To promote a peaceful transition to a Cuba that respects human rights
and political and economic freedoms
How the Castro regime uses Cuban migrants as political weapons to compel changes in U.S. policy, and seeded one outflow with murderers and dangerous criminals
CNN reported on May 30, 2021 that "the search for 10 Cuban migrants, who were declared missing after their boat flipped over off the coast of Key West, Florida, last week has been suspended, according to the US Coast Guard (USCG)."
Coastguard conducts search and rescue for Cuban migrants
The same CNN article cites a "worsening economic climate" and Cubans fleeing the communist nightmare in Cuba, but that is not a change from the last four years. South Florida Sun Sentinel journalists Eileen Kelley and Austen Erblat on February 13, 2021 reported "that over the last four months, the Coast Guard has stopped 58 Cubans before they reached Florida, marking an uptick in the number of at-sea interceptions. It’s only February, just a few months into the fiscal year, and that number exceeds the 49 Cubans who were stopped at sea during a 12-month period the previous fiscal year."
The COVID-19 pandemic and economic sanctions were already doing their worst in April 2020, and prior migration crises, such as Mariel in 1980, occurred after years of economic sanctions being loosened. What changed between May 2020 and May 2021 to account for the new and troubling exodus of Cuban refugees? The outgoing Obama Administration further gutted the Cuban Adjustment Act, and Cuba experts claimed that it would end the phenomenon of Cuban rafters, and when Trump took office on January 20, 2017 the numbers dwindled.
A Democratic Administration enters the White House and there is an uptick in the number of Cuban migrants trying to enter the United States. This was the case during the Carter, Clinton and Obama Administrations. It also appears to be occurring now with the Biden Administration.
Kelly M. Greenhill, an American political scientist and an associate professor at Tufts University, may have answered the question back in 2002 with her paper "Engineered Migration and the Use of Refugees as Political Weapons: A Case Study of the 1994 Cuban Balseros Crisis" that described how a pattern was first established in the Camarioca crisis during the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration by the Castro regime using "coercive engineered migration" to create instability in the United States.
In September 1965, Castro announced that any Cuban who had relatives living in the US could leave the island via the port of Camarioca, located on Cuba’s northern shore. Castro also invited exiles to come by sea to pick up family members who had been stranded on the island, following the suspension of commercial flights between the two countries during the Cuban Missile Crisis three years earlier. Two days later he began offering two flights daily from Havana to Miami. ... By unleashing his “demographic bomb,” Castro demonstrated to the US government he could disrupt its immigration policy and the opening of the port at Camarioca carried with it a “lightly-veiled” threat, namely that Havana, not Washington, controlled Florida’s borders. Almost overnight, and with little warning, the Castro regime had presented the US with a major refugee crisis. President Johnson initially responded with contempt to Castro’s move, making a speech before the Statue of Liberty in October 1965, in which he proclaimed that the US would continue to welcome Cubans seeking freedom “with the thought that in another day, they can return to their homeland to find it cleansed of terror and free from fear.” However, after the numbers of those leaving the island began to escalate, Johnson quickly changed tack and began a series of secret negotiations with Castro. The result, announced the following month, was a “Memorandum of Understanding,” a formal agreement that established procedures and means for the movement of Cuban refugees to the US.
Unlike the Johnson Administration that had taken a relatively strong position on Cuba advocating containment with military force, the James E. Carter Administration had been pursuing an agenda of normalizing relations with Cuba that began in 1977, but this rapprochement did not lead to a better outcome for the United States in 1980.
Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Fidel Castro's former bodyguard, wrote a tell all book published in May 2014 of his time with the dictator titled, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo that included a remarkable passage on the events of Mariel. Brian Latell, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and academic at the University of Miami, in a June 8, 2015 op-ed in The Miami Herald reviewing the above book touched on how Castro dealt with the Mariel boatlift during the Carter presidency:
For me, Sánchez’s most appalling indictment of Fidel concerns the chaotic exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans in 1980 from the port of Mariel. Most who fled were members of Cuban exile families living in the United States. They were allowed to board boats brought by relatives and to make the crossing to South Florida.
But many of the boats were forcibly loaded by Cuban authorities with criminals and mentally ill people plucked from institutions on the island. Few of us who have studied Fidel Castro have doubted that it was he who ordered those dangerous Cubans to be exported to the United States. He has persuaded few with his denials of any role in the incident. Yet Sánchez adds an appalling new twist to the saga. We learn that prison wards and mental institutions were not hurriedly emptied, as was previously believed. Sánchez reveals that Castro insisted on scouring lists of prisoners so that he could decide who would stay and who would be sent to the United States. He ordered interior minister Jose Abrahantes to bring him prisoner records.
