Mariel, the word alone evokes all sorts of emotions.
Forty years later, in a world gripped by a pandemic of unprecedented dimensions in modern times, the Mariel boatlift of 1980 — and all the social chaos unleashed on Miami before and after the massive exodus that year — can teach us something valuable about the worth of a resilient community.
Tumultuous was the word often used to describe the arrival of 125,000 people jam-packed into a daily stream of fishing boats, yachts, shrimpers, and tugboats during a period of five months.
Historic, we call the Mariel boatlift today, a single event directed by outside forces that changed Greater Miami forever, fostered by the seeds of discontent, political and economic strife, and population shifts.
We didn’t know it then, but a new Miami was emerging.
And it all started with a man, Héctor Sanyustiz, driving a bus through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana on April 1, 1980.
Port of Mariel to Miami
Word spread fast that, in response to the Peruvian government’s refusal to turn in the gate-crashers, an angry Fidel Castro had removed security.
Inés Martínez, an office assistant, and her husband, Emiliano, who drove a service car for the embassies, had been keeping their eye on a way out of Cuba for years. When they heard a Voice of America report confirming what was going on, they rushed to an embassy already being flooded with people seeking asylum.
They found an alley corner where they at least could rest against a wall — and they spent 12 days outside, in tight quarters with 10,000 people.
“So many had to sleep standing up,” Inés, now 82, recalls from her home in North Miami Beach.
Once it was agreed that the asylum seekers could leave, they were taken by bus to get passports. Inés was so dirty and disheveled from the embassy standoff, with no showers and very little to eat, that she won’t show her passport photo.
But none of that would be the worst of their ordeal.
When they were put back on a bus to be taken home to await passage, pro-government mobs were waiting for them, holding rebar rods hidden inside folded Granma newspapers to attack them. They only escaped the beating because Emiliano knew the bus driver, who opened the door and insisted they get off before the stop.
Others were pelted with eggs, rocks, and beaten with bats.
All were labeled escoria, scum, first by Castro, then the parroting masses.
Three days later, a police car came to get them and took them to a camp named El Mosquito, where Inés was forced to disrobe and bend over for a miliciana to inspect her private parts for hidden objects.
They took her ring, watch, and the little money she had brought.
“They left us only with the clothes we had on,” Inés said. It was a stripping of who you are and of your dignity that was the modus operandi too for the earlier Freedom Flights.
They divided the men and women in two camps, but a scared Inés, wisely so, didn’t want to be separated from her husband. She would risk it in the men’s camp.
All night long, they were calling people in pairs.
Finally, on the morning of April 24, they were called to board the boat Four Brothers, never meant to carry 60 people, never mind the 80 that were packed in.
The first boat arrived in Key West on April 21.
“My husband who sat on the edge could touch the water,” Inés remembers.
By evening they had docked in Key West.
The first person who greeted her was a man carrying a basket of apples.
“They were so big! I had never seen such beautiful apples in my life!”
At midnight, Emiliano planted a big kiss on her cheek.
“Celebrating your arrival?” a woman asked, Inés recalls.
“No, I am kissing because I told her we would be here on her birthday, and here we are,” Emiliano answered.
Inés had just turned 43.
The next morning they were driven to Tamiami Park in Miami for processing, given new clothes and sanitary kits, and from there, they were housed at the Everglades Hotel in downtown Miami until relatives could come pick them up.
Complete strangers who found out they were refugees would come up to them and put $10, $20 bills in their pockets.
Their first American restaurant meal: Kentucky Fried Chicken.
When her sister, who had been working, came to pick her up, she took them home, where other family members and neighbors were preparing a double birthday and welcome to the USA party.
Inés went to work right away cleaning houses, and Emiliano landed in a shoe factory.
Another odyssey was beginning: Starting anew in a city teeming with “cocaine cowboys” wars and racial tension over disparities and the killing of a black motorcyclist by white Miami-Dade police officers and the ensuing cover-up. Riots broke out in Liberty City, leaving 18 dead and 350 injured.
Resettlement efforts couldn’t keep up with arrivals — and tent cities rose against the city’s nascent city skyline. In Hialeah, where the vacancy rate as the exodus wore on was zero, the city’s new financial director was sleeping in City Hall.
Children of Mariel
If the leaving and the new beginning were hard for the adults, imagine the children of Mariel.
“For many years, you put it away,” said Maydel Santana, who at 11 came on the boatlift with her parents and 2 1/2-year-old brother after a harrowing experience on a shrimper that sailed in stormy waters with a 24-year-old captain.
“You try to forget.”
The family had been waiting for years to leave. They had visas and passports — but the Cuban government wasn’t letting anyone out.
