Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

By early May, there were more than fifteen thousand Marielitos, and American authorities were realizing something even more alarming: Castro hadn’t simply allowed the ten thousand dissidents who’d amassed at the Peruvian embassy to leave. He was emptying prisons and psychiatric institutions, mixing criminals and mental health patients in with the groups headed for the US. One hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans arrived in the ensuing six months, and according to the State Department, some forty thousand of them had criminal records. Fewer than half of all the Cubans who arrived had families to receive them; the rest were on their own, meaning US authorities had to figure out where to send them as the crisis continued. The Department of Defense had space for twenty thousand Marielitos at army bases in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas. 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. Guard posts and additional fencing were installed on the orders of the governor, a thirty-one-year-old, first-term Democrat named Bill Clinton.