Cuban boat people mainly refers to refugees who flee Cuba by boat and ship to the United States. [1] [2]
Cuban boat people mainly refers to refugees who flee Cuba by boat and ship to the United States. [1] [2]
Migrants from Cuba to the United States since the time Fidel Castro rose to power under a Communist regime, have strongly influenced U.S foreign policy concerns through special humanitarian provisions of the law, which has led to various public sentiments. [3] [4] [5]
The first major wave of Cuban boat people came after the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which ended a "temporary exile status" period of commercial air travel between the United States and Cuba, which was positively received by the American public. This had seen a score of roughly 125,000 Cuban exiles reach U.S. soil that were to return upon an overthrown Castro regime that never happened.
During this time, the United States Coast Guard would make no attempt to turn back undocumented Cubans who were usually arriving in small boats. [3] Afterwards, Cubans who wished to come to the United States, would have to do so illegally by crossing the Florida Straits, or travel to other countries. Between 1962 and 1965 around 6,700 Cubans arrived in Florida in makeshift boats and other vessels. Emigrants were not given a process of migration until the Camarioca boatlift in 1965. [6]
As relations with Cuba slowly and steadily improved, a foreign policy that enacted a migration intervention to begin a 7-year program of passages called the Mariel boatlift, which was perceived to 'aid Cuba at ridding itself of undesirables', was met with little public support. After stages of these initial trips, Vice President Walter Mondale of the Carter administration served to justify this political position by stating there "is no better proof of the failure of Castro's revolution than the dramatic exodus which is currently taking place." [3] There was a growing stigma that surrounded marielitos as they were not viewed as romantically as the initial exiles. Even though President Jimmy Carter welcomed migrants in with open arms, [7] [8] it was not well received, as the image of a criminal grew rampant among the public eye, even though it were only about 10-20% of them. Castro had called these people the escoria ("scum") of his country: the "homosexuals, drug addicts, and gambling addicts". [8]
After years of decline since the Mariel boatlift, a few thousand Cuban boat people had made their way to the U.S. in 1993 after a rise from a few hundred in 1989. After riots ensued in Havana after threatening speeches made by Castro in 1994, he announced that any Cuban who wished to leave the island could. Around 35,000 rafters left the island after the announcement and 40,000 Cubans in total were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard that year. [4]
U.S. President Bill Clinton announced that any rafters intercepted at sea would be detained [9] [10] at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Around 31,000 rafters would be detained at the base, which became known as the Balsero crisis. [10] These "Balseros" (Spanish : rafters) as these boat people were known during this time, were known to wash up to shore at the Floridian coast on any conceivable thing that could float such as on wooden rafts or truck tires. [11]
A complaint was filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on July 19, 1994 regarding an old tugboat with 72 people on board, who were attempting to flee Cuba hours before dawn on July 13 [1994], who were attacked with pressurized water hose equipment just 7 miles off the coast of Cuba by 4 boats organized by the Cuban State. The boat named 13 de Marzo, eventually sank with a death toll of 41, which included 10 minors after the cries of women and children for it to stop were in vain. [12]
The Cuban government argued that 13 de Marzo was stolen at a dock and that authorities were attempting to intercept it. Days following the tragedy, the Cuban government were requested to recover the bodies from the bottom of the sea but declined citing the lack of experienced divers. Instead, a nonprofit organization named Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue), whose mission is to rescue boat people attempting to leave Cuba, made a request to the Cuban government to recover these bodies themselves but were denied. [12]
In an attempt to control the influx of boat people, the Clinton administration agreed to grant 20,000 visas annually for Cubans who wished asylum, which became known as the wet feet, dry feet policy. [13] [14]
Fearing that the end of the wet feet, dry feet policy was near after an announcement by Barack Obama in December 2014 regarding possible changes to the Cuban Adjustment Act, there was an increased concern by the U.S. Coast Guard about a possible spike in boat people, which they had intercepted an increased 117% more Cubans in 2014 than the previous year. [8]
In 2017, the wet feet, dry feet policy finally came to an end. Fewer Cubans attempted to make the journey to the United States. Those who manage to arrive in Florida would only be able to remain legally by applying for political asylum. [15]
It is estimated that thousands of Balseros has perished at sea in their flight away from Cuba.
