“The criminal regimes that exist in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba are enemies of humanity who have created a migration crisis.” – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Over X, February 5, 2025.
Havana weaponized migration in order to obtain more concessions over the four years of the Joe Biden Administration, and with the help of Mexican presidents Manuel Lopez Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum sought even more.
The Cuban dictatorship had reason to double down, because the Biden Administration repeatedly rewarded the communist regime, and it did not advance U.S. interests.
The Biden State Department in May 2022 provided concessions in the hope of decreasing migration from Cuba. At that point the number of Cubans who had entered the United States during the Biden Presidency was 180,020, and since then another 553,205 entered.
The number would have been even larger, but in 2023 the Biden Administration took some unorthodox steps to lower numbers.
The White House attempted to get control of the border in January 2023, stepping up deportations of migrants crossing the U.S. border, and specifically targeted Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. These three groups were denied the right to seek asylum at the border.
This led to a decline in Cubans entering, despite this numbers started to rise again in March 2023, and the rate increased further in September 2023 with a total of 200,287 in Fiscal 2023, and even more in Fiscal 2024 when 217, 615 entered, according to data provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The uptick in encounters began in 2021, and the Center’s executive director both privately, and publicly warned that a policy of unilateral concessions would only encourage the weaponization of migration by Havana.
The messy exodus from Afghanistan in August 2021 by the Biden Administration coincided with a marked increase in Cubans arriving in the United States three months later.
Managua lifts visa requirements for Cubans to enter Nicaragua
Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ally of communist Cuba, announced that on November 22, 2021 it would lift visa requirements for Cubans traveling to the Central American country. Sebastián Arcos spoke with José Díaz-Balart of NBC News to discuss this new policy from Managua that would open a new path for Cuban migrants to reach the United States, and create an even greater crisis on the U.S. Mexican border.
The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, a supporter of communist Cuba, declared on November 22, 2021, that it would no longer require Cubans to have a visa in order to enter the Central American nation. In a November 26, 2021 interview with José Díaz-Balart of NBC News, CFC research council member Sebastián Arcos talked about this new policy from Managua that would make it easier for Cuban refugees to enter the United States and worsen the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Engaging and legitimizing regime’s in Caracas and Havana coincides with massive increases in Cubans arriving in the United States.
U.S. officials met in Venezuela with members of the Maduro regime, a client state of the Castro dictatorship, on March 5, 2022, It coincided with the month that the exodus from Cuba doubled, from 16,657 in February 2022 to 32,398 Cubans arriving in the United States in March 2022. This was followed by a further increase in the month of April 2022 to 35,080 Cubans entering the United States. On April 21, 2022, Washington and Havana held migration talks, the first in four years, and on May 16, 2022, the United States announced changes to Cuba policy that included measures viewed as concessions to the regime in Havana. This was one day after Havana passed a draconian penal code that expanded the death penalty against dissidents.
Others began observing this latest example of an engineered migration crisis, and began calling it out in 2023.
“The Ortega government knows they have few important policy tools at hand to confront the United States … so they have armed migration as a way to attack,” Manuel Orozco, director of the Migration, Remittances and Development Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, told The Associated Press. “This is definitely a concrete example of weaponizing migration as a foreign policy.”
The regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are enemies of humanity who slander, and harm their own peoples.
These regimes hate those who seek a better life elsewhere, and reject their communist regimes. They seed the migrant outflows with criminal elements to smear all the migrants with the criminal label, and with agents of influence abroad repeating the regime’s slanderous talking points.
For example, “the Tren de Aragua is a state-sponsored criminal organization born of the policies of the Venezuelan government, which blend the state with criminal networks,” according to the December 5, 2024 report by visiting Heritage Foundation Fellow Joseph Humire.
Although Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, a criminal himself wanted by the FBI, has sponsored the Tren de Aragua, he claims that an exiled political opponent leads it, which is a lie.
This approach was first pioneered by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro during the 1980 Mariel boat lift.
Granma, the Communist Party’s daily paper, compiled a list of 100 insults to scream at those who wanted to leave. Meanwhile Fidel Castro prepared to associate these refugees with the worse of the worse. Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Fidel Castro’s former bodyguard, wrote a tell all book published in May 2014 of his time with the dictator titled, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo that included a remarkable passage on the events of Mariel.
