The Mariel Boat-Lift
The Mariel Boat-lift was perhaps Fidel Castro's cleverest exploit in the service of the revolution. Taking Uncle Sam up on his offer to allow some Cubans to leave for Miami, he simultaneously emptied the Mariel mental asylum for the criminally insane of its burgeoning masses. leaving it to our generous nation to attend to their welfare. Hunter Thompson recorded the stateside consequences of Fidel's strategic end-run of our immigration policy in a paragraph that showcases Hunter's fanatical dedication to the economical use of periods, which after all, only stop the action:
HST wrote:
The raw elements of the story are (in no special order): sex, violence, greed, treachery, big money, fast boats, blue water, Cuba, CIA politics, Fidel Castro's sense of humor, one murder, several rapes, heavy gambling, massive drug smuggling, naked women, mean dogs, total breakdown of law and order, huge public cash transactions, the Iran Hostage Crisis, overloaded boats catching fire and sinking at night in the Gulf Stream, the nervous breakdown of a U.S. Coast Guard commander, fast cars running roadblocks on Highway AlA, savage brawls in Key West bars, Boog Powell, sunken treasure, wild runs on the ocean at night, personality disintegration, desperate wagering on NBA playoff (TV) games and I980 presidential primaries, a grim and violent look at American politics in the eighties, dangerously tangled love affairs, warm nights and full moons, one hurricane, stolen credit cards, false passports, deep-cover CIA agents, the U.S. Marines, a jailbreak in Key West at the peak of the refugee invasion, political corruption in South Florida, the emergence of Miami as the Hong Kong of the Western World, Colombian coke dealers, crooked shrimp-fishermen, scuba diving with shotguns (powerheads, mounted on spears) ... and all the other aspects of high crime, bad craziness, and human degradation that emerged from that strange and shameful episode in our history.
The Mariel Boat-Lift
by Hunter S. Thompsonfrom Songs of the Doomed, Copyright 1990 by Hunter S. Thompson
“The Silk Road” is a story about people who got caught in the fast
and violent undercurrents and, finally, the core of the action of the great Cuba-to-Key West Freedom Flotilla in the spring of I980-a bizarre and massively illegal “sea lift” which involved literally thousands of small private boats that brought more than 100,000 very volatile Cuban refugees to this country in less than three months and drastically altered the social, political, and economic realities of South Florida for the rest of this century.
By I980, the billion-dollar drug-smuggling industry and influx of Latin-American millionaire refugees had turned Miami into the Hong Kong of the Western World and the cash capital of the United States. It was also the nation's murder capital, with a boomtown economy based on the smuggling of everything from drugs and gold bullion to guns and human beings. What Havana was to the I950s, Marseilles to the '60s, and Bangkok to the '70s, Miami is to the '80s .....
The Freedom Flotilla began on April Fools Day. In less than two weeks the Coast Guard had abandoned all hope of stopping the boat traffic; the port of Key West was overwhelmed, and any boat longer than fifteen feet was for sale or rent. Cubans from Miami roamed the bars and local docks with fistfuls of hundred dollar bills, and drug smugglers had already begun to take advantage of the general confusion and the helplessness of the Coast Guard. Not even the White House or the U.S. Marines could stop the tidal wave of Cubans pouring into South Florida.
To accelerate the exodus of refugees already granted 'asylum at the Peruvian embassy in Havana, Castro put out the word: Miami's Cubans could take out one relative for every four refugees taken from Cuba to America. The reaction of the Miami Cuban community was near hysteria. The ISO-mile length of Highway A1A from Key West to Miami-became strangled by a huge caravan of destitute refugees in busloads with blacked-out windows, headed north; and the south-bound lane was jammed with Cuban Americans towing a strange armada of fiberglass speedboats, cabin cruisers, and ungainly fishing boats .... All this in a constant frenzy of traffic through police and military roadblocks all along the way.
As the traffic jam got Worse, pockets of stranded people began to build up in places along the way. There was simply no way to move on the highway without risk or delay.
People who lived in the Keys were afraid to go anywhere at all: you could go out for a drink on Wednesday night and not get back home until Friday. What was “easy money” in April became a shit rain by May ... but by that time the thing was out of control; and the going price for refugees was still $1,000 a head.
The locals began turning on each, other, and growing resentment over the Cuban refugee invasion was compounded by constant TV news bulletins about the national humiliation of the Iran Hostage Crisis. People began carrying guns and hunkering down wherever they could be sure of getting a drink.
One of these pockets of doom along Highway A1A was an isolated fishing resort called Spanish Key Lodge, about twenty miles up the island chain from Key West-a sprawling, run-down motel and marina with its own airstrip and a twenty-four-hour liquor license, owned by a former prosecutor from Philadelphia named Frank Mont, who came to the Keys to get rich.
The chaos of the Cuban refugee invasion and the resulting nightmare at Spanish Key is the baseline of the narrative: a once-lazy backwater fishing resort is transmogrified, overnight, into a seething fortress 'of thieves, smugglers, and criminally insane Cuban refugees, who soon take it over completely, by force of sheer numbers.
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Charles Carreon Is A Hunter S. Thompson Fan
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