El Mariel...

(picture) Boat full of Cubans escaping the communist totalitarianism of the Castro regime, May 1980.

We were going to come to the United States by air travel after quickly getting U.S. Visas, and even had plane tickets on hand, all due to who my father was, and all the sacrifice and intelligence work he had done for the American government. But as we were in the process of getting the final authorization from the Cuban government to leave the island, the Peruvian embassy and subsequent 1980 Mariel exodus occurred. The Cuban government immediately stopped all exits from the country. But then announced that the only exit allowed was through the Mariel Boatlift17. My parent’s desperation grew, being so close to be able to leave, but now seeing us stuck again. Therefore my parents, along with my paternal Grandmother Carmen decided to risk it all and leave Cuba through the Boatlift. 

And so the day of our departure came.  It happened to be a sunny day, which is perhaps the clearest memory I have of that day. By this time in May and late spring our garden at the front of the house had already been giving flowers, and that day, the Rosal (rose bushes) by our entrance had several roses blooming. At the house there were several family members saying goodbyes, with the inseparable crying that always go along with painful separations. Most of the adults knew it would be years (if ever) that we would see each other again.

            For us kids, this was a time when we were sort of “out of it”, almost in a daze. My brother Leo with his legs and feet almost rotten by now was sitting and waiting for the moment when we had to leave. Having lived all our lives close to each other, and as you saw in the previous pages, lived in the “relative” comfort and security of our family, this was a traumatic moment. The next few days everything would be kind of hazy, as we were experiencing traumatic moments, and our lives would change forever. There are things that I will never forget, and which I write about here, but overall my memories are not as sharp as it is normally for me. My mother was especially distraught, for grandmother Hortensia was very sad, knowing that her daughter and grand-kids may never see her again. Mother and grandmother had been very close through the years, and grandmother had basically been my brother and I’s mother, so this was a very difficult moment in our lives.

            It must be remembered that at this time in world history, the Cold War between the Democratic West and Soviet Communism was in full swing, with no end in sight. The Soviets and their satellite nations such as Cuba were deeply engaged in wars of expansion18, for example the many guerrilla wars to spread communism all over the world, and even in a direct invasion (by the USSR itself) of Afghanistan just a few months earlier. Families that had escaped communist nations, and who had left family members behind would spend many years before it would be possible to visit and see their relatives again. So this was very much in the minds of all the adults as the last good-byes were being said.

            Then came time to leave. We were not carrying any luggage, for the orders of the Cuban communist government to anyone leaving were “you leave just with the clothes you have on”… nothing of value, nothing at all. Earlier that morning, my father had dropped our paternal family home keys at the local CDR or Comite de Defensa de la Revolucion (Committee of Defense of the Revolution), the local communist party snitch’s house on the block. All our possessions were left inside the house… everything; furniture, silverware, clothing, memories… everything. The government would later give possession of the house and everything in it to someone deemed worthy by them.  

            A friend of the family, who had one of those old 1950’s American cars (can’t remember what model it was) that still ran in the city as a means of personal transportation would give us a ride part of the way. The car pulled up to the curb right in front of Grandmother Hortensia’ s house, and so it was time for everyone to give those last hugs and kisses. We got Leo into the car first, for the conditions of his legs were really bad, then the rest of us got in it. The family friend was going to take us to one of the places where the government had set up pickup/rally points, which were set up in different parts of the city. There, we would turn over all documents like IDs, ration cards, etc. to the government. Following that, we would board government buses, which would then take us to Mariel harbor, approximately 60 Kilometers (about 38 miles) west of La Habana. As I got in the car in the back seat I looked one last time out the windows at my Grandmother and the other family members that were gathered to say good-bye, not knowing that it would be the last time I would ever see her alive. And as the car begun to pull away from our home, all of a sudden I remember having a deep feeling of sadness engulfed me. Little did I know what lay ahead of us.

