Having grown up in Southern Florida, these images are engrained in my mind.
Funny how progressives wax poetic and nostalgic for the good old days of communism — which Cubans gave their lives to escape.
1980: Shrimp boats jammed with refugees sailing from Mariel to Key West. In five months, 125,266 arrived in a tumultuous exodus that forever changed Cuba and South Florida.
1994: Flimsy rafts of wood and inner tubes overloaded with Cubans float in the Florida Straits. After dramatic U.S. Coast Guard rescues, and months in limbo at dusty camps in the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, 35,000 settled in Dade County.
Twice in two decades, Cuban leader Fidel Castro opened wide the gates to his island and allowed disaffected Cubans to leave en masse for the United States. But the floodgates were never really closed throughout his decades in power.
There was Operation Pedro Pan in the early 1960s, the Camarioca boatlift in 1965, and the Freedom Flights from 1965 to 1973. In the late 1990s, and the early part of the new century, up to 20,000 Cubans were obtaining U.S. visas each year and thousands more were fleeing the island and trickling in to the United States — any way they could.
Cubans paid smugglers — and some ended up dead, the overloaded boats overturned on the high seas. A few hijacked planes. Three men were executed in Havana after they attempted to commandeer a ferry to Florida. Thousands traveled to Latin America and Europe, then made their way to America.
For Castro, the flights of so many of his countrymen were international embarrassments, but also a way to unload tens of thousands of unhappy Cubans clamoring for change and a better life than his communist regime could afford them. –
Via the Miami Herald