LavenderRed_Cubabook

Imperialist blockade and CIA anti-gay extortion
Behind the 1980
‘Mariel boatlift’
Several thousand self-identified homosexual Cubans were among the some
120,000 who left the island over a two-month period in 1980 from the port of
Mariel and sailed to the U.S. The media in the imperialist countries, whose capitalist
classes were hell-bent on re-colonizing Cuba, broadcast an anti-communist interpretation
of what produced that migration at Mariel.
Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy wrote, “The 1970s were the high point in
Cuba’s revolutionary influence, not only in Latin America but in Africa, Asia and even
Europe. Cuba was part of a worldwide surge in the working-class movement and particularly
among oppressed countries. U.S. imperialism was on the defensive, especially
after its historic defeat in Vietnam and its inability to either crush or tame the Cuban
Revolution.” (Marcy)
Cuban women and men were fighting bravely alongside their African comrades to
defend the people of Angola, Namibia and Ethiopia from colonialism and imperialism.
U.S. finance capital tried to isolate and destroy the Cuban Revolution.
U.S. banks and corporations commanded Washington not to recognize Cuba’s right
to diplomatic recognition. Captains of the military-industrial complex ordered their
gen erals and admirals to attack the island using various weapons—covert and overt—
including enforcement of the economic blockade of the island, which is an illegal act of
war. The Pentagon refused to retreat from the military base it built at Guantánamo—now
a site where the interrogators incorporate anti-gay and anti-trans humiliation, rape and
attempted dehumanization as part of their sadistic torture of Muslim men and boys.
And 1980 was the year that Ronald Reagan won the White House.
Marcy concluded, “A period began when the most intense economic, political and
diplomatic pressure was exerted on Cuba. In the background was always the threat of
U.S. military intervention, causing the Cuban government to spend a great deal of its
resources on military defense.”
CIA targeted homosexual Cubans
Between 1979 and 1984—before and after Mariel—scholars Lourdes Arguelles and
B. Ruby Rich interviewed Cuban émigrés in the U.S., Spain, Mexico and Puerto Rico.
The two researchers also interviewed Cubans who chose to stay on the island and be a
part of building a socialist society.
Behind the 1980 ‘Mariel boatlift’ 33