Well-developed narratives such as those found in Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus (2005) by Mirta Ojito and Let the Bastards Go: From Cuba to Freedom on God’s Mercy (2003) by Joe Morris Doss have succeeded at merging autobiographical experiences with history to depict the human drama of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980. These texts, among a few others, have found in historical fiction a way to process the painful memory of that symbolic exodus for the Cuban exile community. Conversely, a larger corpus of the literature on Mariel has relied on the social sciences—on theories of gender and race studies, criminology and sociology—to observe the repercussions of Mariel on the social and economic landscapes of South Florida. However, if we consider the historic significance of Mariel for the overarching narrative of Cuba-U.S. relations, we can say that today we are still limited on the number of books to reflect on the history of this dramatic exodus.
We must therefore welcome a book like Florida and the Mariel Boatlift: The First 20 days, in which a collective of authors—Kathleen Dupes Hawk, Ronald Villella, Adolfo Leyva de Varona and Kristen Cifers—combine personal stories and first-hand accounts with historical research to provide a comprehensive account of the initial events of Mariel and their political ramifications in the United States. The authors rely mostly on diaries kept by Dupes Hawk, who in 1980 was a nurse, and Villella, who worked directly with then Florida Governor Robert Graham, to recount their experiences as the first hosts to the thousands of Cubans landing on Key West. The authors also make use of interviews with volunteers, refugees, and Freedom Flotilla’s crew members. This book, then, comes as an original contribution to the literature on Mariel because it allows a retrospective look at the uncertainty of those first twenty days, not from the perspective of Cubans on the boats, but rather, from the point of view of American and Cuban-American volunteers inland. Florida and the Mariel Boatlift goes beyond analyzing once more the experience of the Marielitos, focusing rather on the emotions, preoccupations and the central role played by volunteers between April 21 and May 10, 1980 when sheltering, medical attention and the fear of conspiracy theories from fleeing Cubans became priorities for many Floridians.
As winner of the Florida Historical Society’s 2015 Stetson Kennedy Award and with a foreword by Robert Graham, this is a book evidently written for Floridians. I confess that, at times, it was difficult to read it from a neutral, academic standpoint. The authors’ intentions to portray Fidel Castro in a negative light become evident early in the book. For example, the first four chapters, or “Part I,” develop an introduction to the Mariel events by reexamining the first decade of the Cuban Revolution which, although smartly contextualized in greater arguments of the cold war, shows an evident preference for sources and accounts that ignore the positive aspects of the Cuban Revolution at that time. And this critical disconnection between the author’s selection of sources and the realities of revolutionary Cuba runs throughout the entire book. “Part I” thus revisits commonplaces such as Cuba’s expulsion from the Organization of American States (OAS), The Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as Cuba’s military involvement in Africa and Latin America—paying special attention to Castro’s pervasive role on the Sandinista movement, his involvement with Colombian drug trafficking (37- 41) and his “support of Puerto Rican terrorists” (27) during the 1970’s—mostly to underscore “Castro Anti-American Obsession,” which is precisely the title given to this first section of the book. According to this collective of authors, who also rely on interviews with former Cuban intelligence agents such as Genaro Pérez, the Mariel exodus was a result of Castro’s “Machinations of a Machiavellian” (24). When the Cuban leader plotted the exodus through Plan Alpha and Plan Bravo, two intelligence operations respectively directed at reducing the costs for the Soviet Union of the U.S embargo on Cuba, and weakening the solidarity and credibility of the Cuban exile community in South Florida (34-41).
The following 21 chapters (chapters 5-26), included in “Part II” and entitled “The First Days,” are an invaluable resource for readers seeking to understand how local private agencies and volunteers in South Florida provided the Marielitos with food, shelter and medical care. This section describes daily operations at Key West, but is also critical of the unprepared and bureaucratic systems put in place by the Carter Administration, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Opened on May 3, 1980 at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, FEMA was the main organization coordinating all efforts among U.S. Departments and Federal Agencies involved in screening the arrival of Cubans and their transportation to the first reception facility for refugees. This second section of the book is mostly based on the diaries kept by Dupes Hawk and Villella, as well as numerous interviews with other participants, who also kept diaries during the events. Among them were Governor Robert Graham and Colonel Robert F. Ensslin of the Florida National Guard, and Arturo Cobo, who was a medical doctor and became a supervisor of the volunteer efforts. These chapters are organized with admirable attention to detail, and contain a tremendously important archive of information from government files, meetings in Washington D.C and Eglin Air force Base, data on daily refugee arrivals, resources allocated, costs, etc. Chapter 15, “Thursday, May 1—The Sublime and the Ridiculous,” also includes 27 photographs mostly of refugees’ arrivals and processing.
This main section of the book steers away from the academic writing style of chapters 1-4 to offer instead a narrative reconstructed with dialogues, anecdotes, and a rather dramaturgical description of the events. It may appear that the goal was to make the book more attractive to the public, and not strictly directed at an academic audience. Emerging from this narrative, for instance, are characters like Arturo Cobo, who becomes a sort of self-appointed special agent charged with the task of unveiling the secret identities of alleged Cuban Intelligence agents, mental patients and convicted criminals, and boosting the refugees’ morale with speeches on freedom (119-120). Authors Dupes Hawk and Villella become characters in this story as well, and are referred to in the third person. The local newspaper Key West Citizen is a recurrent bibliographic source, which reinforces the sensationalist aspect of South Florida Press reports on the situation in Cuba. Here, the book fails to contextualize some events in a more historically verifiable light and validates these press reports, where, for instance, refugees leaving from Mariel harbor “made their ways into boats trying to avoid rabid dogs and gunfire” (125). As I mentioned earlier, this critical disconnection with historically reliable sources on the Cuban contexts of Mariel (the Peruvian embassy, the port of Mariel) is present throughout the book.
The strongest chapters come at the end, in “Part III” entitled “Mariel: The Legacy,” when the authors return to a less politically biased analysis of the socioeconomic impact of the Mariel Exodus in South Florida communities. For instance, Chapter 25 “May 1980 and Beyond—The End of the First Wave,” offers a solid discussion and summary of the main difficulties experienced by Marielitos in becoming assimilated into U.S society and among earlier Cuban immigrant communities; while Chapter 26, “The Mariel Boatlift’s Impacts,” provides a useful reflection on the Mariel influence on the U.S government’s response to the later Balseros Crisis of 1994. Finally, a postscript by Dupes Hawk and Villella reinforces the central motivations for the book: Florida and the Mariel Boatlift pays a deserved tribute to the many Floridian volunteers who complemented the dysfunctional response systems implemented by the Carter administration in 1980.
Beyond the value of this book as a contribution to the field of migration studies and Cuban studies, it becomes a relevant text in the context of the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States. The book is also pertinent to the current role of citizens, local communities and volunteer organizations in the social shaping of immigrant subjects, and within more encompassing, present-day debates on immigration in the United States. Just as this book has accomplished, future studies on Cuban migration must reconsider oral histories as key research sources, even when these personal stories must exist, paradoxically, in the excessively restricted language and format of academic publications. But perhaps Florida and the Mariel Boatlift of 1980: The First Twenty Days suggests that research practices and academic writing are evolving, along with more creative ways of reaching the reading public.
Authors: Kathleen Dupes Hawk, Ronald Villella, Adolfo Leyva de Varona, with Kristen Cifers
Publisher: University of Alabama Press; 1st Edition (July 30, 2014)
Hardcover: 360 pages
ISBN-10: 0817318372
ISBN-13: 978-0817318376