Politically, this was immediately and lastingly toxic. Nineteen thousand Marielitos were being held at a base called Fort Chaffee, in Arkansas. One weekend in May, hundreds of Cubans protesting the prisonlike conditions set fire to the barracks and managed to overtake the gates, escaping down the road. “A lot of those refugees are just thugs,” the sheriff of Sebastian County, which included Fort Chaffee, told the public.
