The Freedom Flights from Cuba to Miami, 1965 to 1973

The Freedom Flights were a U.S. Government airlift that flew Cuban refugees from Varadero Airport to Miami from December 1, 1965 until April 1973, two flights a day, five days a week.

The State Department record describes an airlift operated on the basis of two flights per day, 5 days a week, carrying an average of 4,000 persons each month from Varadero to Miami, Florida (Office of the Historian). The carrier was Pan American World Airways, and the National Park Service gives the same rhythm for the Pan Am service from Varadero to Miami (National Park Service). Varadero Airport sits 85 miles east of Havana by the State Department count.

The Freedom Flights filled a gap. After the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 all direct commercial air travel between the United States and Cuba had been suspended, so the airlift became the major new transportation link to Miami, while other travelers routed through Mexico or Spain (Office of the Historian). The flights were also selective by design: the first priority was immediate relatives of Cubans already living in the United States, a group a May 1966 White House memorandum called Category A (Office of the Historian, Document 309).

The airlift continued until April 1973, by which time the Office of the Historian records a total of 260,737 refugees as having entered the United States. In the Miami story the airlift sits between the 1965 Camarioca boatlift and the later Mariel boatlift, which the Digital Towns Mariel guide covers separately.

The airlift started because the Camarioca boatlift of October 1965 sent hundreds of small boats from South Florida to Cuba, and Washington wanted an orderly substitute.

On September 28, 1965 Fidel Castro said Cubans who wanted to go to the United States could leave, and that exiles could pick up relatives at the port of Camarioca after October 10 (Office of the Historian). A chaotic rush of small boats followed from Florida toward Camarioca. Five days later, on October 3, 1965, at a previously scheduled signing of an immigration bill on Liberty Island, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that those in Cuba who seek refuge in America will find it (Office of the Historian).

Johnson pointed the movement at Miami. He directed the Departments of State, Justice, and Health, Education, and Welfare to arrange an orderly entry, said immediate relatives would have priority, and asked the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross for help in processing the movement of the refugees from Cuba to Miami (Office of the Historian). The first refugees with family in the United States began reaching Florida by small boat in October, and by October 18 the number had exceeded 700. In an October 14 memorandum, McGeorge Bundy told Johnson that special measures had been taken to persuade Cubans in southern Florida to wait until orderly arrangements could be worked out.

Cuba then shut the boat route in two steps. No more boats could dock at Camarioca after midnight on October 28, and no Cuban could leave from Camarioca after noon on November 4, 1965. The United States chartered vessels for a sealift of the 2,000 stranded refugees at Camarioca from November 13 to November 24, and the switch from sealift to airlift took place as scheduled on December 1 (Office of the Historian).

The November 6, 1965 Memorandum of Understanding, reached through the Swiss Embassy in Havana, set 3,000 to 4,000 departures a month on a U.S. Government airlift from Varadero to Miami, with no end date.

The two governments exchanged notes on November 6 formalizing a Memorandum of Understanding covering procedures for the movement of refugees from Cuba to the United States, and the understanding contained no time limitation, so no end date was ever set for the Miami flights (Office of the Historian). The Cuban side had first proposed a rate of 12,000 a month against a U.S. figure of about 3,000, said men aged 15 to 26 would not be allowed out, and accepted the U.S. priority for immediate family members while keeping the right to draw up the departure lists, subject to a U.S. veto.

Cuba wanted the memorandum itself to exclude men of military age, technicians and professionals. The United States refused to write those two points in, and Cuba moved its prohibitions on military age men, certain technicians and political prisoners into supplemental notes (Office of the Historian). Cuba declined Red Cross participation in the Miami movement and said the Swiss could do what was necessary.

Switzerland was the working channel. The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs says its ambassador in Havana, Emil A. Stadelhofer, negotiated the safe airlift of Cuban refugees from Varadero to Miami, and that under the memorandum two daily flights would leave Varadero, Cuba, for Miami, Florida (Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs). The same account says Switzerland registered every person who left Cuba.

Official counts for the years of the Miami airlift land near 260,000: the State Department records a total of 260,737 refugees entering the United States by April 1973, and the Swiss foreign ministry gives some 260,000 emigrants over seven years.

The flow was steady once the Miami flights began. In all, 9,268 refugees arrived from Cuba during 1965, and 3,349 of them came in December on the new airlift. By December 1, 1968 the airlift had brought 131,372 Cuban refugees to the United States (Office of the Historian). The National Park Service counts over 175,000 Cubans on the flights between December 1, 1965 and December 31, 1969 (National Park Service).

Demand far exceeded the seats. A State Department paper of December 1968 estimated that several hundred thousand Cubans had registered to leave when the airlift began, and thousands were still on the list awaiting departure that month (Office of the Historian). In May 1966 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare held close to 50,000 Category A applications, while Cuba claimed no one else in that group wanted to come (Office of the Historian, Document 309).

The Freedom Flights ended in April 1973 after Cuba wound them down from September 1971, though official sources give different dates for the pause before the last Miami flights.

Cuba had interrupted the flights before. It suspended them in May 1966 (Office of the Historian, Document 309), and the same month it stopped accepting new registrations for the airlift (Office of the Historian, Document 308). A memorandum to President Johnson on May 25, 1966 noted that almost 22,000 Category A refugees had arrived since the airlift started on December 1, 1965.

The wind down of the Miami flights came in 1971. On September 2, 1971 Henry Kissinger told President Nixon that, beginning September 1, the Refugee Airlift would be suspended for about two weeks while Cuban authorities processed a final group of names, with less frequent flights to follow and a final list of about 1,000 names (Office of the Historian, Document 243). Cuba would not accept a U.S. list of relatives that included the parents of some 2,000 Cuban children then living in the United States, and the State Department answered with a formal note reaffirming the Memorandum of Understanding.

The sources do not agree on the pause before the last Miami flights. The National Park Service says the flights continued until 1973 with a brief hiatus from August 1971 to December 1972 when Castro stopped the flights (National Park Service), while the Kissinger memorandum dates the suspension from September 1, 1971. The Office of the Historian gives April 1973 as the end of the airlift. Both dates are stated here because neither record corrects the other.

Passengers who landed in Miami were served by the federal Cuban Assistance Center in the Freedom Tower at 600 Biscayne Boulevard, which the National Park Service says operated from 1962 through 1974.

On July 1, 1962 the General Services Administration began its lease on the first four floors of the Miami News Tower for the Cuban Assistance Center, and gold lettering identified the building as the Freedom Tower (National Park Service). The Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 authorized the aid. The building is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, from September 10, 1979, and was designated a National Historic Landmark on October 6, 2008.

The Miami center was part of a larger federal program. Known to the refugees as El Refugio, the center used the basement, lobby, mezzanine, third and fourth floors of the tower; the Park Service puts federal spending on the Cuban Refugee Program at $957 million for an estimated 650,000 Cuban refugees over the 1959 to 1974 period, after which the program was phased out and the Miami center closed in 1974 (National Park Service). The Digital Towns guide to the Cuban exile community covers the refugee center's registrations and records; the Freedom Tower landmark guide covers the building today.

Primary records of the Miami airlift are public. Foreign Relations of the United States volume XXXII, documents 308 and 309, and volume E-10, document 243, are on the Office of the Historian site, and the Swiss foreign ministry lists Swiss Diplomatic Documents such as dodis.ch/30982 and dodis.ch/33717 on the negotiation (Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs). Last verified: October 18, 2026, by re-reading the Office of the Historian documents, the National Park Service Freedom Tower page and the Swiss foreign ministry account behind each Miami airlift figure above.