The Cuban Refugee Criminal: Media Reporting and the Production of a Popular Image

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.11.1.0061
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Pages: 61-83
• Author: Jillian Marie Jacklin
• Subject Matter: Cuban,Marielito,refugee,criminal,boatlift

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

ACADEMIC ARTICLE

THE CUBAN REFUGEE CRIMINAL: MEDIA

REPORTING AND THE PRODUCTION OF A

POPULAR IMAGE

Jillian Marie Jacklin1

University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA

Abstract

On 15 April 1980, Fidel Castro opened the port at Mariel Harbour, prompting 125,000

people to depart for the United States in search of asylum. Unlike those who emigrated

from the island thirty years earlier, these refugees did not encounter empathy from the

American public. Rather, Marielitos encountered hostility, as they found themselves

scattered in detention centres around the United States. As refugee camps sprang

up in small communities in the US South and Midwest, sensationalised accounts of

crimes committed by the migrants shaped negative local perspectives of Cubans. This

article complicates the legitimacy of the image of the refugee criminal, however, by

describing the context within which Marielitos travelled to remote areas in the US,

specifically in west-central Wisconsin. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how media

reporting on the Mariel boatlift, along with the contentious socioeconomic climate that

Cuban refugees encountered while detained in rural America, influenced the popular

representation of their criminality.

Keywords: Cuban, Marielito, refugee, criminal, boatlift

1 Jillian Marie Jacklin is Lecturer in History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

She specialises in labour and working-class history with an emphasis on US social

movements and political activism. Her research includes cultural and carceral studies,

critical race theory, economic and industrial relations, gender studies, and the history

of American capitalism.

62 ACADEMIC ARTICLE – JILLIAN MARIE JACKLIN

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 11.1 Summer 2019

Introduction

On 15 April 1980, Cuban President Fidel Castro opened the port at Mariel

Harbour, prompting approximately 125,000 men, women, and children to

depart for the United States in search of political asylum. A 1980 US State

Department report estimated nearly 60 per cent of the refugees were adult men,

22 per cent were adult women and roughly 18 per cent were minors under the

age of 18 (Larzelere 1988).2 Social upheaval, political dissatisfaction, and an

economic recession in Cuba sparked a national crisis that began on 1 April 1980,

when six desperate Cubans crashed through the gates of the Peruvian embassy

in Havana.3 Within days, 10,000 people occupied the grounds of the embassy,

seeking help from the Peruvian government and permission to leave the island

(Larzelere 1988). Disillusioned Cubans had been breaking into Latin American

embassies for months before Fidel Castro responded to the crowds stationed at

the government buildings and permitted anyone who was dissatisfied with living

in Cuba to leave. The Cuban president addressed the potentially embarrassing

political situation by disparaging the asylum seekers, labelling them ‘undesira-

ble’, ‘homosexual’, ‘antisocial’, and ‘scum’. The Cuban press reinforced this

classification, and US media sources eventually did as well, representing Cuban

refugees as criminals in popular news outlets (Masud-Piloto 1996).

In addition to people who wanted to depart, the Cuban government

attempted to relieve several socioeconomic and political woes during the boatlift

by coercing men suspected of anti-communist sentiment to leave the island.

Cuban officials tried to alleviate national discontent linked to high unemploy-

ment, lack of food, housing shortages, and political dissent by deporting adult

male political prisoners, men in jail for petty theft, and unemployed people

(Larzelere 1988).

This group included 50,000 Marielitos who were single men and an addi-

tional 20,000 adult males who authorities obligated to separate from their fami-

lies and leave the island (Peña 2007: 485). Rather than differentiate between

those men who the administration forced to migrate and others who chose to

2 Scholars dispute the age and gender breakdown of Mariel refugees. For instance,

in his study, Larzelere provides a table with statistical information that he refers to

as ‘Ages and sex breakdown of Cuban entrants, 1980 Boatlift’. The Cuban-Haitian

Task Force, an agency of the US State Department, issued a report with this table

on 1 November 1980. The statistics provided above are estimates pulled from this

report.

3 For more on economic, social, and political discontent in post-revolutionary Cuba, see

Sawyer (2006); Lumsden (1996).