Indeed, over half of the boatlift population had criminal backgrounds. To further support this characterization of the boatlift, Castro himself is quoted as saying that the departing citizens leaving from Mariel are the scum of the country and were surely welcome to leave Cuba for he thought no other country would have them, even America. He openly denounced the population leaving by way of boat at a 1980 May Day celebration during the height of the Mariel migration.
But the figures about criminality do not alone tell the tale of the character of the migrants. Many criminals in Cuba have been imprisoned for political activities such as freedom of speech that would not be considered criminal in America. Also, homosexuality is illegal in Cuba. Many of the boatlift population had engaged in homosexual relations, which are outlawed in Cuba. The conservative Cuban population of America, however, was by and large no more amicable to alternative sexualities than the Castro regime.
But more to the point, the hostility to the new immigrants may have been racial. The Cuban population who denounced the marielitos as causing a decline in tourism in Miami, noted that the recent boatlift was made up of Cubans who were mostly Blacks and mulattoes of a color that I never saw or believed existed in Cuba." (21) All new immigrant populations present a new face to older and more established members of the community,...
In Miami, Cubans were devoted to capitalism, as the first immigrants represented the elite and established commercial classes. As a result, their businesses flourished. But the new Miami immigrants had lived many years under communist influence, and had no such of a work ethic. Furthermore, they were met with rejection from the city of Miami, because of their race, sexuality, and perceived social classes, and this rejection led to their marginal within the city, and hence, criminality. Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick note that after the Mariel exodus, however Cuban Americans found the Cuban people ranked among the undesirables and a 1982 national poll found that Cubans placed dead last in the public's view of contributions made by different ethnic groups to the national welfare. Only 9% of those polled considered Cuban influence to be good for the country and 59% deemed it bad. The fault for this polarization of attitudes towards Cubans however, is complex, lying in the fault of the established community in its expectations of the immigrants, in the difficulties of the immigrants themselves, and to…
