggarvin@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Apr. 03, 2005

When Ed Schumacher spotted the line of Cuban refugees climbing aboard the boat in Mariel Harbor -- some shuffling vacantly, others caressing lurid tattoos of daggers and skulls -- he knew he was onto a good story. He didn't know he was going to rewrite history.

''I thought I certainly had found something a bit scandalous,'' recalls Schumacher, an incognito New York Times reporter aboard a fishing boat, trying to take notes inconspicuously as he covered the 1980 boatlift of refugees from Mariel to Key West.

''But what effect it would have, I had no idea. I'd like to say I was so wise, but I wasn't.''

The story Schumacher filed that afternoon ran on the Times' front page the next day under the headline Retarded People and Criminals Are Included in Cuban Exodus.

It would single-handedly transform what had been sympathetic and even admiring press coverage of the 125,000 refugees fleeing Cuba through Mariel into the media equivalent of a lynch mob, crafting a stereotype of cocaine-drenched, chainsaw-wielding psychotics that would fascinate Hollywood, freak out cops and terrify most Americans for years to come.

And the fallout would haunt not only the Mariel Cubans, but Miami itself for decades.

'The news media tended to focus on the 'undesireables' that the Castro government forced onto the boats,'' says Maria C. Garcia, author of Havana USA, a history of Florida's Cuban exile community.

''The majority of those who arrived in the U.S. were decent, hard-working folks, who simply wanted to be reunited with their family members, or have new opportunities; but their stories were buried in larger stories with very sensationalistic headlines.''

Schumacher couldn't possibly have foreseen that when he sidled up to the 70-foot fishing boat Valley Chief to chat with the refugees. Nonetheless, he quickly found the first evidence to support a rumor that had been popping up in the American press for two weeks: that among the tens of thousands of refugees boarding vessels in Mariel, Fidel Castro was systematically concealing prison inmates and mental patients.

''I just happened to be at the dock when that boat was loaded up,'' says Schumacher, who for two weeks had been posing as a Cuban in search of his family as he covertly filed stories back to the Times. ''You could see these poor people -- they were clearly insane asylum cases, a lot of them, seriously schizophrenic and retarded.

''And mixed throughout them were these tough-looking guys with tattoos. Now everybody's got a tattoo, but it was not so common then.''

The refugees made little attempt to hide where they came from. 'Some of them would say right out, 'I got out of jail to come over here,' '' remembers Schumacher. 'Some tried to hide it, to claim they had been at the Peruvian embassy [where 10,000 Cubans had demanded asylum the month before, the incident that triggered the boatlift]. But then the guy beside him would say, 'Bull----, he came from the same prison I did.' ''

Schumacher's story the next day was restrained. He reported that several hundred mental patients and prison inmates had been loaded aboard two vessels bound for Key West and, adding details gathered by a Times reporter in Havana, called it part of 'a major effort, discussed openly by Cuban officials, to rid the country of criminals, mentally retarded people, delinquents and others the government calls 'scum' by sending them to the United States.''

But he made no attempt to characterize the entire boatlift as a floating jailbreak. Many of the prison inmates aboard the Valley Chief wouldn't be considered criminals in most countries, Schumacher wrote. One man he interviewed had been jailed for being jobless, another for a joyride in a government jeep. Other crimes ''were more politically than criminally motivated,'' the story added.

'REJECTED'

MEDIA'S PORTRAIT OF REFUGEES CHANGED

Those niceties, however, would quickly be lost, not only on the rest of the U.S. press corps but on American officials back home.

''The Mariel refugees got the shorter end of the deal in every sense,'' declares Felix Masud-Piloto, a DePaul University historian and author of the forthcoming book Contesting Asylum: Cuba, Peru, the U.S. and the Mariel Boatlift of 1990. ''They were rejected by everybody -- the attorney general, the Justice Department, the media, Miami itself.''

Before Schumacher's story on May 11, American press coverage of the boatlift -- although not ignoring the logistical headaches and political snarls -- had painted a sympathetic picture of the refugee themselves. Story after story mentioned refugees braving Castro-backed mobs to escape, leaping from boats to kiss the docks at Key West or joyously celebrating public Masses for the first time once safely ashore in Florida.

