LavenderRed_Cubabook

Washington lured Cubans to risk their lives at sea by creating an exception to immigration
rules and quotas that barred legal migration to the U.S. Any Cuban who arrived
on U.S. soil was promised admission, with perks.
Cuban President Fidel Castro challenged Washington’s immigration manipulation
and hypocrisy by opening the port at Mariel from April 21 to Sept. 28 in 1980, allowing
any Cubans who wanted to leave to go to the U.S. Some 120,000 Cubans left, out of the
country’s total population of 11 million.
Even the estimates of how many homosexual Cubans left from Mariel in 1980 demonstrate
political manipulation by the U.S. government.
Reporting for the publication Paris Match, Nina Sutton cited a “nonofficial State Department
source” as saying at least 10,000 Cuban homosexuals had emigrated at Mariel.
However, Julia Preston stated in the New York Village Voice dated Dec. 10-16, 1980, that
“As many as 3,000 gay Cubans passed through refugee camps this summer. Now about
350 are left, almost all men, the others having been sponsored out mainly to gay communities
throughout the country.”
Gay Cubans were not welcomed into the homosexual-hating, right-wing-dominated
Cuban émigré enclaves and anti-communist organizations.
Under state duress
At U.S. borders, all individual immigrants face tremendous pressure under interrogation
from border police, immigration judges and officials and in detention centers.
Arguelles and Rich explained in 1984 that “Cuban ‘refugee’ testimony and subsequent
conversations with the newly arrived Cubans, for example, becomes the main source for
evaluation of Cuban gay life, despite knowledge of the pressures on émigrés to testify to
political persecution in their country of origin in order to attain the legal and economic
advantages of refugee status in their new country.”
Arguelles and Rich stated, “The success of this interpretation has served anti-Cuban
interests, most notably the American state, rather well. First, credibility of the story has
neutralized badly needed support for the Cuban revolution among its natural allies (North
American progressive lobbies) and legitimated the presence in traditionally liberal circles
of some of the more reactionary elements within the Cuban émigré population.”
Behind the 1980 ‘Mariel boatlift’ 35