By Laurie Goering. Tribune Staff Writer. May 15, 2000
MIAMI -- When 9-year-old Vivian Darias first slogged onto the piers of Key West with her family, part of the biggest exodus from Cuba in the island's history, her father urged her not to tell her new friends she had come on the boatlift now known as Mariel.
"At the beginning, when I started school, my dad told us that if people asked, we should tell the truth but if they didn't, not to say anything," remembers Darias, now 29 and a Miami-Dade County public school teacher. "Even from the kids you'd face discrimination, and the teachers
didn't want to teach the children of Mariel because their parents were supposed to be criminals."
Twenty years ago, in a five-month flotilla that reached its peak in May, 125,266 Cubans fled the dictatorship and overnight altered the face of Miami and the image of Cuban-Americans.
The newcomers also reshaped U.S. policy toward Cuba, now aimed in part at preventing another Mariel. Even the celebrated case of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez is set against the legal and political backdrop of the 1980 boatlift. A three-judge federal appeals panel in Atlanta heard arguments last
week on his Miami relatives' motion seeking asylum for the boy but have not issued a ruling.
But long before the nation ever heard of Elian, the Mariel experience led U.S. officials to tighten regulations for Cubans seeking to legally enter the U.S. This eventually encouraged thousands to flee the island on rafts and small boats such as the ill-fated craft that brought the boy to
Florida waters where his mother and most other passengers drowned. The U.S. government's subsequent determination to reunite Elian with his father and send him back to Cuba reportedly was fueled at least in part by concerns in Washington that an annoyed Fidel Castro could release another mass exodus
of refugees.
Even two decades after Mariel, conflicting images of the boatlift linger. The vast majority of Mariel arrivals were either Cubans disenchanted with communism or political prisoners seizing their first chance to escape the island after "freedom flights" for political dissidents ended in
1973. A smaller but more notorious group of the newcomers included homosexuals, branded undesirables in Cuba; mentally ill inmates released from institutions; and criminals, emptied from the island's prisons by Castro's regime and sent north.
Those latter 5,000 or so thugs quickly set off an ugly crime spree in Miami that gave the city--and all Mariel arrivals--a repugnant image immortalized by actor Al Pacino in his role of Tony Montana, a new arrival who becomes a Miami drug lord, in the movie "Scarface."
But within a few years the criminals largely died or were returned to prison. The remainder of the Marielitos have blended so well and so successfully into Miami's fabric that the stigma they long bore has largely vanished. In its place a deep pride has slowly taken root.
"I tell people proudly now that I came with Mariel," said Darias,who speaks perfectly unaccented English. "They're always surprised."
The boatlift began almost by accident in April 1980, after Cubans seeking political asylum broke into the Peruvian Embassy in Havana. A furious Castro soon threw open the doors of the embassy, and later, on April 20, the port of Mariel near Havana, inviting those who disagreed with his
revolution to leave.
Castro expected perhaps a few hundred to go. Instead, more than 125,000 Cubans raced toward the port, pooling their savings to rent boats already motoring south from Miami at news of the opening.
On April 21, the first 55 Cubans reached Key West. On April 22 another 50 arrived. By April 23, more than 2,000 Cubans were pouring into South Florida in one of the largest short-term refugee influxes in U.S. history.
"People were coming and coming and coming," said Siro del Castillo, a former Cuban political prisoner quickly tapped to organize settlement of the new refugees.
The first arrivals jammed a community center in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood. When that overflowed, warehouses west of the city were opened and organizers desperately sought donations of food and clothing.
By early May, President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency in South Florida and sent in the Federal Emergency Management Agency to organize relief services for tens of thousands of immigrants. A blimp hangar at Opa-locka Airport was turned into a processing center and the city's Orange
Bowl stadium opened as a campsite for arriving refugees.
For Miami's huge Cuban-American community, Mariel marked a turning point. Up to that time, Cubans fleeing Castro's 1959 revolution had been a largely white and homogeneous first wave of exiles, many of them intent on one day returning home.
"First-generation Cubans had built up a reputation," said Mercedes Sandoval, one of those early immigrants and now a professor of anthropology and social science at Miami-Dade Community College. "Mariel shattered all of that."
The new immigrants were poorer, younger and darker-skinned than their predecessors, and had lived for two decades under Castro's communist regime, which offered little reward for hard work.
When they moved into the at-first welcoming arms of the old-line Cuban exiles, both sides were in for a shock.
Older Cuban-Americans, who opened their homes to members of their families and other refugees, were horrified to find that some of the new arrivals were criminals, and others had no idea of the value of money--or much interest in working for it.
"Mariel [refugees] were people who grew up under a totalitarian system where stealing was a necessity and a way of life," del Castillo said. "Families broke down after taking Marielitos," with the Miami members of long-close extended families cutting ties with their arriving
Mariel relatives.
Sandoval, who ran a psychological counseling service for Mariel refugees, quickly found that it was instead their hosts who needed help.
"We expected the people of Mariel to come as heroes. What a surprise!" she said. "Mariel was an eye-opener."
The changes were equally difficult for the newcomers. Darias' family, including two uncles who had been political prisoners, fled their lifelong homes with little more than hastily packed bags of clothes. They had no chance to say goodbye to a cancer-ridden grandfather, whom they never saw
again.
"We left from the port in the middle of the night and [Castro demonstrators] were throwing rocks at [us]," Darias remembers.
On the way across the Florida Straits at the height of hurricane season they sailed through an enormous storm that left them all seasick and washed overboard passengers on a nearby boat. "I remember as if it were yesterday--people screaming, people drowning right next to us and we couldn't
get them," she said.
After arriving in Key West, the family endured a month in a riot-prone refugee processing camp in Ft. Chaffee Army Reserve Base in Arkansas. Eventually, however, they were located by U.S. family members and moved to Miami.
By Sept. 26, when Castro declared the port of Mariel closed, one in four Miami Cubans was a new boatlift arrival.
Mariel had, and continues to have, enormous political consequences. Violent protests by Cuban inmates at Ft. Chaffee contributed to then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton losing his 1980 bid for re-election.
For Castro, the threat of unleashing another Mariel flotilla remains a key pressure point on the U.S. government, which has in part based Cuba policy decisions around avoiding another such rush to the sea.
While given far fewer loans and benefits than their Cuban exile predecessors in the United States--Mariel immigrants weren't granted U.S. resident status until 1985--many of the refugees have gone on to become stars in the Miami Cuban-American community.
Isidoro Vilarino, 52, worked as an orange packer after arriving with 20 members of his family.
"I worked at whatever was necessary, and being from Mariel made it harder," he said. "Every time you'd say you just came with Mariel they looked at you, trying to figure out if you were a good person."
He and his family run a chain of 16 La Casita family restaurants in South Florida. "I feel very accomplished," he said. "It took a lot of work but it has gone well. I'm proud of being part of Mariel." |