Brian Latell, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and academic at the University of Miami, in a June 8, 2015 op-ed in the Miami Herald reviewing the above book touched on how Fidel Castro dealt with the Mariel exodus during the Carter presidency:
For me, Sánchez’s most appalling indictment of Fidel concerns the chaotic exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans in 1980 from the port of Mariel. Most who fled were members of Cuban exile families living in the United States. They were allowed to board boats brought by relatives and to make the crossing to South Florida.
But many of the boats were forcibly loaded by Cuban authorities with criminals and mentally ill people plucked from institutions on the island. Few of us who have studied Fidel Castro have doubted that it was he who ordered those dangerous Cubans to be exported to the United States. He has persuaded few with his denials of any role in the incident. Yet Sánchez adds an appalling new twist to the saga. We learn that prison wards and mental institutions were not hurriedly emptied, as was previously believed. Sánchez reveals that Castro insisted on scouring lists of prisoners so that he could decide who would stay and who would be sent to the United States. He ordered interior minister Jose Abrahantes to bring him prisoner records.
Sánchez was seated in an anteroom just outside of Fidel’s office when the minister arrived. The bodyguard listened as Fidel discussed individual convicts with Abrahantes.
“I was present when they brought him the lists of prisoners,” Sánchez writes, “with the name, the reason for the sentence, and the date of release. Fidel read them, and with the stroke of a pen designated which ones could go and which ones would stay. ‘Yes’ was for murderers and dangerous criminals; ‘no’ was for those who had attacked the revolution.” Dissidents remained incarcerated.
A number of the criminal and psychopathic marielitos put on the boats to Florida went on to commit heinous crimes — including mass murder, rape, and arson.
The author and former bodyguard of Fidel Castro, Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, suddenly passed away at age 66 on May 25, 2015 within a year of the Spanish edition of the book being published.
There are also documentaries, books, and other works that examine the Mariel Exodus, and one of the best is the 1980 documentary “In their own words” by Jorge Ulla for the US Information Agency that interviewed Cubans as they arrived in the United States. It reveals that the vast majority of Cubans in this exodus were decent, hard working people fleeing a brutal dictatorship.
The same holds true for the 888,000 Venezuelans who have fled their homeland due to the current, Cuba-backed, dictatorship in Caracas, and have entered the United States.
Looking the other way, or worse legitimizing these three dictatorships in this hemisphere have led to an engineered migration crisis, but a principled policy that advances the national interest will put a stop to it quickly, as has happened repeatedly in the past. However, genuine democratic transitions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela would create an opportunity for greater stability in the region, and a permanent end to these crises.
Why a return to Obama-era policy on Cuba would be a big mistake
by John Suarez, opinion contributor – 01/08/25 12:00 PM ET
Ten years after Barack Obama’s surprise reopening of diplomatic relations with Cuba, rolled back by Donald Trump in 2017, some are now opining on President Biden’s legacy by calling for a return to Obama’s failed policy. But they are leaving out key facts to advance their claim that the 2014 thaw was successful.
The late Democratic senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, observed that “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” This also holds true in the conversation over U.S.-Cuba policy. President Obama’s claim that the U.S. “changing its relationship with the people of Cuba” was among “the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years” ignored the past actions of the Nixon, Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations to do the same.
The repeated good-faith unilateral concessions by Washington, under these four prior presidencies, were responded to by Havana with actions that negatively impacted U.S. national interests in Latin America, Africa and in the United States. This included facilitating the entry of narcotics into the United States, giving terrorists safe harbor, resources and training that resulted in the deaths of Americans on American soil in 1975 and 1977, and directly participating in state terrorism in international airspace that resulted in the deaths of Americans in 1996.
In 2015, the Obama State Department removed Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism in response to a public demand by Raul Castro that the full restoration of diplomatic relations be contingent upon Cuba being removed from the list.
