by Jorge Luis Romeu

Twenty-five years ago, the evening of Saturday, May 24, 1980, my wife, my three small children and I arrived in Syracuse on the train from New York City.

Waiting for us at the old East Syracuse station was my sister Raquel, a professor at Le Moyne College. She had just returned from three weeks aboard a shrimp trawler in the Bay of Mariel, Cuba, where she had sailed, like hundreds of others, to get her relatives out of the country. But what was the Mariel Boatlift? How did it happen? Did it start just the month before, when Castro announced Cubans in the United States wanting to get their families out could do so by sailing to Mariel? Was it a few days before that, when 10,000 people stormed the Peruvian Embassy in Havana and requested asylum? Was it a year before, when Castro released hundreds of political prisoners and let their families and tens of thousands of others apply for exit permits?

Was it two years before, when tens of thousands of members of the “Cuban Community Abroad” (as Castro calls the exiles) were allowed, for the first time in 20 years, to return to visit their relatives? Was it before that when, under President Carter’s policy of improving relations with Castro, Cuban authorities held negotiations with a group of hand-picked “exiles” who agreed to family visits and exit permits? Or was it in 1960, when Castro decided to transform a liberal, nationalist revolution into a Marxist, pro-Soviet one?

Yes, it was all of that! For as with any complex event, the Mariel exodus of April-July 1980, when more than 120,000 Cubans were brought to Florida in boats of all sizes, was not a simple issue.

For us, it all started two years before when my brother, a former political prisoner, applied for an exit permit. We were granted American visas through our sister, a U.S. citizen, and we expected to leave shortly after.

Then an unexpected event occurred. One morning, the secret police searched our home. They found the manuscript of a story book that I had written, a! bout life in the UMAP, which was published in the US under a Pen Name. UMAP, were forced labor camps for dissidents, created by Castro in 1966, where I had spent two years, after being expelled from the university of Havana.The police also found manuscripts of 33 other short stories, copies of which I had also sent abroad.

I was arrested, interrogated and finally “released guilty,” a precarious status. I lost my job. Our passports, visas, etc., were retained by the government. Our prospects of leaving Cuba became quite dim.

When Mariel occurred, my sister rushed to get us out. The Cuban government reluctantly let us go; but not on the boats. They returned our visas and put us on a plane to Mexico. My wife’s brothers took our places in the shrimp trawler.

To try to discredit those defecting via Mariel, the Cuban government also included mental patients and jail inmates. The police took those leaving to Mariel, a seaport 20 miles east of Havana. There, intimidated by threats, police dogs and beatings, they awaited their turn to board a boat to Key West.

Marielitos with relatives in the United States were released to their custody. All others were taken to Eglin or Fort Chaffee and later resettled. Syracuse’s Catholic Charities received a few of them. Those with hard criminal records spent many years in an Atlanta prison.

Mariel was a milestone in Cuban politics. Up to then, exiles came heavily from the educated, the upper and middle classes and Havana, supporting the myth that only the privileged disagreed with the revolution. The heterogeneous socioeconomic, racial and geographical composition of the Mariel cohort finally disproved this. Castro had a hard time justifying how this had happened.

Moreover, Mariel brought a new and enriching perspective to the exiled community. Outside Cuba, people knew little about the conditions of daily life under Castro. Mariel finally brought a different attitude in the international response to the Cuban revolution.

Jorge Luis Romeu is a Cuban political exile and a research professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in Syracuse University’s L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science.

This op-ed appeared in the June 7 issue of the Syracuse Post-Standard

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