Any failed attempt to cross the sea by raft can end in drowning (with the same characteristics about drowning prevention and drowning management).
The appearing of mobile phones with GPS and not-terrestrial satellite phones has increased the possibilities of survival, because they allow to call through the satellite to ask for help, even being in the middle of the sea at a long distance from the coast.
The Mariel boatlift was a mass emigration of Cubans who traveled from Cuba's Mariel Harbor to the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980. The term "Marielito" is used to refer to these refugees in both Spanish and English. While the exodus was triggered by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy, it followed on the heels of generations of Cubans who had immigrated to the United States in the preceding decades.
Brothers to the Rescue is a Miami-based activist nonprofit organization headed by José Basulto. Formed by Cuban exiles, the group is widely known for its opposition to the Cuban government and its former leader Fidel Castro. The group describes itself as a humanitarian organization aiming to assist and rescue raft refugees emigrating from Cuba and to "support the efforts of the Cuban people to free themselves from dictatorship through the use of active non-violence". Brothers to the Rescue, Inc., was founded in May 1991 "after several pilots were touched by the death of" fifteen-year-old Gregorio Perez Ricardo, who "fleeing Castro's Cuba on a raft, perished of severe dehydration in the hands of U.S. Coast Guard officers who were attempting to save his life."
The wet feet, dry feet policy or wet foot, dry foot policy was the name given to a former interpretation of the 1995 revision of the application of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that essentially says that anyone who emigrated from Cuba and entered the United States would be allowed to pursue residency a year later. Prior to 1995, the U.S. government allowed all Cubans who reached U.S. territorial waters to remain in the U.S. After talks with the Cuban government, the Clinton administration came to an agreement with Cuba that it would stop admitting people intercepted in U.S. waters.
The Cuban exodus is the mass emigration of Cubans from the island of Cuba after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Throughout the exodus, millions of Cubans from diverse social positions within Cuban society emigrated within various emigration waves, due to political repression and disillusionment with life in Cuba.
Balseros is a 2002 Catalan documentary co-directed by Carles Bosch and Josep Maria Domènech about Cubans leaving during the Período Especial.
Balseros were boat people who emigrated without formal documentation in self constructed or precarious vessels from Cuba to neighboring states including The Bahamas, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and, most commonly, the United States since the 1994 Balsero crisis and during the wet feet, dry feet policy.
Cuban immigration has greatly affected Miami-Dade County since 1959, creating what is known as "Cuban Miami." However, Miami reflects global trends as well, such as the growing trends of multiculturalism and multiracialism; this reflects the way in which international politics shape local communities.
Operation Sea Signal was a United States Department of Defense operation in the Caribbean in response to an influx of Cuban and Haitian migrants attempting to gain asylum in the United States. As a result, the migrants became refugees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The operation took place from May 1992 to February 1996 under Joint Task Force 160. The task force processed over 50,000 refugees as part of the operation. The U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy rescued refugees from the sea and other migrants attempted to cross the landmine field that then separated the U.S. and Cuban military areas. Soldiers, Airmen, and Marines provided refugee camp security at Guantanamo Bay, and ship security on board the Coast Guard cutters. This mass exodus led to the U.S. immigration implementation of the Wet Feet Dry Feet Policy. The mass Cuban exodus of 1994 was similar to the Mariel boat lift in 1980.
The Maleconazo was a protest on 5 August 1994, in which thousands of Cubans took to the streets around the Malecón in Havana to demand freedom and express frustration with the government. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba fell into a crippling economic crisis that had many citizens looking to flee the island. On the day of the uprising, the Cuban police blocked people from boarding tugboats leaving Havana, prompting thousands of citizens to storm the streets in the largest anti-government demonstration Cuba had seen since the Cuban Revolution. In the weeks following, President Fidel Castro quelled the frustration by opening the doors of the country and allowing Cubans to leave, which proved to have a significant impact on Cuba's relationship with the United States moving forward.
Marielitos is the name given to the Cuban immigrants that left Cuba from the Port of Mariel in 1980. Approximately 135,000 people left the country to the United States from April to September in what became known as the Mariel boatlift.
