Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Mariel Boatlift

The Mariel Boatlift occurred during the spring and summer of 1980, when Cuban dictator Fidel Castro opened his island nation's ports and allowed any dissidents to leave Cuba. Over a period of four months, approximately 125,000 Cubans entered the United States through Key West, Florida, as political refugees fleeing the Castro regime. They were known as “marielitos” because they set sail from the Port of Mariel in northwestern Cuba.

Although the large-scale influx of Cubans to the United States began 20 years earlier, the Mariel Boatlift marked a turning point in Cuban American history, as this event shifted public sympathy for U.S. refugee policy toward Cuba and evoked a pernicious anti-Cuban backlash. This backlash was particularly strong in southern Florida, the destination of most marielitos. Nearly two-thirds of Cubans who entered the United States during the Mariel Boatlift settled in Miami.

Background

On March 28, 1980, a bus carrying six Cubans crashed the gate of the Peruvian embassy in Havana, and the passengers requested political asylum, triggering a wave of several thousand other Cubans seeking asylum from the Peruvian and Venezuelan embassies. Despite Castro's insistence that the embassy turn over the asylum seekers to Cuban authorities, the Peruvians refused to comply. The incident quickly became an international embarrassment for the Castro regime, and Castro retaliated by instructing all Cubans who were unhappy with his regime to go to the Peruvian embassy.

Castro also announced that he would open the port of Mariel in northern Cuba so all were free to leave the island, under the caveat that they could never return to Cuba. Castro notoriously declared of the marielitos in May 1980, “Those who have no revolutionary genes, those who have no revolutionary blood … we do not want them; we do not need them!”

Within days of Castro's proclamation, thousands of Cuban refugees already living in the United States sailed to Mariel to bring their relatives back with them, but Castro used the boatlift as an opportunity to expel prisoners, mental patients, homosexuals, and other “undesirables” from his island. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service reported that Castro expelled approximately 23,000 “non-felonious criminals and political prisoners,” along with an estimated 2,000 violent criminals, during the boatlift. The boats returning to the United States thus carried far more people, most of them strangers to one another, than their captains originally intended. Many of these vessels were either makeshift floating devices or overcrowded boats filled well beyond capacity; some capsized at sea, resulting in drownings or in rescues by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Aftermath and Legacy

More than any other event, the Mariel Boatlift turned public opinion of the Cuban American community decidedly negative. Sensationalized television news footage of rickety boats, overflowing with dark-complexioned, Spanish-speaking passengers, traversing the harsh waters of the Florida straits en route to Miami, alarmed many Americans and evoked nativist sentiments that the country was “under siege.” Even Miami's leading newspaper, the Miami Herald, took a decidedly negative tone in its coverage of the Mariel Boatlift.

Others pointed out the U.S. government's contradictory treatment regarding Cuban and Haitian exiles. Although both Caribbean nations suffered tyranny at the hands of brutal dictators, the United States granted political asylum to Cubans essentially on demand while routinely denying refugee status to Haitians, who were customarily returned to Haiti or placed in detention centers if the Coast Guard apprehended them. This duality in treatment took on an apparent dimension of favoritism and racism, and it infuriated immigrants’ rights advocates and African Americans alike.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution