Word: mariel
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There were still more than 1,500 American boats of all sizes waiting last week with restless crews and anxious relatives in Cuba's single refugee embarkation port of Mariel, 27 miles west of Havana. Those skippers who are finally permitted to load and sail under Castro's slow and erratic selection of exiles will have greater U.S. protection on the sometimes perilous 110-mile voyage than those hapless earlier captains whose boats were swamped by high winds. The U.S. Navy has the landing ship Boulder and the amphibious assault ship Saipan patrolling the Florida Straits. The Saipan...
There were without question a certain number of criminals among the latest refugees. Cuban Americans who had sailed to Mariel on Castro's pledge that they could pick up relatives there sometimes returned tearfully in boats carrying some young toughs, old winos and even prostitutes (Castro had long insisted that his nation had rid itself of such vice). Armed Castro soldiers marched prisoners directly from jails to the boats, forcing them aboard whether they wanted to go or not. The American crews similarly had no choice but to accept them...
...captain $5,000 to take them to Cuba to fetch 17 members of their families. It was 18 miles from the Cuban coast that the first faint harbinger of trouble surfaced: a small runabout wallowing out of gas. We secured a line and towed it in. At Mariel, the harbor gradually took on the look of a water-bound tent city: laundry fluttering from the tethered craft; dejected skippers passing the waiting hours with poker games and the Cuban favorite, dominoes. To provide for the boatmen's diminishing supplies, the port had set up floating stores with exorbitant prices...
...hours ticked into days, life in Mariel harbor grew monotonous, strangely communal. On one shrimper, a woman gave birth; on another boat, a man suffered a heart attack. There was a mini-mutiny aboard one boat; the captain, impatient after five days, decided to return home, although he had a $38,000 charter to pick up refugees. An angry exile pulled out a pistol and held him in his cabin a full day. The Cuban military presence also became more visible. Soldiers patrolled the banks of the harbor with automatic rifles. Jumbo choppers whipped across...
After three days at Mariel, three of us took up the government's standing offer of a diversionary trip to the Triton Hotel in Havana. A Castro showpiece, the 22-story facility was turned into a luxury stockade for exiles willing to pay $44 a night. Guests were forbidden even to visit the oceanfront, and the crowded lobby became as squalid and confused a bedlam as the harbor was. Exiles lined up twelve deep to call loved ones in Havana over wall phones. Elevators broke down, and fistfights broke out. One Miami sales executive, clutching $8,000 in cash...