Of course, Cuba's government-controlled press had from the start referred to the refugees as escoria and gusanos (scum and worms) and proclaimed they were responsible for more than half of the island's crime. And a handful of U.S. officials -- notably Attorney General William H. Webster and U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holzman of New York -- had voiced suspicions that Castro was slipping criminals and crazy people into the wave of refugees.

But that claim was viewed skeptically by many in the press. Just a week before Schumacher's story appeared, the Washington Post reporter covering the boatlift, Ward Sinclair, had written a front-page commentary that dismissed the warnings as so much ''muttering.''

''They are human beings who worry about feeding their children, who don't want Big Brother thinking for them, who don't want neighbors spying on them, who want to eat, sleep work and breathe as reasonably free people,'' Sinclair wrote of the refugees.

But Schumacher's story -- which ran the same morning that a record 4,588 refugees arrived at Key West in a single day -- changed everything. In a matter of days, freedom-loving refugees had turned into predatory and perverted Marielitos in the media's eyes.

On May 16, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that Castro had ''mocked the authority of the White House'' by unloading ''his criminals and mental cripples'' on the United States. On the same day, The Times' editorial page, which only 12 days earlier had chided the Carter administration to ''take the refugees, and stop being so grudging about it,'' reversed itself and called for tight enforcement of immigration law. Castro ''mocks the generosity of the United States by dumping criminals, even leprosy patients, into the boats,'' a Times editorial blustered.

Assessing the criminality of the day's arrivals became as routine as reporting the weather. ''Fewer prisoners, prostitutes and pimps are showing up among the Cuban refugees landing in South Florida,'' The Post wrote.

Eventually even the slightest negative detail about the Marielitos was enough to warrant a separate story. The Washington Post reported on Aug. 14 that 10 refugees had been admitted to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital. The only other admission to St. Elizabeth's that the Post considered newsworthy enough to publish about in 1980: country singer Tammy Wynette.

LINKED TO CRIME

TIMES STORY QUOTES DAMNING STATISTICS

A Dec. 18, 1980, Times story quoted a litany of damning Miami crime statistics -- homicide up 103 percent, robbery up 124 percent, assault up 109 percent -- without noting they were artificially inflated by the wave of murder and looting that accompanied the McDuffie riots, which broke out in May 1980 after four white Miami cops were acquitted by an all-white Tampa jury in the beating death of black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie.

In fact, Dade County crime began increasing steadily and sharply in 1970 -- in large part due to the drug trade mayhem and so-called cocaine cowboys of the Colombia cartels. This was long before the Mariel refugees arrived.

The 515 homicides in Dade County made 1980 the most murderous year in history (as 1979 had been before that). Scholars still puzzle over the exact causes of the 62 percent year-over-year increase. Criminologist William Wilbanks, who studied the police report of every murder in the county in 1980, concluded that Mariel refugees were responsible for only a quarter of the increase.

''Crime was going up, yes, but it had little to do with Marielitos and a lot to do with drugs and other things,'' says Benigno Aguirre, a sociologist at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center.

The press rarely provided context in reporting the criminality of the Mariel refugees. Many of the reported ''criminals'' were fakers. One way to get permission to leave Cuba during the boatlift was to sign what the Castro regime described as a carta de escoria (literally, scum-letter) confessing to a criminal record or sexual deviance. Thousands of Cubans signed them routinely without ever dreaming they would be taken literally by immigration officials in the United States.

And if a Mariel refugee had really been in prison, it was usually not for anything that would be considered a crime in most countries. Their rap sheets included jail time for slaughtering a cow without government permission, refusing to join the Communist Party, not having a job, homosexuality and violation of the Castro regime's favorite catch-all -- the ley de peligrosidad, the law of dangerousness.

''The law of dangerousness said, essentially, that you could be picked up on a street corner for the way you looked,'' explains historian Masud-Piloto. ''If you had long hair and looked like a hippie. Or gay -- there was a lot of repression of gays during that period. Or listening to the Beatles -- the Beatles were banned in Cuba, they were considered subversive musicians.''

