The Mariel Arrivals: Who Those People Actually Were

The coverage was relentless and focused. In April and May of nineteen eighty, American television and newspapers devoted enormous attention to the Mariel Boatlift arrivals who had been released from Cuban prisons and psychiatric hospitals, people Fidel Castro had deliberately included in the departure as a way of embarrassing the Carter administration and shifting whatever problem they represented from Cuba to the United States. The coverage was not wrong that these people existed. It was wrong about what proportion of the arrivals they represented.

Subsequent immigration studies, drawing on Cuban government records and federal processing data, estimated that only a small fraction, generally described as a low single digit percentage, were released prisoners or psychiatric patients, while the large majority were workers, professionals, dissidents, and families who had been waiting for an exit that had never before been legal. They were not criminals. They were people who wanted to leave.

They arrived in South Florida with essentially nothing, in a city that had not been prepared to receive them and that was already stretched by the simultaneous pressures of the McDuffie verdict and its aftermath in Liberty City. They were processed in tent cities at the Orange Bowl and the Tamiami Park. Many waited for weeks in conditions that were inadequate by any reasonable measure. Then they went out and built lives.

The Mariel arrivals transformed Miami's economy, its cultural life, and its demographics in ways that took decades to become fully visible. They brought skills, languages, professional credentials, and a particular kind of ambition that comes from having given up everything to arrive somewhere. The "Marielito" label, applied as a slur, described people who, over the following twenty years, became a substantial part of what Miami is. History tends to be kinder to them than the nineteen eighty headlines were.