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1669-27 Social, Society,& Local News 1946-1993 SUN DEC 11 1983 ED: FINAL SECTION: FRONT PAGE: 18M LENGTH: 75 .50" LONG ILLUST: color photo: Mariel harbor, Boat lift; photo: Tent City SOURCE: GUILLERMO MARTINEZ AND GUY GUGLIOTTA Herald Staff Writers DATELINE: MEMO: THE CUBANS; THE BOATLIFT THE TRAUMA OF SEPARATION AND REUNION For two decades, Cubans made up fairy tales about each other. Cuban exiles in Miami told themselves that the island they remembered still existed. Fidel Castro had enslaved the people, but if he were eliminated, Cuba would emerge from the shadows, once again the isle of fond memory. Cuba' s Cubans told the story of gusanera -- "wormdom"-- how the revolution spewed its useless human effluent into a South Florida ghetto where it groveled beneath imperialism' s racist yoke and wasted its young in quixotic plots to recover the past. Then in 1979, the two parties to the bitter divorce were brought together for the first time in 20 years, to find out how the other half lived. Reunion proved as traumatic as the original separation. First as envoys, and later as tourists, exiles en masse visited Cuba for the first time since 1961 . A year later 125, 000 refugees left Cuba for the United States, the overwhelming majority of them from a small Cuban port city called Mariel. Statistics have measured some of the effects, but statistics, on both sides, cannot measure the loss of innocence. This was not the stuff of fairy tales . Cuba, blue-collar, Marxist-Leninist, Third World, was not the Cuba of yore, nor would it ever be. The exiles, upwardly mobile, ultra-capitalist, video-game modern, were not the downtrodden losers portrayed in two decades of propaganda. In Cuba, where coping with adversity had become a way of life, the reunion introduced a vision of prosperity either unknown or at best long- forgotten. And in Miami, exiles who had lived for years with hazy, but warmly familiar memories suddenly confronted relatives who were strangers from a strange land. ' EXILES HURT US ' Miami ' s new arrivals felt the collision most deeply: "The exile Cubans have hurt us, not helped us, " said Reinaldo Jardin, who traded a spot on Cuba ' s national soccer team for unemployment on Miami Beach. "I don' t know what it is with these people in this country. Your own people all become sons of bitches. " But the exiles felt the collision, too: "Cuba remained a fantasy, but going there has changed people, " said Florida International University psychologist Fernando Gonzales Reigosa. "Prior to the opening of travel and Mariel, many Cubans had dreams of going back to Cuba; I haven't heard many of these dreams since. " Some of the Mariel arrivals were so upset at their new lives, they went back home. "They gave me the idea that things were better in the United States than in Cuba, " said Manuel Francisco Otero, who came to Miami, worked for a few months, then bought a boat and went home. "Everyone was talking about the U.S . Cubans and how they had progressed so much, and they were telling everyone to leave, to escape, to go to the United States. " "It was a fever, and I caught the fever. Everyone said that you could find the streets of Miami paved in gold, that you could get a car within a week of living in the United States. That was all false. " But who could say, in the opening months of 1977 , when it all began? Then it was all a closed book. Cuba and the United States probably knew less about each other than ever before, and relations stood at a point of sullen equilibrium. Jimmy Carter, then 53, a bright, born-again Christian, had just been inaugurated as 39th U.S. president and the sixth to confront Fidel Castro and his revolution. Castro, 50, an equally bright, Jesuit-trained atheist, saw an opportunity for a fresh start. "What was new was that an administration appeared in Washington -- the first in history -- that indicated a willingness to work toward normalization, " Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Ricardo Alarcon said. IN THE BACK DOOR The method would be "reciprocal gestures" by both countries, but the Cubans had something besides diplomatic orthodoxy in mind, as well. They came through the back door as well, for the first time seeking leverage with the United States by working through the exile community. "We understood that the migrants were heterogeneous. . . and we were missing a lot of what was happening, " said Cuban diplomat Jesus Arboleya, then a United Nations official. "So we decided to promote the conversation. I say conversation and not negotiation, because we couldn' t negotiate anything. We listened. " Many of the chosen contacts remember their first encounters as casual affairs: idle chat over highballs at a U.N. reception; a seemingly chance meeting between strangers in a foreign capital. For vacationing Miami banker Bernardo Benes it was a quiet Sunday lunch at a Panama City restaurant with a long-time friend and his two acquaintances from Cuba. The conversation was about nothing at all. "We talked a lot about people I used to know. They informed me about how things were in Cuba, about what they were doing, " Benes