When the U.S. screening panels that reviewed the records of the refugees before granting them immigration papers threw out all the cartas de escoria and the bogus political counts, they wound up with 1,306 refugees who had committed crimes serious enough to be confined in minimum-security prisons, and 350 serious felons who were sent to maximum-security prisons in the United States.

That represents about 1.4 percent of the 120,000 refugees the panels screened, compared with the 6 percent of Americans who had committed a felony in 1980, according to FBI crime statistics.

Nonetheless, distorted crime statistics quickly turned into a cottage industry for the news media. By late May, People magazine was quoting a U.S. official who claimed more than 100,000 of the Mariel refugees were criminals.

Predictably, the barrage of negative stories soon turned Americans firmly against the Marielitos. An ABC News poll showed three-quarters of the public thought the Carter administration should never have admitted the refugees, and 57 percent believed they should be kicked back out.

Eventually, the Mariel stereotype extended to Cuban immigrants in general in the public's eye. A 1982 Gallup poll showed Americans ranked the contributions of Cubans last among 15 national and ethnic groups of immigrants.

Not surprisingly, cities from San Diego to Puerto Rico began refusing to accept the Mariel refugees. One state legislator said Marielitos weren't fit to walk the streets of Texas because they ''urinate in public and are prone to masturbation.'' In little Plains, Ga., President Carter's own mother, the folkloric Miz Lillian, regaled reporters: ''I'll tell you the truth, I hope they don't come to Plains.'' Meanwhile, Sen. Donald Stewart of Alabama protested that the refugees were too dangerous even for the maximum-security prison in Talladega.

ERRORS' EFFECT

NATIONAL PUBLICATIONS CONTINUED STEREOTYPE

Journalism is often called the first draft of history, and errors are expected. But in this case, they lasted well into the second, third and fourth drafts, too:

o Time magazine's notorious 1981 cover story titled Paradise Lost? called South Florida ''a region in trouble . . . An epidemic of violent crime, a plague of illicit drugs and a tidal wave of refugees have slammed into South Florida with the destructive power of a hurricane.'' The magazine left little doubt that the first two problems were triggered by the third: ''Marielitos are believed to be responsible for half of all violent crime in Miami.''

o U.S. News & World Report in a 1984 story on Castro's 'Crime Bomb' Inside U.S. called the Mariel refugees ''one of the most despised immigrations in this nation's history . . . Fidel Castro himself called them escoria, scum, and many American who greeted them with open arms now agree with him.'' The story claimed claimed that 10,000 Mariel refugees had been arrested in New York and Miami alone.

o The New York Times Magazine, in a 1987 cover story headlined Can Miami Save Itself? A City Beset by Drugs and Violence, compared Mariel to one of the great catastrophes of all time: ''Miamians speak of 1980 as San Franciscans who survived the great earthquake and fire must have spoken of 1906.''

o In 1987, The New Yorker not only credited Mariel refugees with the invention of the cocaine trade (even though Colombian cocaine cowboys were shooting it out at Dadeland a full year before the boatlift) but accused them of turning Miami into a slaughterhouse: ''The criminals whom Castro chucked out along with the refugees were willing to do anything -- run drugs, steal cars, burn down a house, murder -- and to do it for rock-bottom wages. Everything, including life itself, became too cheap.''

POPULAR CULTURE

'SCARFACE' AN ENDURING MARIEL ARTIFACT

The news stories ultimately echoed their way into popular culture with the TV series Miami Vice (whose creator Anthony Yerkovich called Miami ''a city in which the American Dream had been distilled into something perverse'') and the most enduring Mariel artifact of all, the film Scarface, in which Marielito narcotraffickers carved one another up with power tools.

The powerful Scarface imagery in turn was soon cited in scholarly criminology journals as if it were fact, completing the cycle of fiction into fact. Historian Mark Dow, the author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons, says Scarface has been so destructive that director Brian DePalma, producer Martin Bregman and star Al Pacino should be punished.

''You know how criminals are prohibited in some states from profiting through books or movies about their crimes?'' says Dow. ''Well, Pacino, DePalma and Bregman should donate the Scarface profits to finance housing and job counseling/training for all those they helped keep behind bars.''

Herald researchers Elisabeth Donovan and Monika Leal contributed to this article.

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