Freedom Flights transported Cubans to Miami twice daily, five times per week from 1965 to 1973. Its budget was about $12 million and it brought an estimated 300,000 refugees, making it the "largest airborne refugee operation in American history." The Freedom Flights were an important and unusual chapter of cooperation in the history of Cuban-American foreign relations, which is otherwise characterized by mutual distrust. The program changed the ethnic makeup of Miami and fueled the growth of the Cuban-American enclave there.
Lizbet Martínez is a Cuban violinist and English teacher at M.A. Milam K-8 Center.
Cuban immigration to the United States, for the most part, occurred in two periods: the first series of immigration of wealthy Cuban Americans to the United States resulted from Cubans establishing cigar factories in Tampa and from attempts to overthrow Spanish colonial rule by the movement led by José Martí, the second to escape from Communist rule under Fidel Castro following the Cuban Revolution. Massive Cuban migration to Miami during the second series led to major demographic and cultural changes in Miami. There was also economic emigration, particularly during the Great Depression in the 1930s. As of 2019, there were 1,359,990 Cubans in the United States.
The 1994 Cuban rafter crisis which is also known as the 1994 Cuban raft exodus or the Balsero crisis was the emigration of more than 35,000 Cubans to the United States via makeshift rafts. The exodus occurred over five weeks following rioting in Cuba; Fidel Castro announced in response that anyone who wished to leave the country could do so without any hindrance. Fearing a major exodus, the Clinton administration would mandate that all rafters captured at sea be detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
"Refugees as weapons" is a term used to describe a hostile government organizing, or threatening to organize, a sudden influx of refugees into another country or political entity with the intent of causing political disturbances in that entity. The responsible country usually seeks to extract concessions from the targeted country and achieve some political, military, and/or economic objective.
The emigration of Cubans, from the 1959 Cuban Revolution to October of 1962, has been dubbed the Golden exile and the first emigration wave in the greater Cuban exile. The exodus was referred to as the "Golden exile" because of the mainly upper and middle class character of the emigrants. After the success of the revolution various Cubans who had allied themselves or worked with the overthrown Batista regime fled the country. Later as the Fidel Castro government began nationalizing industries many Cuban professionals would flee the island. This period of the Cuban exile is also referred to as the Historical exile, mainly by those who emigrated during this period.
Haitian boat people are refugees from Haiti who flee the country by boat, usually to South Florida and sometimes the Bahamas.
A Cuban exile is a person who emigrated from Cuba in the Cuban exodus. Exiles have various differing experiences as emigrants depending on when they migrated during the exodus.
On April 1, 1980, six Cuban citizens made their way into the Peruvian embassy in Havana, Cuba, instigating an international crisis over the diplomatic status of around 10,000 asylum-seeking Cubans who joined them over the following days. The Peruvian ambassador, Ernesto Pinto Bazurco Rittler, spearheaded the effort to protect Cubans, most of whom were disapproved of by Fidel Castro’s regime and were seeking protection at the embassy. This episode marked the start of the Cuban refugee crisis, which was followed by a series of diplomatic initiatives between various countries in both North and South America that tried to organize the fleeing of people from the island of Cuba to the United States and elsewhere. The embassy crisis culminated with the substantial exodus of 125,266 Cuban asylum-seekers during the Mariel Boatlift.
The 2021–2023 Cuban migration crisis refers to an ongoing event characterized by a significant surge of Cuban nationals leaving the country, mostly to the United States, due to a combination of factors, including economic hardships and political uncertainties in their homeland. The crisis has resulted in a notable increase in Cuban encounters at the United States' southern border, with many attempting to cross into the country through both regular border crossings and sea arrivals, particularly in South Florida. This mass exodus has posed humanitarian, social, and political challenges for both Cuba and the U.S., prompting discussions and negotiations between the two nations to address the crisis and manage the flow of migrants. It has been described as the largest mass emigration in Cuba's history. It is estimated that nearly 500,000 Cubans have sought refuge into the United States between 2021-2023, accounting for nearly 5% of Cuba’s population. It is estimated that 60% of the new Cuban arrival between 2021-2023 (300,000), have settled in Miami-Dade County.