said. "In all of this I couldn 't figure out their motive in selecting me for this exchange of views . " To Benes fell the leading role in an interchange that would last a year. An emotional, sometimes boastful man, he would not shrink from view when militant exiles in Miami accused him of consorting with communism. But he wore a bulletproof vest and changed his telephone number. And one afternoon in Havana, visiting the graves of his dead relatives at a Jewish cemetery, he burst into tears, "really alone, " he wrote later, "with no one to share the moment. " Less than a month after Benes ' s Panama lunch, Cuba and the United States in a "reciprocal gesture" on Sept. 1, 1977, opened "Special Interests Sections" in Washington and Havana, the first diplomatic link between the two countries since relations were broken Jan. 3, 1961 . Granma gave it a couple of paragraphs, but The Herald bannered it on the front page, describing a musty basement of the American embassy, containing a photograph of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, an old Coca-Cola machine ( five cents a bottle) and cans of 1961 Rose Bowl film (Washington 17 , Minnesota 7 ) . Benes, meanwhile, made repeated visits to Havana and spoke with Castro many times in 1977-78, finding his host curious and surprisingly ignorant about the exiles and about Miami. Why not give him a glimpse of capitalism, Cuban style? He hired a cameraman to videotape Little Havana and Hialeah for a group of "visiting Spanish bankers, " then took the result to Havana. "Fantastic, " Benes said. Castro and his staff watched wide- eyed as Cuban exiles played dominoes, worked in a shoe factory, ate at country clubs, sent their debutante daughters to elaborate quince balls, drank coffee at streetside lunchrooms. "I heard Fidel talking to his people about it, " said Benes. "He was surprised. ' How is it possible with all the racism and all the crime in that country? Look what these Cubans have done. ' " By mid-1978, groundwork, by the exiles and by the governments, was complete. Castro called a news conference in Havana and invited the exile community to participate in a "dialogue. " It took place on Nov. 21, 1978, when a "Committee of 75" exiles sat down with Castro at Havana' s Palace of the Revolution. The dialogue, later described by several committee members as a Castro "monologue, " gave its blessing to three agreements: Cuba would release 3,600 political prisoners and allow them to leave the island; Cuba would allow exiles to visit relatives who stayed behind; families divided for nearly two decades could be reunited in the United States. Most exiles left the meeting thinking they had made a pact between Cubans, but the terms were in fact identical to a previously agreed upon secret U.S.-Cuba accord. For 18 months most of it worked -- 3, 900 political prisoners came to Miami in all -- and some of it really worked: 100 , 000 exiles traveled to Cuba in 1979 alone. This stampede, euphemistically described as "family visits, " was a comic opera of astonishing dimensions. The visitors arrived with hampersful of medicine and cosmetics, watches for every wrist, fan belts for the old pre- revolution Chevy. Thin people wore half a dozen layers of clothing, stuck fistsful of ballpoint pens and bubble gum in the pockets and undressed and unloaded it all into the closets and larders of their loved ones. AN ADVENTURE For some of the exiles it was a great adventure, but for others it was a sharp collision with reality. Gregorio Gonzalez, 60, who stole a boat to leave Cuba, visited home for the first time in 17 years to see his sons. "When I saw them, I didn' t recognize them and they didn't recognize me. All the kids -- my sons, my nephews -- were skinny and had bad teeth, " Gonzalez said. Later he would return to try to get the boys to leave Cuba, but "they were integrated and didn't want to leave. " He will travel to Cuba no more. "What for? They' re all Communists, " he said. "They took away my two boys. " A lot of Cuban Cubans, with a per capita annual income of $800, permanent shortages of basic consumer items and a propaganda-imposed idea that exiles lived in near slavery, were finding the encounters unsettling as well. This was not what the United States was supposed to be all about. The human rapprochement had suggested possibilities never contemplated by most Cubans. The diplomatic rapprochement, meanwhile, was coming apart, fueled by Cuban disgust with the U.S. refusal to prosecute boat hijackers. This old wound was dramatically reopened in February 1980 when 66 people were granted immediate political asylum after arriving in Miami aboard a commandeered Cuban dredge. "This was a very erroneous policy of the Carter Administration -- to consider everyone who wanted to leave Cuba for the United States as a heroic dissident, " said Cuban Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez. "The United States is now paying the consequences. " The first public hint of what those consequences might be came in a March 8, 1980, Castro speech warning that Cuba would open a north coast port for anyone who might want to leave if the United States continued giving hijackers