During Obama’s thaw with Havana, violence increased against Cuban dissidents, the Cuban government weaponized migration, with over 120,000 Cubans entering the United States through Central America, and U.S. diplomats in Havana began suffering brain damage in 2016 in what the Biden administration would call “anomalous health incidents but became better known as the Havana Syndrome.
Furthermore, defenders of Obama’s Cuba policy make no mention of diplomatic slights against Obama by Havana, including Raul Castro presiding over a military parade on Jan. 2, 2017, where Cuban soldiers chanted they’d shoot Obama so many times in the head that they’d make him a hat of lead.
Despite this, on his way out of office, Obama provided two additional concessions responding positively to two long-standing demands by the Cuban dictatorship: ending the Wet-Foot Dry-Foot policy, which allowed Cuban legal status if they touched U.S. soil, and the Cuban Professional Medical Parole program, which provided trafficked Cuban doctors with asylum. These policy changes hurt ordinary Cubans, but helped the dictatorship.
The Trump administration did not end all of the Obama thaw, but did pursue a policy of not providing resources to the Cuban military, and providing victims of the dictatorship a new avenue for redress.
After normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations, Obama’s secretary of State, John Kerry said in an interview on Sept. 9, 2020, “It’s fair to say that everybody shares a little bit of disappointment about the direction that the government in Cuba chose to go.” Kerry continued, “Cuba seemed to harden down after the initial steps were taken.”
Candidate Joe Biden on the campaign trail in 2020 said he wanted to return to the Obama opening, but facts on the ground forced him to change course. The images coming out of Cuba of regime agents beating and gunning down nonviolent protesters during nationwide protests of July 2021, then following up with draconian prison sentences against many of the demonstrators, made rapprochement with the dictatorship politically untenable.
Nevertheless, President Biden, 10 months after the July 2021 protests and crackdown, provided unilateral concessions to Havana in what was euphemistically described as “new measures to support the Cuban people” but contained specific actions that empowered the dictatorship. For example, the expansion of educational exchanges ignored FBI concerns about Havana using these openings to recruit spies and undermine U.S. national security. This policy also loosened travel restrictions.
The Cuban military through its conglomerate, the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., and its sub-entity Gaviota, the military’s tourism arm, profited from the expansion of authorized travel by the Obama and Biden administrations, but the Castro regime could not fully exploit it due to poor decisions taken by Havana.
Moscow offered Havana $1.36 billion in 2015 to repair and build new generators, but Cuban officials did not take them up on it, due to other priorities. While Cuba’s infrastructure collapses due to lack of maintenance, the dictatorship continues to build luxury hotels across the country with their own generators for tourists, as millions of Cubans are kept in the dark. It did not have to be that way, but it is Havana’s — not Washington’s — fault.
The European Union and Canada continue to send millions of Euros and Canadian dollars to the Cuban dictatorship. The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, stated in Havana on May 25, 2023, that the 27-member bloc remained Cuba’s biggest trading partner and one devoted to “mutual respect.” He said that the EU accounted for about one-third of the island’s foreign trade, “versus 8% by China or 8% by Russia,” reported Euractiv on May 26, 2023.
This economic engagement has not prevented Cuban soldiers from donning Russian uniforms and fighting for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, Havana openly supporting Moscow’s invasion of its European neighbor ,or Cuban agents assisting Nicolas Maduro in undermining democracy in Venezuela and torturing Venezuelan dissidents.
The advocates for returning to the Obama Cuba policy would have the United States join in the complicity of the European Union and Canada in subsidizing with tax dollars a 65-year-old dictatorship, helping to enrich a corrupt ruling class while everyday Cubans continue to suffer under their oppressive rule, and providing Havana resources to help create more Nicaraguas and Venezuelas in Latin America and sponsor international terrorism.
John Suarez is the executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, and a former program officer for Latin America programs at Freedom House.
South Florida Sun Sentinel, October 10th, 2023
Commentary
Cuba remains a threat we cannot placate | Opinion
By John Suarez
In his Viewpoint essay of Oct. 4, Manuel Gomez writes that the relation between Cuba and the United States is not irrelevant despite it not making headlines recently. He is right about that — but wrong about nearly everything else. The thawing of relations advocated by Gomez and others like him will only embolden a despotic regime that, despite Gomez’s insistence, remains a sponsor of terroristic acts at home and abroad
Venezuelan and Nicaraguan refugees are aware of Havana’s role in bolstering dictatorships in both countries, as well as how the Cuban military and intelligence service torture Venezuelans and Nicara
President Barack Obama’s Cuba policy increased Cuban suffering, led to increased violence against dissidents, the murder of dissident leaders Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero on July 22, 2012, the machete attack against dissident Sirley Avila Leon on May 24, 2015 and legitimized General Raul Castro’s dictatorship, but got nothing in return.
In a Sept. 9, 2020 interview, Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry stated, “It’s fair to say that everybody shares a little bit of disappointment about the direction that the government in Cuba chose to go” after normalizing US-Cuba relations. Kerry added, “Cuba seemed to harden down after the initial steps were taken.”
Left out of Secretary Kerry’s analysis is that during the Obama thaw migration was weaponized by Havana and over 120,000 Cubans entered the United States. The claim that uncontrolled Cuban migration is caused by sanctions on the dictatorship ignores six decades of history.
During the Carter and Clinton administrations, migration was weaponized by Havana to leverage concessions. During the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, Fidel Castro personally chose rapists, murderers and mental patients to seed the exodus, smearing the Cuban diaspora and causing a deadly crime wave in the United States.
Cuba poses a threat to the US and the wider region
On May 17, 2012, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing on “Cuba’s Global Network of Terrorism, Intelligence, and Warfare.” Christopher Simmons, retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency with over 23 years of experience as a counterintelligence officer, presented the following analysis of Cuba.
“In many respects, Cuba can be accurately characterized as a violent criminal organization masquerading as a government. The island’s five intelligence services exist not to protect the nation, but to ensure the survival of the regime. … Transitioning to the issue of terrorism, Havana takes a three-tier approach to its involvement in terrorism: Regime-directed, regime-supported, and finally, alliances with state sponsors. For regime-directed activities, we’re looking at specifically bona fide acts of terrorism, Cuban Intelligence Service targeting of the U.S. war on terrorism, and ‘Active Measures.’ ”
Cuba was first added to the list of state sponsors of terrorism on March 1, 1982. The U.S. State Department had confirmed Havana was using a narcotics ring to funnel both arms and cash to the Colombian M19 terrorist group, which was fighting to destabilize Colombia’s democracy.
Obama’s decision to remove Cuba from this list was a political decision, responding to Havana’s conditions for normalization.
Cuba was returned to the list on Jan. 11, 2021 for having “refused Colombia’s requests to extradite 10 ELN leaders living in Havana after the group claimed responsibility for the January 2019 bombing of a Bogota police academy that killed 22 people and injured more than 87 others.” Secondly, “the Cuban intelligence and security apparatus has infiltrated Venezuela’s security and military forces, assisting Nicholas Maduro to maintain his stranglehold over his people while allowing terrorist organizations to operate. The Cuban government’s support for FARC dissidents and the ELN continues beyond Cuba’s borders as well, and the regime’s support of Maduro has created a permissive environment for international terrorists to live and thrive within Venezuela.”
Now, Havana is supporting Moscow’s illegal war in Ukraine. Cuban soldiers are fighting in the Russian military on the front lines.
Ignoring this, and pretending Cuba is not a threat, will end in tragedy.
John Suarez is a human rights activist and executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington D.C.
The Hill, January 4, 2023
Why Cubans leave
by John Suarez, Opinion Contributor – 01/04/23 11:00 AM ET
Originally published in The Hill on January 4, 2023.
More than 227,000 Cubans fled Cuba last year. The U.S. Coast Guard reported that 22 migrants died during fiscal 2022. On Dec. 21, Associated Press reporters said that families of Cubans who fled the country during the current exodus had compiled a list of 135 missing relatives.
Havana does not keep track of how many of its citizens are missing. Nor does the Cuban government allow independent actors in Cuba to track the numbers.
Francisco Chaviano González, a former mathematics teacher and political prisoner, attempted to compile a list of Cubans who went missing while trying to flee Cuba. Cuban officials threatened him with arrest and a 15-year prison sentence if he continued to count the number of missing Cubans.
Cuba has experienced a mass exodus over the last six decades, with more than 2.7 million Cubans moving to the U.S. Tens of thousands of Cubans perished while attempting to flee the Castro dictatorship. Some Cuban migrants who attempted to flee were massacred by agents of the Cuban dictatorship.
Between 1959 and December 1991, over 940,000 Cubans fled the Castro regime and entered the United States while Havana received massive subsidies from the Soviet Union. Cuban leader Fidel Castro repeatedly ridiculed the ineffectiveness of the U.S. trade embargo, but changed his tune in 1992 after the USSR collapsed on Christmas Day 1991.
The U.S. embargo on the Cuban government is not the cause of this mass exodus. Cuba’s communist dictatorship is.
In 1993, the Clinton administration in an official note charged that Cuban marine patrols repeatedly tossed grenades, strafed fleeing swimmers with automatic weapons fire and recovered bodies with gaff hooks, within sight of U.S. personnel at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
On July 13, 1994, a group of Cuban migrants attempted to flee aboard the “13 de Marzo” tugboat. State Security forces and four Transportation Ministry boats attacked the tugboat seven miles off the coast of Cuba, sinking it. Thirty-seven Cubans were killed, including 11 children.
A 1995 study by two academics reported that “a total of as many as 100,000 balseros may have died in crossing” the Florida Straits.
The most recent massacre was reported on Oct. 28, 2022. A Cuban Coast Guard ship deliberately collided with and sank a boat near Bahia Honda in Cuba’s Artemisa province. On the ship bound for the U.S., seven Cubans were killed, including a two-year-old girl.
Several other factors are contributing to the ongoing exodus. Some of these also led to the nationwide protests that began on July 11, 2021, and still impact Cuba today.
Havana’s decision not to obtain foreign vaccines for Cubans in order to claim that Cuba was the first country in the world to vaccinate their entire population with homegrown vaccines caused many deaths, and public outrage.
Havana used the pretext of the pandemic to tighten monopoly control over the distribution of assistance with no transparency, and refused to allow farmers markets on the island, increasing scarcity. Now Cubans with hard currency, and who were well off, cannot easily find food and other necessities.
This, combined with the lack of freedom, led to last year’s mass protests across Cuba, but the regime’s response is also contributing to the exodus.
When the protests erupted, President Miguel Diaz-Canel declared in a nationally televised broadcast: “The order to fight has been given — into the street, revolutionaries!” and “They will have to pass over our dead bodies If they want to confront the revolution, and we are willing to do anything.”
Police and paramilitaries shot Cuban protesters. They fatally shot Cuban artist Diubis Laurencio Tejeda in the back. Some witnesses who documented his killing were arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Over a thousand Cubans were jailed for taking part in or recording images of the 11J protests, and the trials continue.
In response to the protests, Havana passed a new penal code in May 2022, which went into effect on Dec 1. Amnesty International referred to it as “a chilling prospect for 2023.” According to the human rights organization, the new code expands the death penalty to 23 crimes and punishes freedom of expression with long prison sentences.
These factors heightened Cubans’ desire to flee, but they do not explain the magnitude of the current exodus.
This exodus benefits the communist dictatorship financially and politically. Nicaragua is a client state of Havana, and it is coordinating with Cuba to weaponize migration to gain concessions from the U.S.
Managua lifted visa requirements for Cubans visiting Nicaragua on Nov. 22, 2021. This new route for Cuban migrants to the United States has exacerbated the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The mass exodus of disgruntled Cubans has strengthened the dictatorship’s grip on the island. Meanwhile, travel agencies affiliated with the communist regime are selling $4,000 plane tickets to Managua, thereby enriching regime oligarchs. In comparison, a slightly longer flight from Miami to Managua costs less than $400.
The Biden administration must demonstrate its support for Cuban democracy, not the dictatorship’s fabricated stability, which amounts to thinly veiled blackmail.
Three steps would be a good start: fully funding Marti Noticias (an international radio and television service funded by the U.S. government that broadcasts in Cuba) so that it can communicate directly with Cubans; applying Magnitsky sanctions on Diaz-Canel for the murderous violence he has inflicted on Cubans; and demanding Havana lift its internal blockade.
Only with these and other changes will the Cuban mass exodus begin to abate.
John Suarez is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba and a human rights activist.
https://thehill.com/opinion/
The Washington Times, April 27, 2022
Don’t let Cuba weaponize migration
OPINION:
The Washington Times editorial “Biden should not bow to Cuba’s political blackmail” (Web, April 24) is spot on in its conclusion that “the United States must take charge and only negotiate on its own terms without bowing to political blackmail,” but not while the military dictatorship engages in “its manipulative migration tactics — and finally frees political prisoners.”
The editorial mentions Mariel (1980) and the rafter crisis (1994) but omits the fact that between 2014 and 2016, over 120,000 Cubans entered the United States in another migration surge, during former President Barack Obama’s detente with Raul Castro. Obama responded to this extortion by ending the asylum policy for trafficked Cuban doctors, as well as the wet-foot/dry-foot policy. Ending these policies harmed Cubans and strengthened the dictatorship.
All Cuban migration crises have occurred under administrations seeking better relations with Havana: Camarioca (1965), Mariel (1980), the Rafter Crisis (1994), the Central American exodus (2014-2016) and now. The Cuban dictatorship reasoned that it could use immigration as a tool of asymmetric warfare to obtain more concessions. And it has been right on these four prior occasions.
In contrast, when Fidel Castro threatened a new exodus during the Reagan and Bush administrations, he was met each time with the response that the weaponization of migration would be dealt with as a national security matter. No exodus occurred.
To understand Havana’s tactics, Prof. Kelly M. Greenhill’s 2002 peer-reviewed paper, “Engineered Migration and the Use of Refugees as Political Weapons: A Case Study of the 1994 Cuban Balseros Crisis,” is required reading.
JOHN SUAREZ
Executive director, Center for a Free Cuba
Falls Church, Virginia
Copyright © 2022 The Washington Times, LLC.
https://amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/27/letter-to-the-editor-dont-let-cuba-weaponize-migra/
The International Herald Tribune, April 3, 2020
40 Years have Passed since That Infamy
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
The “Mariel exodus” occurred 40 years ago. One hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans arrived in the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980. Jimmy Carter was not re-elected as president in the elections of November of that year as a consequence, at least in part, of his handling of the crisis. He refused to follow the advice of a ruthless admiral. “I have not been elected President of the United States to kill refugees,” he said.
Nor was Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton elected to a second term in Arkansas. He was accused of being “soft” for hosting hundreds of Cubans in Fort Chaffee. Less than 10% were crazy or criminal, but the stigma affected all the “Marielitos,” and even Cubans in general. Forty years later, the “Marielitos” have an economic and social performance similar to the American white population’s average, but they have also revitalized the Hispanic artistic world in the United States.
It all started before April, when a young Peruvian diplomat named Ernesto Pinto-Bazurco Rittler arrived in Cuba. He was the new Chargé d’Affaires of his country’s legation in Havana. Fortunately for Cubans, the incumbent ambassador was off the Island. Otherwise, everything would have probably been different.
On April 1, half a dozen Cubans, desperate to leave the country, were traveling in a bus driven by Héctor Sanyustiz. They crashed the vehicle into the embassy’s entrance and managed to cross the gates. The guards opened fire, injuring Sanyustiz, but one of the policemen lost his life. He was a victim of “friendly fire.”
As a consequence of the incident, Fidel Castro asked Peruvian diplomats to hand over the new asylees. Pinto-Bazurco refused, and the “Maximum Leader” of the revolution decided to teach them a lesson –– he would lift the custody of the Embassy so that the Peruvians suffered the uncomfortable presence of a few dozen legitimate dissidents among whom he would camouflage a few of his security agents.
Gross mistake. In three days, 10,856 people entered the Embassy, 5 people per square meter in the gardens. It was a unique case in the history of relations among countries. They were an absolute sample of society –– there were doctors, engineers, farmers, lawyers, highly educated, less educated and uneducated people. There were people linked to the revolution, including members of the Communist Party, and disaffected individuals. There were children carried by their parents, teenagers excited by the adventure and elderly people. They weren’t just Havanans. Word spread throughout the island.
Pressure continued being exerted on the diplomat Pinto-Bazurco. One night he was picked up in the embassy. The Commander wanted to see him. He intended to intimidate him personally. Fidel was kind at the beginning. Pinto-Bazurco stuck to his guns. He was a lawyer and a diplomat. He clung to the defense of law and Human Rights. He dared to tell Fidel that the person responsible for the asylum of almost eleven thousand people in three frenetic days was the one who eliminated the guard in the diplomatic compound, violating international law. But when, in order to save lives, the Peruvian rejected the proposal to request the army to enter the embassy, Fidel was outraged. “I am the one who decides in this country who will live and who will die,” he said.
Finally, Fidel accepted, in fact, that he had been wrong. He organized a command post near the Embassy. He asked Víctor Bordón, one of his commanders, how many people were against the revolution. Bordón told him that he had heard it was half the country. Fidel insulted him and kicked him out. It was amazing that the more he shone, the greater the rejection. He had triumphed in Angola, in the Ogaden and in Nicaragua, he had become the head of the Non-Aligned countries, despite being an accomplished pro-Soviet, and in Cuba the protest was growing. Fidel did not understand that the cost of his leadership and the island’s presence in international affairs was immense. Cubans wanted to be reasonably happy, not heroes forced to sacrifice their lives for a thirsty-for-glory individual.
Fidel immediately thought of transferring the problem to the hated Gringos. He had done so in 1965. He provoked a crisis, he allowed Cuban exiles to pick up their relatives, which became a headache for Lyndon Johnson administration, and he released them through the port of Camarioca. Washington reluctantly gave in. It established a legal exhaust valve and called it “Freedom Flights.” Between 1965 and 1973, 300,000 Cubans left in an orderly fashion. Another two million remained dressed up and ready to go.
In 1980 he insisted on the same scheme. First, he created the conflict. Once again, he authorized the flotilla of exiles to pick up their relatives, but to avoid hesitation he used Napoleón Vilaboa to start the trips. Vilaboa was an intelligence lieutenant colonel infiltrated among the exiles who was very useful to Havana. Fidel just changed the port of departure. This time it would not be Camarioca but Mariel.
He took the opportunity to insult all the alleged emigrants. He called them “scum,” “worms,” and he took children and youth from schools to participate in “rallies or acts of repudiation.” The students killed a teacher they caught “running away.”
Granma, the newspaper of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, compiled a list of one hundred insults to shout at the “bastards” who had decided to emigrate. It was a terrible time. From the rostrum, Fidel spoke of a revolutionary “gene.” He was a kind of unleashed Nazi. A cameraman told me in Madrid, crying, that when he said he was leaving the country, he was forced to walk on his knees among coworkers who spat on him and insulted him.
Everyone must smear their hands with blood. Singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez participated in an act of repudiation that lasted several days against Mike Porcel, his partner in the Nueva Trova. Rodríguez never asked for forgiveness for his miserable behavior. Porcel could not even leave Cuba. He had to remain on the Island, as a “non-person”, for nine years. The academic Armando Álvarez Bravo was not allowed to leave with his wife and daughters. His wife was sent to Peru. A few years later, Armando was allowed to emigrate to Spain. The Cuban regime, under Fidel’s lead, was dedicated to dividing and breaking up families.
Castroism hated homosexuals, to the point of locking them in concentration camps in the sixties to “cure” their perversity through intense agricultural work. The regime had to postpone that monstrosity and close the camps due to international pressure, which in this case came from the left. But Fidel Castro saw in the Mariel exodus the opportunity to get rid of thousands of homosexuals accused of being “counterrevolutionaries by nature.” Were there not, according to Aristotle, “slaves by nature”? Well, there were also people genetically incompatible with a political process inspired by Marxism-Leninism.