         During this whole period of time in the city there had been a lot of “spontaneous people demonstrations” against the “gusanos”, a derogatory name given by the communists to people like us who were leaving, and which literally means worms. These mobs (which in a totalitarian system have the blessings, and even the support of the government) would gather and attack people like us by throwing eggs, etc. In several instances things had gotten violent, and some people who were leaving were brutally beaten by the mobs, This was especially true for those arriving in normally scheduled city buses to those rally points the communist government had set up to pick up people. But our hope was to be as less conspicuous as possible, and thanks to this friend of the family giving us a ride in his personal car, to arrive at the rally point out of sight, and glare of attention of these mobs. We hoped to slide by these people, and get into the government buses leaving for the port of Mariel undisturbed as much as possible.

            The ride in the car to the drop off point was quiet, with very little small talk, each person deep in his or her thoughts.  As we got close to the government rally point, dad asked our family friend to drop us off about half a block away, so we could then walk like casual people to the pickup area. And since we were not carrying any luggage, we could look like just a family who had come over to see what was happening. Dad picked up my brother in his arms, and all of us started walking slowly towards the rally point. The harassing mobs were in full swing, screaming obscenities, and acting aggressively toward the lines of people waiting to get into buses leaving for the port of Mariel and the boats.


          Then, luck had it that a new bus full of people from the city arrived at that moment. As the harassing mobs shifted their attention from the people in the lines to the newly arriving city bus, we sped up, and made our way into the area where the lines of exodus people were waiting to board the buses to the port of Mariel. After waiting in a line for a little bit, we then got the front of the line where we had to surrender all our Cuban documentations, including all our “Carne De Identidad”, plus all the paperwork, American Visas, Cuban Passports, and plane tickets we had… all the things dad had paid for with his inheritance money from Grandfather. Then they let us on the bus.

            I remember the bus was a typical soviet made bus of those years. The ride was in the countryside west of the La Habana, with the sun now beginning to set as it does in the afternoon. It was really crowded, with many people standing. Memories of our arrival at a place called El Mosquito (the mosquito) near the port of Mariel is even fuzzier. I remember that they put us in a large wooden building, which was sort of a large storage facility of some sort, with a tin roof. The building was long, and had an open center section, with sectional areas, or pens like where you put livestock to the sides of the long center area. On one side of the building, the side towards which we were led to, where many families; women, their kids, their husbands, grandmothers and grandfathers, all grouped almost like in a concentration camp. The only places anyone could sit down were on the floor, and/or on some long and narrow “banquitos” or benches made out of wood, which were about six feet long, but only a foot wide.


            On the other side, the sectional areas across from us were enclosed in chain link fences with locked access doors, and guarded by armed guards. Inside these pens were full of all kinds of questionable characters; many that anyone could tell were very rough individuals. It is well known that the communist dictatorship emptied a lot of the jails in the island, and this was the first place they were brought to after leaving the jails. I do remember my mother was worried about having those people so close to us, and it would not help matters that we would spend the entire night in that place. Dad would not sleep much that night, as he stood guard and watched over us. We slept sitting on the benches, bended over and resting our heads on mom’s legs... that was our night at El Mosquito.

            Early in the morning the next day, Cuban military officers came into the building, and begun to select groups of families to follow them to the boats. They would pick a few families, and then follow them with a large amount of the prisoners from the enclosed sectional areas. We boarded our boat about 7:30 in the morning, and the boat departed at about 8:00 AM.

            We left Mariel on a Trawler type fishing boat early in the morning of the month of May 1980 around eight o’clock as part of the “flotilla of the day” returning to the United States, overloaded with more people than what the boat could carry. A typical shrimp boat has a crew of just a few people, yet the boat we were in had over 150 persons on board. The reason for that was that the Cuban tyranny forced the boat captains to take more people than what they should have had. They also decided on what kind of make up the group of people was going to be. In most cases the group of people would be a few families, augmented by a bunch of single men and/or ex-prisoners, and/or “undesirables” as the tyranny was calling them, such as homosexuals, etc. And so we began our trip to Key West.

