Word: boatlift
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...camaraderie. Many of the first Cubans who fled from Castro were middle class or even wealthy. Other Hispanics call them "the hads" (los tenia) because so many of their sentences supposedly begin "In Cuba, I had . . ." These Cubans in turn contrast themselves with others who fled in the 1980 boatlift from the port of Mariel, a minority of whom had been inmates of prisons or mental hospitals. The word Marielito, flung by one Cuban American at another, can be a fighting insult...
MIAMI--About 125,000 Cubans who fled their homeland in the 1980 "freedom flotilla" boatlift can apply for U.S. residency beginning today, and officials say they may eventually bring in more than 300,000 relatives who were left behind...
...Cubans came to Florida during the boatlift from the port of Mariel from April 15 to Oct. 15, 1980, after Cuban President Fidel Castro expressed his indifference to their leaving. They have since lived in a legal limbo, unable to bring their relatives here...
Among the more than 125,000 Cuban refugees who poured into South Florida in the 1980 boatlift from the port of Mariel were a few thousand "excludable aliens," many of whom had criminal records in Cuba. Four years later, 1,500 of them still await resolution of their cases, a mass of increasingly desperate men locked in the granite cell blocks of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Last Thursday the Marielitos rioted, setting mattresses and clothing afire amid shouts of "?Libertad...
...concern with image is understandable. Three years after the Mariel boatlift hit South Florida, the struggling refugees have a reputation that is decidedly mixed. The majority of Marielitos are hard-working and peaceful; some are former political prisoners and professionals. But an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Marielitos are violent criminals and former mental patients, forced by President Fidel Castro to leave the country. "Two groups were on the boatlift: those who came and those who were sent," explains Miami-based Painter Victor Gomez, who says he arranged to be falsely classified as a delinquent to join the exodus...