Specter of Mariel Boat Lift Is Raised--14 Years Later

It has been 14 years since 125,000 Cuban refugees fled to U.S. shores after President Fidel Castro permitted them to leave the port of Mariel in small boats.

They came in droves, overwhelming resettlement agencies and refugee camps. Castro warned then, as he does now, that Washington’s policy of accepting Cuban immigrants while granting few visas encourages illegal efforts to leave his country.

An estimated 8,000 criminals and hundreds of mentally ill refugees were among the 125,000 refugees who flooded into Florida and other states. About 1,100 of the refugees still are held in federal prisons without the right to legal immigrant status.

But most of the refugees are now U.S. citizens, immigration experts said. Many settled in the Miami area.

“When the criminal activity surfaced, Marielito (a term for those who came to the United States then) became like a bad word,” said Juan Clark, a Miami sociologist. “Once the rotten apples were weeded out, the whole thing changed and today you don’t hear that word much any more.”

Cuban Americans in Southern Florida used their own boats to help transport refugees in 1980.

While President Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he called out National Guardsmen to deal with rioting by hundreds of Cuban refugees who were being held at Ft. Chafee, Ark.

Other Cuban criminals were held in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, where they rioted and set fires in 1984, causing $1 million in damage. Six months after Castro agreed early in 1985 to accept repatriation of these immigrants, he suspended the deal in retaliation for the establishment of Radio Marti, a U.S. radio station broadcasting anti-Castro messages into Havana.

Other rioting by Cuban prisoners followed. In 1987, Cubans held in a New York detention center rioted and tried to escape. They were sent to the Atlanta prison. Later that year, when the State Department began deporting some of the refugees, Cuban inmates in an Oakdale, La., jail took 28 hostages and set fires. The next day, refugees in the Atlanta prison took 94 hostages and kept authorities at bay for two weeks before surrendering.

In 1991, Cuban inmates rioted again at a federal penitentiary in Talladega, Ala.