Truth matters: Remembering the Mariel boatlift

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” ~Oscar Wilde

Originally posted May 14, 2024

We've all heard Trump's attacks on immigrants.

They're his go-to, practically his entire brand, because American conservatives are so easy to manipulate. Go after immigrants, and you've got them eating out of your hand, no questions asked.

The rest of us have consistently dismissed the attacks for exactly what they are: racist, cruel, and unfounded.

But....

For me, one attack in particular stands out — but not for of its unfounded racism.

It's the bit about how other countries are sending their worst, how they're emptying their prisons into the immigrant pipeline....

And then I hear the retorts from otherwise reliable pundits: "It's never, ever happened."

Bzzztttt!!! Wrong....

It did happen.

In 1980.

And therein lies our biggest quandary: How to preserve and promote the truth — the whole, unvarnished truth — without giving the right wing even more room to twist it into hateful, ignorant rhetoric?

Because the truth is always complicated.

In this case, the basics revolve around a massive refugee exodus from Cuba, known as the "Mariel boatlift."

The Cuban government emptied prisons into boats and sent bad people our way.

Or so we were told.

Because that's how it was reported by mainstream media.

I didn't know it at the time, but reporting on the boatlift was uniformly racist, homophobic, and ill-informed.

I won't speculate on the motives behind the reporting. But at the time, limited technology meant the mainstream media's control over the news was complete.

Here in Kansas City, we had four network affiliates on TV, plus PBS and a couple of smaller local stations. In my partner’s North Carolina hometown, there were even fewer.

There was always radio, albeit a mix of choose-your-poison stations: Music with no news, a public radio station or two, or the usual gamut of talk shows.

And the newspapers.... Apart from the usual host of local papers, Kansas City had two supposed competitors, The Kansas City Times and The Kansas City Star. (They shared the same building, which was possible because The Times was a morning edition and the Star hit stands in the evening. The reporters worked in shifts, literally keeping the desks warm for each other.)

While national media could fan out their teams of reporters, local publications like the Times and Star focused on local and regional news. For national stories, they were heavily dependent on the Associated Press and Reuters.

There were news magazines, of course, most notably Newsweek and U.S. News. USA Today didn't premiere until 1982. (I probably shouldn't discount rags like the National Enquirer, which my ex-mother-in-law believed was completely accurate. I can't specifically remember seeing the Mariel boatlift on its cover, but I'm sure there was some kind of anti-immigrant coverage laced between Hollywood scandals.)

Still, you probably get my point.

Contrast that era's pool of reporters and publications with today's range of choices, and you have what amounts to a news chokehold.

National media took the salacious route, categorizing the Mariel refugees as refuse from Castro's prisons: murderers, thieves, and scum — and that's all we heard. No surprise there....

I also recall something about psych patients, although I could be wrong. Perhaps Castro himself fed this to the press, or perhaps the one accurate word, "prisons," was enough. From there, the media extrapolated.

And why not? The sheer number of refugees — 125,266 Mariel Cuban exiles in five months — was enough to scare the bejeezus out of Americans. The alleged criminal majority was just gravy.

Likewise the potential for mental illnesses, which, as it turned out, may or may not have been based in reality. (A lot depended on the Cuban definition of mental illness.)

Coverage focused on how to feed and house so many unexpected guests — and what to do about all the criminals and crazy people.

But that was all 44 years ago. I hadn't really thought about it until another of my favorite commentators repeated the stark untruth: "It never happened."

This untruth — this ignorance, this white lie, whatever you want to call it — it troubled me, because I knew it had.

The Mariel boatlift

Initially, when I decided to write about this, I was pondering what I "knew."

But then, I looked it up, starting with the easiest overview: a Wikipedia entry.

Imagine my shock when I read the disqualifying word, "political."

That's right, the Mariel boatlift brought Cuba's political prisoners to our shores.

The whole story is even more complicated than that, of course. In a mass of more than 125 thousand people, there are bound to be a few miscreants (to put it mildly). Among Wikipedia's list of "Notable Marielitos" are a serial killer, an arsonist/mass murderer, and a gang founder/murderer, and a couple of other convicted killers.

But — as in every other immigrant wave — America also benefited from an infusion of writers, singers, musicians, and artists. One was an opera singer. Another would found "I Had Cancer," a social networking site. Bárbaro Garbey became a Major League Baseball utility player and minor league coach.

