Mirta Ojito, Finding Mañana

THE MAKINGS OF MARIEL
The groundwork for the boatlift was laid years before the first refugee
found freedom, and far from South Florida and Cuban Shores.
By Mirta Ojito

The Mariel boatlift began for me at dawn, April 23, 1980, when I woke up to the sounds of my aunt's sobs at the foot of the sofa bed I shared with my sister in our tiny Havana apartment."

You are going to el norte," my aunt, standing next to my mother, said that morning. A sharp pain pierced my heart as I thought, "Today is the day I leave Cuba forever." I was 16 years old, and I understood then that a heartache is not just a romantic metaphor but a real physical phenomenon, the roots of which may have something to do with the fact that a teenager who holds her breath for a long time may stop the flow of blood to vital organs. Not long enough to die, mind you -- though I can see how one could -- but long enough to cause some long-lasting damage. The pain, somewhat diminished through the years, is still there.

I didn't know it that morning, but several boats had already arrived in Key West loaded with refugees, and hundreds more were beginning to crowd the waters of the Mariel harbor. By the time the boatlift was called to a halt five months later, more than 125,000 men, women and children -- from poets and carpenters to housewives and thieves -- had left Cuba. We joined them on May 11, the day that broke all previous records of arrivals in South Florida: 4,588 refugees aboard 58 vessels, almost double the number of Cubans who had arrived in the monthlong 1965 Camarioca boatlift.

Like any historical event worth retelling, the Mariel boatlift was not conceived or carried out by powerful politicians or skilled diplomats. It was not a Washington or a Havana ploy but an event that welled up from below, brought about by men who, guided by religion, politics and even childhood traumas, managed to trigger a chain reaction that, in the end, led to the biggest exodus this hemisphere has had in recent history. Yes, Castro opened the port of Mariel; yes, President Jimmy Carter embraced, if grudgingly, the thousands of Cubans who arrived. But the doors of Mariel and Key West were pried open by the relentless power of a people intent on changing their fate, and their power was unleashed by a set of circumstances that no one could have envisioned.

It wasn't until recently, while researching a book about the boatlift, that I realized Mariel did not begin the day I first heard about it, or on the night of April 21, 1980, when the first two boats carrying 48 bewildered but jubilant refugees arrived in Key West. It did not even begin on April 1 of that year, when a desperate driver crashed his bus against the fence of the Peruvian Embassy, setting off the detonator that led to the boatlift.
Mariel, in fact, began three years earlier and far from South Florida and Cuban shores.
It began with a phone call to an empty hotel room in Panama City in the early morning hours of Aug. 22, 1977. The call, which was eventually transferred to the hotel's restaurant, was for Bernardo Benes, then a prominent 42-year-old Miami banker with ties to the White House.

Benes was having breakfast with his wife and children on the first day of what was to be a vacation when the call came. On the line was Alberto Pons, an acquaintance in the guayabera business. "There are some Cubans here who want to meet with you," Pons said and hastened to add that the Cubans were not from Miami but from the island. Benes hesitated briefly but said yes. That night he dined on lobster, fresh sea bass and imported beers in an oceanfront restaurant with Pons and three of Fidel Castro's most trusted men: Jorge Luis Padrón, Amado Padrón and Antonio "Tony" de la Guardia.
That decision -- Benes' decision to talk to Castro's men -- had a dramatic impact on Cuba's and South Florida's history. For if Benes, or anyone finding himself in his position, had refused the invitation to chat that night, there would have been no visits of exiles to Cuba in 1978 and 1979, no overwhelming desperation on the island to get out, no embassy break-ins, no Peruvian Embassy gate crashers, no 10,000 people crowded in the ambassador's garden clamoring for freedom. And, of course, no boatlift.

Benes was not the first, or even the only, person contacted by the Cuban government in the late 1970s. He was, simply, the most gullible. Or the most courageous. That he had been chosen by Cuba to negotiate tapped into Benes' healthy ego, as well as his strong Jewish faith and sense of civic duty. Like Moses, Benes thought, he would be the one to lead his people out of the desert. Or, in this case, out of a once-prosperous island that was rapidly deteriorating into a ruined Communist country.

By the end of 1978, the so-called diálogo was in place, and Cubans from the United States and the island were talking, among other things, about family visits. In 1979, more than 3,000 political prisoners were freed from Castro's prisons and about 110,000 Cuban exiles had returned to their country for weeklong visits.

