Mariel@40: An Introduction

Abstract

The Mariel Boatlift of 1980 has not wanted for scholarly, journalistic, and artistic attention over the years. Yet, forty years later, there is much about this traumatic episode in Cuban, Cuban American, Caribbean, U.S. immigration, and South Florida history that remains underexplored or simply unsaid. In this introduction, issue co-editors Michael J. Bustamante and Lillian Manzor describe the aims and contents of this special issue, as well as its origins in the 2020 virtual program El Efecto Mariel: Before, During, and After, at the University of Miami's Cuban Heritage Collection. They also contextualize its contributions considering previous scholarship. For U.S. immigration policy, race/ethnic relations in South Florida, and Cuban American politics, the multiple, intersecting legacies of Mariel remain highly germane for understanding various aspects of the present. And in Cuba, too, the legacy of Mariel remains painfully alive, as practices of political exclusion associated with 1980-e.g. the "act of repudiation"-have been revived as a prominent feature of Cuban political conflict since 2020.

“We Are Happy Here”: Creating Communist Cuba and the Mariel Crisis of 1980

“…In looking back at these policies, recent scholarship reveals just how inextricable economic factors were and remain from the political system that created them: it also leaves little doubt that citizens' disgust with their lack of control over policy making, increasing ability to gain knowledge of the outside world independently of the state, and government demands for ideological homogeneity went hand in hand with the 1 Although the Cuban state nationalized the economy in fall 1960 and Fidel Castro famously announced he was a "Marxist Leninist" in December 1961, the Communist Party did not officially govern Cuba until 1965 when all structural and ideological remnants of Fidel Castro's own 26th of July Movement were dissolved. decision to flee (Sierra Madero 2019;Sierra Madero 2022, 431-486;Bustamante and Lambe 2019, 244-274;Bustamante and Manzor 2021).…”

Making Miami’s History and Present More Accessible

“…1 For instance, many people's understandings of the Mariel boatlift of 1980 A and the thousands of Cubans who entered the United States during one of the most controversial episodes of U.S. immigration history often originate from fictional retellings and misinformation, such as the storyline of the 1983 film Scarface that starred Al Pacino as Cuban mafioso Tony Montana. While the film itself acknowledges in one of the opening scenes that the majority of Cubans who entered the United States during this period were not criminals, Montana's violent storyline helped perpetuate the myths of criminality, deviancy, and undesirability that many people still associate with this episode in Cuba-U.S. history-one that is still frequently cited as one of the United States' most notorious immigration blunders (De Palma, 1983;Bustamante & Manzor, 2021).…”