Sánchez was seated in an anteroom just outside of Fidel’s office when the minister arrived. The bodyguard listened as Fidel discussed individual convicts with Abrahantes.
“I was present when they brought him the lists of prisoners,” Sánchez writes, “with the name, the reason for the sentence, and the date of release. Fidel read them, and with the stroke of a pen designated which ones could go and which ones would stay. ‘Yes’ was for murderers and dangerous criminals; ‘no’ was for those who had attacked the revolution.” Dissidents remained incarcerated.
A number of the criminal and psychopathic marielitos put on the boats to Florida went on to commit heinous crimes — including mass murder, rape, and arson.
Professor Greenhill documented that, "three more months would pass before the [Carter Administration] made the kind of proposal the NSC had rejected as too placatory the previous spring, namely that the migration talks would be linked to a future (broader) agenda." In the abstract for her paper the consequences of both Camaroica and Mariel were brought to bear again on the Clinton Administration in the 1994 rafter crisis. "It argues that Castro launched the crisis in an attempt to manipulate US fears of another Mariel, and in order to compel a shift in US policy, both on immigration and on a wider variety of issues. The paper further contends that from Castro’s perspective, this exercise in coercion proved a qualified success – his third such successful use of the Cuban people as an asymmetric political weapon against the US. In addition, the paper argues that Castro’s success was predicated on his ability to internationalize his own domestic crisis and transform it into an American domestic political and foreign policy crisis."
Every administration that engaged the Castro regime and made unilateral concessions in good faith (Carter, Clinton, and Obama) saw migration waves used against them to coercively change U.S. policy towards Cuba. Administrations that took a harder line did not face these problems on their watch ( Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump). It appears that the Castro regime perceives good faith measures to improve relations as a sign of weakness that they have repeatedly exploited. During these Republican Administrations the Castro regime feared that the consequences of using migration as a weapon could elicit a harsh response, and they did not endure a migration crisis.
The Obama administration secretly negotiated with the Castro regime and did not consult with Congress in restricting the Cuban Adjustment Act, which is US law. This is the second time that it has happened. From 1966 until 1995 the Cuban Adjustment meant that if a Cuban touched US territorial waters the Coast Guard would pick them up and take them to shore and they would be eligible to obtain residency. The Clinton Administration in 1995 reinterpreted the law to mean that Cubans had to touch land (dry feet) or be deported if caught in the water (wet feet). The Obama Administration in January 2017 re-interpreted the law a step further saying that all Cubans who arrive in the US without a visa would be deported. This is a narrower interpretation of the law by the Executive branch without consulting with Congress.
Cubans, despite the rhetoric, did not have a special privilege but rather special circumstances that led to the Cuban Adjustment Act that unfortunately are not historically unique. The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act was not the first such measure, the Hungarian Escape Act of 1958 granted Hungarians refugee status. Nor was it the last, the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act of 1975 granted refugees from the conflict in South East Asia special status.
The Castro regime continues to harm Cubans, seeks to negatively impact the United States and the immigration policy instituted by the Obama Administration, left in place by the Trump Administration, may create chaos in South Florida during the Biden Administration because Cubans will continue to flee, but now the Castro regime, as it had done before, will use migrants as weapons, but unlike during the 1980 Mariel Crisis, and 1994 rafter crisis Cuban refugees will go underground to avoid being deported. Also, the failure to control the U.S. border leaves it open to drug trafficking, of which the Castro regime has a long history of complicity with major cartels.
Professor Greenhill in 2016 gave a presentation with a focus on immigration used as a weapon to destabilize the European Union, but her analysis should be looked at by Cuba policy experts to better understand immigration challenges. She did mention in her presentation that in 1980 the top person in the Carter Administration tasked with tackling with the unfolding Mariel crisis did not know that Castro had done this before in 1965 in Camarioca. It is important for policy makers to know their history, and understand how the Castro regime operates to better counter it.
Sending a clear message to Havana that another engineered mass migration is viewed as a security threat, raising the cost to the regime playing this game, and backing it up with credible consequences are the best ways to avoid another Mariel or rafter crisis, and protect U.S. interests.
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