It is hard to overstate the significance of those visits. Families were reunited and dollars poured into the island. Returning exiles, who had up to then been called gusanos, or worms, because they had "abandoned" the revolution, became mariposas, butterflies.
In a society long denied the smallest privileges, exiles were like the Three Kings from the Orient bearing gifts. Jeans fascinated the young and old alike, Hitachi rice cookers made working moms deliriously happy, Gillette razor blades brought tears to the eyes of many grown men. Suddenly, habaneros looked clean, groomed and buoyant.
It wasn't long before Cubans began asking themselves one question: Why can't we have more and, more importantly, why can't we go get it ourselves?

Not knowing where to turn, Cubans began to hijack boats and seek asylum in embassies. On April 1, 1980, Héctor Sanyustiz, a 31-year-old unemployed bus driver, crashed a borrowed bus carrying three other people through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy, in Havana's exclusive Miramar neighborhood. Cuban guards at the embassy opened fire, wounding Sanyustiz and one of his friends. In the shower of bullets, one guard was killed. The government blamed the gate-crashers and demanded that the Peruvians turn them in.

But Sanyustiz and his friends were protected by Ernesto Pinto-Bazurco Rittler, a German-born Peruvian diplomat with a profound distrust of men in uniforms. The men, a woman and the one child in the bus remained under Peruvian protection. Angry, Castro ordered all Cuban guards removed, leaving the embassy open and inviting.

In about 36 hours, 10,856 people had taken refuge there. Many more had packed their bags and were hitchhiking or walking across the island to reach the embassy. On the grounds, people were trampling all over the ambassador's gardens, sleeping on the lawn, using the thighs of strangers as pillows. There were rumors that someone had killed and cooked the ambassador's cat; people were tearing leaves from the trees and eating them. The international press congregated in Havana, and the pictures beamed to the world were devastating: The people of Cuba preferred to eat pets and shrubbery rather than live in a Communist paradise. Clearly, Castro needed a plan, and quickly.

Enter Napoleón Vilaboa, a car salesman and Bay of Pigs veteran who was then traveling to Cuba often to negotiate the release of the handful of Bay of Pigs veterans still imprisoned. He happened to be in Havana during the takeover of the embassy and to have friends in high places, mainly René Rodríguez, who was then in charge of the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos, which supervised Cuba's relations with the exile community. Through Rodríguez, Vilaboa met with Castro and, during two meetings in the Riviera hotel, they agreed on details of the boatlift. Vilaboa wanted family reunification (he had left his toddler daughter in Cuba in 1960 when he went into exile in Mexico); Castro wanted to get rid of malcontents. A deal was struck: For each embassy refugee, exiles who traveled to the island to pick them up could bring one relative back. Vilaboa returned to Miami with orders to wait for Castro's word.

When it came just a few days later, Vilaboa took to the Miami airwaves and urged exiles to follow him to Cuba. On April 19, leading a convoy of 42 ships, Vilaboa sailed to Cuba.
Mariel was on.

Two days later, when the first boats returned, the Carter administration was caught off guard. Though it immediately declared the boatlift unlawful, few paid attention. The penalties were not strong enough, and the pull of family 90 miles away was impossible to ignore. White House and State Department officials considered a number of options to stop the boatlift, including taking the refugees to Guantánamo and pushing them back to Cuban territory through the fence. The idea, along with any other military action, was quickly discarded. It came down to this: Coast Guard officials told the White House that the only way to stop the boatlift was through the use of force. No one in an administration that prided itself on its support of human rights was about to approve any plan that included the shooting -- or even the intimidation -- of innocent refugees fleeing a Communist country. The Coast Guard was instead instructed to save as many lives as possible. The mission was accomplished: Only about two dozen people died in the boatlift.

It wasn't until May 14, 20 days after the boatlift had started, that the Carter administration managed to come up with a comprehensive plan to put an end to Mariel. By then, more than 50,000 Cubans had arrived, increasing the population of the city of Miami by more than 10 percent.

It was Castro who stopped the boatlift. On Sept. 26, a Cuban army colonel called the captains of the 150 remaining boats ashore and, without preambles, announced that Mariel was closed. Both Cuba and the United States were exhausted and embarrassed by the boatlift. No reference to its end appeared in the Cuban press the next day.
The official silence remains. Though Castro in recent years has opened up about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, there has been no public forum to address the Mariel boatlift. Last year, while researching my book, I repeatedly asked the Cuban Interests Section in Washington for a visa. Though I was never formally denied, the visa never arrived.

When a reporter from The Miami Herald visited the port of Mariel five years ago, few in that town wanted to talk about the thousands of people who had passed through there on their way to freedom. One man seemed puzzled that anybody would want to know about them. After all, he said, they had left, and for those who remained behind, "they might as well be ghosts."

Mirta Ojito is a former reporter for The Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald. Her book, Finding Mañana, will be published April 11.