The anonymous majority — ordinary people and their families — integrated themselves into the American economic system. They blended quietly into American society, working, educating themselves, and succeeding. History predicted this outcome. It's what immigrants do.

I said above that the reporting was "racist, homophobic, and ill-informed." That's another discovery I made while I was looking into this.

Either the national media didn't have access to the complete set of facts — which is possible, since Castro was happy to let us think the worst. Or maybe they opted to feed our national hysteria. Either way, they maligned the vast majority of Marielitos.

But here's rest of the story:

“Marielitos differentiated from other Cubans in several aspects: they were of darker skin and there was also a part of the community that was homosexual—at the time, it was the 1980s, there was still a huge stigma in Cuba about homosexuality. So that part of the Marielitos conditioned the U.S. media to seeing them as this dark group, in various senses like with sexuality, race, criminalization—think about ‘Scarface’—those are the kinds of negative attributes they were choosing to use to categorize Marielitos.” Source

"Cuban gays took the opportunity to leave Cuba during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. From the early stages of the massive exodus, the Government described homosexuals as part of the 'scum' that needed to be discarded so the socialist society could be purified. Some homosexuals were given the ultimatum of either imprisonment (or extended terms for those already imprisoned) or leaving the country, although Fidel Castro publicly denied that anyone was being forced to leave." Source

Colorism has always been a problem in the United States. Likewise, in 1980, Americans wouldn't have overwhelmingly welcomed an influx of gay foreigners — especially not dark-skinned gay foreigners. And while I don't remember reading about these two details at the time, I have no doubt they played into the boatlift coverage.

So yes, in the Mariel boatlift, Fidel Castro "forcefully deported convicted criminals, mental hospital patients, LGTBQ people and prostitutes—people Castro crudely labeled as 'escoria' (trash)."

Certainly, this dark-skinned group of foreigners numbered among Trump's "worst people." In 2017, he cited the Mariel boatlift as a reason to cut immigration.

Why this matters

Forty-four years later, the Mariel boatlift has faded from memory. The Marielitos changed Americans' view of Cuban immigrants. But over time, they also became indistinguishable from the Cubans who came before them.

In turn, the Marielitos are part of the larger immigrant demographic — a demographic that's targeted and rebutted in every election cycle.

It's the rebuttals that concern me here.

Don't say it didn't happen, ever — not even if it only ever happened once. (And frankly, I seriously doubt it only happened once.)

It's ridiculous to try. Obviously, Trump's administration knew about the Mariel boatlift. It doesn't make sense for liberals to say it never happened.

On my favorite social site, I've made a nuisance of myself by fact-checking political and social memes. Sometimes, the memes echo the prejudices and biases of the poster. Other times, they echo my own sentiments, but their supporting facts were out of kilter.

One of the site's most popular liberals wound up on my block list, because in private, she told me that she uploads so many memes every day that she doesn't have time to fact check them. And would I please stop saying shouty things under them, just because they were wrong?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again here: The truth matters.

Not the partial truth. Not the sanitized truth.

The whole truth.

As liberals, we have a special obligation to protect and preserve that truth, because the truth is constantly under attack from the right.

The idea of criminal immigrants might be uncomfortable, but it is inevitable.

In one minor but painful example, a Hispanic family qualified for amnesty under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. But then, their teenage son got into trouble, committing a felony. With that, the entire family's citizenship was in doubt. I don't know the outcome of their story. Perhaps, the rest of the family is eligible for citizenship after all, but the son will always be subject to deportation.

In any large group of people, some will cross the line into criminality. Nor will all immigrants be the vaunted paragon of potential and drive. Just as in the non-immigrant population, some will need help to compensate for disabilities.

It's inhumane to rule out immigrants who don't meet our racist, perfectionist standards. But we do have to acknowledge them.

We can't sweep the details under a rug because they're inconvenient, especially not when the circumstances of their arrival are as historically significant as the Mariel boatlift.

We have to counter conservative rhetoric on our terms, based on our values — and most of all, based on the entire, unvarnished truth.

And for god's sake, can we get out of our teachers' ways?

Because it's for damned sure conservatives will continue to distort the truth, in their public speeches, their podcasts, and their so-called interviews. Especially, they'll continue distorting it in their precious home schools, or else through PragerU's public school curriculum.

The Mariel boatlift had a huge impact.

That impact still haunts us.

Our children should be allowed to know and understand what happened.

Likewise, so should any reporter/commentator/pundit who styles themselves a defender of the truth.

Because the truth — the complete truth — matters.