Word: boatlifts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fidel Castro who sundered the marriage of Juan and Carmela Perez (Alfred Molina and Anjelica Huston). It's the political amnesty and boatlift of 1980 that promises to reunite them. It's another Perez, no relation, who gives them a new life utterly unlike the one they yearned for all those years. Her name is Dottie. She is a hooker-turned-sugar-cane-cutter, and Marisa Tomei plays her, most wonderfully, as a force of nature, a small hurricane gusting along on her own headlong agenda, ripping the roofs off everyone's expectations...
...movie begins in 1980, during the so-called Mariel Boatlift, when Fidel Castro emptied his prisons of political prisoners, criminals, homosexuals and other undesirables and allowed them to go to Florida. Juan Raul Perez (Alfred Molina), a political prisoner, hasn't seen his wife Carmela in 20 years, ever since he sent her and their infant daughter to Miami. Memories of Carmela and his daughter kept him alive during his imprisonment, and he desperately looks forward to the reunion. Dorita Perez (Marisa Tomei), a young sugarcane worker, is obsessed with American popular culture, especially John Wayne and Elvis Presley...
Cuban negotiators began their third round of "migration" talks with U.S. officials in New York today amid worries that Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms' efforts to tighten a U.S. embargo could spark a new boatlift. But lead Cuban negotiator Ricardo Alarcon, at a meeting with TIME editors, flatly denied that Havana had threatened to encourage would-be refugees: "We haven't made the threat, Helms has made the threat." Even so, Alarcon said passage of a pending Helms bill -- a measure to punish foreigners doing business with Cuba -- could unleash "huge waves of rafters." He also attacked...
...troops in Panama City tightened security and mobilized anti-riot squads today as they prepared to repatriate 7,500 Cubans held there sincelast summer's boatlift crisis. It won't be easy: almost none of the refugees wants to return to the spartan U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and so far, at least 13 have scaled chain-link fences topped by razor wire surrounding the camps, two have drowned trying to swim the Panama canal and another dozen have attempted suicide. (Only 1,171 out of the nearly 8,500 originally brought there from Guantanamo have obtained visas...
...Fidel Castro can to little about it without employing coercive methods; he would be hard pressed today to organize the same type of "voluntary" mass demonstrations against of Cuban drafters that he did during the Mariel boatlift. In 1980, thousands turned out for fear of losing their jobs or being labeled counterrevolutionaries. Today, selling trinkets to tourists pays in dollars and state jobs pay in pesos; getting fired has become an asset, and some estimates put worker absenteeism as high...