            The trip lasted 14 hours due to the seas being a bit choppy. In addition, the trawler we were on was also towing a broken small American yacht that was part of the Boatlift flotilla, but that had broken down in Cuban waters, and could not make it back on its own to America. The faster boats that had left the port of Mariel with us in the flotilla formation had gone full speed as soon as they hit open waters, and left us alone towing the broken small yacht, and struggling in the heavy seas. On our boat, the Captain had most of the women and children inside the captain’s control room, and the rest of us, including my father and I both were outside on the deck, on the port side, aft end of the boat.

Because we were all the way in the back of the boat, on the port side (left side), and as the trawler galloped on the big waves up and down, I got really seasick. My ordeal lasted from the beginning of the trip, all the way to the end of it, yes… the entire 14 hours. I was bent over the side of the boat vomiting. My father, seasick himself, was holding me by the belt of the shorts I was wearing at the time. He slipped his hand between my belt and my shorts, and held me that way tightly, while I was bent over the side vomiting. He was afraid I was going to go over the side at any minute, but he could not pull me back into the boat, for I could not stop vomiting, and otherwise I would have spilled the insides of my stomach over everyone in that cramped deck.

During the middle of the voyage, and in between my vomit attacks I do remember getting glimpses of American Coast Guard ships. A couple of times the Coast Guard ships came close to us to see how we were doing, and I guess after seeing we were OK, and that we could continue on would peel off and go check on other vessels. It was the first time for me seeing American things… anything American for real, and to me they seemed like guardian angels watching over us. But then the exaltation would be over, and I would bend down again over the side of the trawler… and resume my stomach ordeal. My father held on to me all the 14 hours as I was bent over the side of that boat, me taking breaks now and then to drink some water, and then bending over the side again to continue vomiting. At the end of the trip, I didn’t even have stomach acid left to throw up; all I was doing was dry hives. 

We arrived in Key West pass ten o’clock at night, and upon our boat’s arrival to the pier we had been directed to dock in by the US Coast Guard, we were greeted by the American military and the Red Cross, who were waiting on the pier as the overloaded boats came in. Upon seeing the men in green camouflage uniforms, and speaking Spanish, mom got hysterical, for she thought that somehow the Cuban tyranny had turned the boat around, and that we were back in Cuba. Her fear was that they were going to round us all up, and kill us all in some secret location like the tyranny has been known to do. She was almost hysterical and delusional. Given the almost total ignorance of how life and things were here in the United States, plus the many bad experiences we have had with the Cuban tyranny her fears were understandable.

What she didn’t know is that among the many soldiers and Marines the US military had deployed in the Mariel operation in Key West, the American military had also stationed Spanish speaking soldiers on the docks to help the new arrivals disembark and proceed to the buses to Miami as smoothly as possible. And so of course some of those soldiers were Hispanics and perhaps a few of them Cuban Americans as well. But in her head the whole thing was one big communist trick and for a while she didn’t want to get off the boat. Finally dad, who had left me laying down on the deck of the boat so he could go and check on mom and grandmother and my brother convinced her that things were OK, and that we were indeed in the U.S.

And so we had arrived to Liberty at last.  Dad left mom, grandmother, and my brother, for mom took care of helping grandmother and my brother get off the boat, and he returned to the rear of the vessel where I was, to help me disembark. Since I was so weak that it was impossible for me to even stand up, he picked me up in his arms, and took me off the boat. We were then checked quickly by the Red Cross to see if we were OK, and after giving us the all clear to proceed, we were directed to board Greyhound buses that would take us to Miami and the Orange Bowl stadium for temporary housing. I don’t remember much of those hours coming off the boat, or our trip on the bus to The Orange Bowl in Miami, which lasted all night. I was very weak and dehydrated, and even up to this day the events of that night; practically everything is still a blur to me.

One good thing that happened right away, besides having arrived here in the United States was that my asthma disappeared completely right after that awful boat trip. My mother used to say that perhaps the clean sea air had “cleaned me out.” And given all the vomiting I had done all those 14 hours, in which I basically puked my brains out perhaps she was right. The only sure thing was that for many years after Mariel I didn’t have another asthma attack again. And in many ways it was like if I never had asthma.

(Generations, The Journey of a Family Throughout the Ages" is available as an eBook, and as a hard copy at Amazon)

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