They had it especially rough coming in the heat of summer, waiting for days in packed holding facilities with no adequate sanitation, getting sick from the smell and the grime. Then having to board, not the boat her uncle had sent for them, but a boat loaded with strangers, some of them criminals Castro was forcing boat captains to take on.
As the family was leaving, their guardians in military uniforms perpetrated another infamy, taking away their passports and visas.
“So we arrived essentially undocumented,” Santana said.
Recently, on the first Sunday in March, before the coronavirus overtook our daily lives, the conversation around the lunch table with Santana’s parents and her daughter Karina, 19, turned to the boatlift and the 40th anniversary.
“Every time we talk about it, I get goose bumps,” said Santana, 51, associate vice president of communications and media relations at Florida International University. “It’s so outside of what our lives are today. It’s hard to believe, this is us, this was us.”
“You look at it now as an adult and say, ‘You put your kids on a boat, that’s crazy!’ But it changed the course of our family’s lives forever. They had a vision. They took a big chance. I’m so thankful to them. I’m thankful that the United States let us in. I’m thankful to all the people who made it happen.”
Indeed, although he resisted at first, President Jimmy Carter put his humanitarian principles ahead of the political.
“We will continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from Communist domination and from economic deprivation brought about primarily by Fidel Castro and his government,” Carter said May 5, 1980.
Finding tomorrow
Forty years later, the Mariel chaos is a stain on Castro, not on the fleeing people he sought to denigrate.
“Mariel demonstrated that Fidel Castro’s carefully controlled utopia had deep fissures,” journalist Mirta Ojito wrote in her 2005 memoir of the exodus, “Finding Mañana,” titled after the tugboat on which she sailed to Key West, at 16, with her family.
Finding tomorrow, it’s pure poetry.
“For the Cuban government, it [Mariel] meant the end of a virtual monopoly on its people and their ideas,” Ojito wrote. “If a bus driver was able to poke a hole through the system, the end of Fidel Castro was not only desirable but also attainable.”
Castro died of old age and cancer in 2016, but in the aftermath of Mariel, what has endured is the rise of an openly defiant human rights movement birthed by the events of 1980, Ojito concluded.
“The Cuban government is now known internationally not as a beacon of progressive thoughts and revolutionary ideals but as a repressive regime routinely abandoned by its brightest sons and daughters,” she wrote.
As for Miami, the Mariel refugees were ultimately a gain.
They re-energized and contributed to almost every sector of the community, from the arts to the restaurant scene to the growth of small business enterprises. All those people coming with nothing, some with no one here to support them, among them the daredevil bus driver who set in motion the chain of events that would launch an exodus.
Sanyustiz, 70, still lives in Miami.
They — and we as a community — made the madness work.
Miraculous, really, when you consider the tumult, the social upheaval, the hatred coming from those who didn’t want the fleeing masses out of Cuba and took it out on Cuban Americans. There was a Miami-generated exodus, too; it was dubbed White Flight.
Out of those dark days emerged a modern South Florida.
The disparities of a Liberty City burning were finally taken seriously and resources never seen before poured into the black neighborhoods, where community centers and parks rose. Police brutality continued to exist, and Overtown, too, would rebel. But there were instruments to address this and other racial and ethnic issues through institutions like the Community Relations Board.
And although his killers were acquitted by a jury, Arthur McDuffie’s name has never been forgotten.
The cocaine cowboys either killed each other — or were sent to serve long prison sentences.
Out of decaying Art Deco buildings, where some of the refugees had initially found cheap housing, the South Beach renaissance led by unrelenting preservationists followed — and the rest is Miami real estate history.
The Mariel refugees did arrive in a Cuban community 20 years in the making that offered them some safety net, connections, and a cultural comfort zone.
There were periods of adjustment to the new arrivals, moments when some of the exile generational gap got ugly, and the label “Marielitos” for a while carried a negative connotation. But that’s all gone now.
In fact, the nickname is a source of pride.
“They long ago established themselves and became upstanding members of society,” said Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, a professor at the University of Central Florida and author of the story collection “Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles.” There is no stigma anymore.”
There’s only gratitude.
The Martínezes turned their penniless beginnings into exile gold. Inés started doing nails, then pedicures, and then enrolled in beauty school “with my savings,” she points out, “the government didn’t pay for it.”
They have a beautiful house, paid for cars, children they were eventually able to bring from Cuba after a 10-year separation, and grandchildren now living in Oklahoma.
At 82, she was still working at “Hair For You” until the coronavirus forced a shutdown of the salon.
“Not in a single moment have I regretted anything,” said Emiliano, echoing the feelings of thousands. “This is the most marvelous country in the world.”
And now, Mariel is the title of a Miami chapter on resilience apt for the times.
Mariel records database
Search the Miami Herald/el Nuevo Herald database of records from the Mariel boatlift here: http://pubsys.miamiherald.com/cgi-bin/mariel/index