History.com has this for 20 April;
On 20 April 1980, the Castro regime announced that all Cubans wishing to emigrate to the US were free to board boats at the port of Mariel, west of Havana, launching the Mariel Boatlift. The first of over a hundred thousand Cuban refugees reached Florida the next day.
The boatlift was precipitated by housing and job shortages caused by the ailing Cuban economy, leading to simmering internal tensions on the island. On 1 April, Hector Sanyustiz and four others drove a bus through a fence at the Peruvian embassy and were granted political asylum. Cuban guards on the street opened fire. One guard was killed in the crossfire.
The Cuban government demanded the five be returned for trial in the dead guard’s death. But, when the Peruvian government refused, Castro withdrew his guards from the embassy on Good Friday, 4 April. By Easter Sunday, 6 April, some ten thousand Cubans crowded into the lushly landscaped gardens at the embassy, requesting asylum. Other embassies, including those of Spain and Costa Rica, agreed to take a small number of people. But suddenly, two weeks later, Castro proclaimed that the port of Mariel would be opened to anyone wishing to leave, as long as they had someone to pick them up. Cuban exiles in the United States rushed to hire boats in Miami and Key West to rescue their relatives.
In all, over a hundred thousand Cubans fled to America in about seventeen hundred boats, creating large waves of people that overwhelmed the Coast Guard. Cuban guards had packed boat after boat, without considering safety, making some of the overcrowded boats barely seaworthy. Twenty-seven migrants died, including fourteen on an overloaded boat that capsized on 17 May.
The boatlift also began to have negative political implications for President Jimmy Carter. When it was discovered that a number of the exiles had been released from Cuban jails and mental health facilities, many were placed in refugee camps, while others were held in Federal prisons to undergo deportation hearings. The Marielitos, as the refugees came to be known, who landed in Florida, more than seventeen hundred were jailed and another six hundred were detained until they could find sponsors.
The exodus was finally ended by mutual agreement between the American and Cuban governments in October of 1980.
Rico says that, as Winston Churchill said, may not have been the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning...
No comments:
Post a Comment