It is worth noting that there was no real purpose of amendment when he closed the UMAP concentration camps where gays and religious believers were crowded together. The homophobia of the 1960s was still intact in the 1980s. Homosexuals were mistreated during and after the Mariel exodus. Labor and student meetings, in which they were publicly accused of this “improper conduct,” were frequent in the 1980s.
Fortunately, the crime and the cruelties that they did to the “Marielitos” were documented in the press, books and movies. One of the books that caused the most impact was Mañana, by the journalist Mirta Ojito. She was 15 years old when she boarded the ship that gave its name to the book. There is a detailed description of what happened in that terrible episode in the history of Castroism.
Another valuable book was Al borde de la cerca (On the Edge of the Fence) by Nicolás Abreu, a writer of the so-called “Mariel’s Generation”, to which, among others, belong his brothers Juan and José, the poet and narrator Vicente Echerri and Luis de la Paz, although they did not necessarily go through the trauma of “Cayo Mosquito” (the inhospitable and desolate place where they waited for the boat that would take them to freedom.)
Among the films on those events, I choose En sus propias palabras (In Their Own Words) by filmmaker Jorge Ulla and let him put an end to this painful account:
“The movie In Their Own Words was an assignment from the Carter administration. The idea was to document how different government agencies provided their services in the midst of the crisis. When what the newcomers’ stories were heard, another film was revealed to all, that of a choral testimony that dismantled a series of ambiguous myths about Cuba –– many social cracks became visible, and through them many lovers of the “Cuban project” could suddenly question or reassess that project in a critical way. In the 29-minute documentary many people spoke with dismay, from a worker and an ordinary citizen to a novelist of the stature of Reinaldo Arenas. It would be the first time that Arenas spoke on camera. It was an unusual phenomenon that would find its best repercussion between the intelligentsia and the most enthusiastic left. Suddenly paradise was a source of disillusionment.
President Carter grew fond of that film and was showing it to different guests at the White House. USIA showed it in more than 50 countries. Jack Anderson wrote in The Washington Post a sentence somewhat exaggerated, “29 minutes were enough to reveal what is happening in Cuba.” As it was USIA material, it could not be exhibited in the United States. A Congress resolution allowed it to be shown here and, furthermore, to file it in the Library of Congress. After that, it was seen in hundreds of universities and public libraries.”
There, in less than half an hour, Ulla recounts Mariel’s infamy. Forty years later the documentary retains all its vitality.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200410111626/http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=2490979&CategoryId=13303
International Migration, December 16, 2002
Engineered Migration and the Use of Refugees as Political Weapons: A Case Study of the 1994 Cuban Balseros Crisis†
First published: 16 December 2002
Abstract
This paper presents a case study of the August 1994 Cuban balseros crisis, during which more than 35,000 fled the island and headed toward Florida in the span of a few weeks.
It argues that Castro launched the crisis in an attempt to manipulate US fears of another Mariel, and in order to compel a shift in US policy, both on immigration and on a wider variety of issues. The paper further contends that from Castro’s perspective, this exercise in coercion proved a qualified success – his third such successful use of the Cuban people as an asymmetric political weapon against the US.
In addition, the paper argues that Castro’s success was predicated on his ability to internationalize his own domestic crisis and transform it into an American domestic political and foreign policy crisis.
Finally, it offers a novel explanation of how, why, and under what conditions, states and/or non–state actors may attempt to use refugees as coercive political weapons. Although dwarfed in size by the larger 1980 Mariel boatlift, the 1994 crisis is important for several reasons.
First, despite its brevity, it had far reaching consequences for US–Cuban relations. Without warning or preamble, it catalyzed a shift in US policy vis–à–vis Cuban immigration that represented a radical departure from what it had been for the previous three decades.
Second, it influenced US domestic politics on the national level, by expanding the scope and salience of the issue, and mobilizing not only Floridians, but also the larger public concerned about illegal immigration. Third, the crisis illustrated the potential potency of engineered migration as an asymmetric weapon of the weak.
Finally, the brief, but significant, interactions of international and domestic actors in this case warrant examination because, although the 1994 crisis was limited, in its dynamics it resembles myriad other international refugee crises, large and small. Thus the case offers valuable lessons that may aid in dealing with future (real or threatened) crises.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2435.00205