Mariel Boatlift: A Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand in Six Months

On April twentieth, nineteen eighty, Fidel Castro announced that anyone who wanted to leave Cuba could do so through the port of Mariel, a small harbor west of Havana. He had been forced into the announcement by a crisis at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, where approximately ten thousand Cubans had stormed the grounds seeking asylum after Castro removed the guards. What happened next was the largest maritime refugee movement in Western Hemisphere history to that point.

Cuban Americans with boats in Miami and the Keys began making the ninety-mile crossing immediately. What followed was an improvised fleet that bore no resemblance to any organized evacuation: shrimpers and pleasure boats, cabin cruisers and sailboats, vessels commandeered or volunteered, running the crossing as many times as they could in the weeks that followed. Coast Guard ships attempted coordination and largely failed. Between April and October, approximately one hundred twenty-five thousand Cubans arrived in South Florida.

The Carter administration had no plan for an arrival of this scale and improvised one badly. The media coverage of the boatlift focused heavily on the subset of arrivals that Castro had deliberately included in the departure: people released from Cuban prisons and psychiatric facilities, sent along with the general population as a deliberate irritant to the United States. The proportion of this subset in the total population was small, somewhere around two percent by subsequent immigration studies. The other ninety-eight percent were workers, families, and dissidents who had been waiting years for an exit that had never been legal before. They arrived with nothing in a city that was not prepared to receive them.

The "Marielito" label, applied pejoratively by American media and politicians who focused on the criminal subset, attached to the entire population of arrivals and outlasted the reality by decades. What the label described was a community that, over the twenty years that followed, built businesses, raised children, paid taxes, and remade Miami more thoroughly than any previous immigrant wave. The stereotype proved more durable than the people who carried it.