a "hero' s welcome. " There wasn't long to wait. On April 4, 1980, the Cuban government removed the guards from the handsome Fifth Avenue embassy of Peru, ostensible retaliation for the Peruvians ' policy of granting asylum to gate-crashing Cubans seeking to emigrate. CUBA, MIAMI IN UPROAR In three days the embassy had 10, 800 people packed in its front yard, Cuba was in an uproar and the exiles had pumped Miami into a fevered rage. Diplomacy managed to get 1, 200 of those at the embassy to Costa Rica and Spain, but this was just an appetizer. On April 22 , in a column headlined News From Mariel, Granma reported that "yesterday morning two boats from Florida left the port of Mariel for the United States with 48 anti-social elements on board. Eleven more will leave from the same place today with 300 more. What a nice rhythm! " Over the next five months, Mariel, a jewel-pretty navy town 20 minutes outside Havana, would become the jumping off point for 125, 000 new refugees, Cuba' s escoria, destined for an uncertain future as Miami' s Marielitos. U.S. authorities took their names, interrogated them, shipped half of them to resettlement camps and tried to get them to move to places like Wisconsin and Maine. Three years later, 90, 000 are in Dade County. At the beginning, Miami ' s Cubans welcomed the newcomers with the same outpouring of affection that greeted their relatives from earlier migrations. Quite rapidly, however, it became apparent that Mariel wasn't the same thing. "He wanted immediately to have everything I worked 15 years to get, " said Jose Gomez, 48, a Hialeah auto mechanic who spent $5 , 000 to have a boat pick up his brother Pedro at Mariel. Pedro got room, board, clothes and a car for 11 months. He also laid about, drank too much and couldn't hold a job, the same problems he had in Cuba. It was the flip side of 1979 . If the Miamian in Havana was a Daddy Warbucks dispensing largesse, the Habanero in Miami was Orphan Annie looking for a handout. Or so it seemed to many Miami Cubans. Pedro Gomez left Hialeah two years ago for New York, still pursuing his pot of gold. Brother Jose says he hasn' t found it: "He only calls when he needs money. At first I sent him some, but then I stopped. "I feel sorry for him, but it bothers me that they tried to take advantage, " said Jose Gomez . "We are too different now. He doesn't understand me and I don' t understand him. " This was the basic problem. Twenty years of socialism -- free medical care and education, a guaranteed job -- had ill- prepared the Marielitos for life in the high-octane world of Cuban exile capitalism. "These people grew up in a different Cuba, " said Siro del Castillo, a Cuban exile who has become one of Miami ' s leading authorities on the Mariel migration. "They are not accustomed to the consumer society, and for the Cuban community here it is very difficult to accept the idea an anti-Castro Cuban who is also a Marxist-Leninist. " Cuba had salted the Mariel refugee sample with large numbers of deadbeats, convicts and the mentally disturbed, and these elements quickly made themselves felt. Latino crime in Dade County soared. In 1981, Marielitos made up 69 per cent of Dade ' s Latin prison population. Miami Assistant City Manager Cesar Odio estimated that Mariel had brought 10, 000 "violent types, " including 2 , 000 hard-core felons. But today the numbers are improving. Del Castillo says 80 per cent of the Marielitos are traveling in the American mainstream. Refugee food stamp recipients dropped dramatically from 23, 740 households in March 1982 to 15, 215 in March 1983, when federal officials stopped separating Marielitos from other refugees. The crime rate in Dade County began to decline in 1982 , but the county doesn' t keep refugee crime statistics any more. Mariel Cubans and the earlier exiles are getting along better, but the Marielitos have set up their own self-help grapevine in South Miami Beach and East Little Havana, Miami ' s first Latin slums. Mariel has also created its own set of diplomatic issues. Homesick refugees, unable to cope, hijacked 11 airplanes to Cuba in 1983 . Twenty-six people have been jailed there, according to Cuban authorities. The United States has more than 1, 000 refugees in federal penitentiaries and wants Cuba to take them back along with several thousand other "undesirables. " Cuba refuses to talk about any of these issues without talking about all of them. A major sticking point: failing to take action against boat hijackers from Cuba. A NEW SPIRIT Nonetheless, Miami has already begun to pick up fresh signals from the Cuban entrepreneurial spirit. Mariel ironmonger Jose Miguel Gonzalez spent his first few dollars to rent a workshop. He slept in back and made ornamental ironwork. He failed at that so he bought a beauty parlor, made himself a $4 , 000 stake, and sank it in a bodega near the corner of Collins and Washington Avenues that he optimistically has named La Primera de Jose -- Jose' s First. "I 've done everything legal, " Gonzalez says. "I 'm hoping to succeed because I never rest. " Maybe they aren' t so different after all. ADDED TERMS: mh series cuban refugee boat history END OF DOCUMENT.