The Mariel Boatlift and Miami, 1980

The Mariel boatlift was the April to October 1980 sealift that brought about 125,000 Cubans from the port of Mariel to the United States, with the Miami Orange Bowl among its processing centers.

Fidel Castro declared on April 20, 1980 that Mariel would stay open for six months to all dissidents who wanted to leave Cuba as long as they could arrange transportation. The next day, April 21, 1980, the first boat from Mariel tied up in Key West carrying 48 Cuban exiles, and by the time the United States negotiated an end in October 1980 the National Archives counts it as the largest single migration of Cubans to the United States (National Archives).

May 1980 was the crush. That month alone 86,488 refugees reached Florida, 69 percent of everyone who came through Mariel, the peak month of the boatlift (National Archives). People who arrived in 1980 became known as Marielitos, and the press called the boats the Freedom Flotilla (National Archives Still Photos Branch).

The Mariel boatlift began after a standoff at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana in April 1980 led Castro to open the port of Mariel to any dissident who could arrange transportation.

Pressure had been building since 1979, when asylum seekers crashed a bus into the Venezuelan Embassy on May 13, 1979. On April 1, 1980 six Cubans drove a bus into the fence of the Peruvian Embassy; when the embassy refused to hand them over, Cuba pulled its guards from the diplomatic compounds and an estimated 10,000 people poured onto embassy grounds in Havana (National Archives). The first boat from Mariel reached Key West on April 21, 1980, three weeks after the Peruvian Embassy crash.

The opening came during a thaw. President Jimmy Carter had set up a U.S. Interests Section in Havana in September 1977, and by 1979 Americans were organizing tour groups to visit the island (National Archives). Castro's answer to the embassy crisis was to let dissidents go if someone came for them, and Cuban exiles in Florida responded by assembling a fleet of about 1,700 rented fishing and shrimp boats. Within four days of the first landing nearly 300 boats had arrived in Mariel Harbor.

Key West became the staging point for boats leaving from Florida, since many people with ties to Cuba rushed there to obtain vessels and head for Mariel (National Archives). The National Archives puts the journey between the two countries at 90 miles, and it records the first wave of boats leaving for Cuba at 1,000 to 1,200, a figure that sits below the 1,700-boat fleet in the other National Archives account; neither post reconciles the two.

The Coast Guard ran the Mariel boatlift as its largest operation since World War II, with Coast Guard and Navy forces assisting over 117,000 people in more than 5,000 boats.

The service organized the Florida Straits in three waves: high endurance cutters worked closest to Cuba, U.S. Navy ships held the inner wave, and Coast Guard 95-foot and 82-foot cutters covered the waters closest to Florida (U.S. Coast Guard Historian). Over 660 Coast Guard Reservists were called up to replace boat crews and maintenance and repair teams, and the Coast Guard Auxiliary helped with radio communications.

The chronology also records that the first two boats arrived in Miami on the day departures began, while the National Archives places the first landing in Key West on April 21, 1980 with 48 passengers (Coast Guard chronology; National Archives). The two federal accounts differ on where the first boats landed, Key West or Miami, and neither site reconciles them. The Coast Guard count of over 117,000 people assisted also differs from the National Archives total of about 125,000 Cubans, and neither source explains the gap.

Crossings of the Florida Straits were dangerous. The National Archives notes that refugees faced poor weather, overcrowded boats and anti-refugee sentiment in the United States (National Archives). The volume came partly from the large number of Cuban Americans in South Florida who owned boats.

Mariel arrivals reached Key West and were processed at venues such as the Miami Orange Bowl, churches and decommissioned missile sites, with resettlement camps such as Eglin Air Force Base set up by Executive Order.

Within a week of the first boats, Florida Governor Bob Graham declared a state of emergency in Monroe and Dade counties. Decommissioned missile defense sites, the Miami Orange Bowl, churches and other venues served as processing centers, and the American Red Cross, Catholic Charities and others assisted the immigrants (National Archives). Early arrivals were also housed in hangars at the Boca Chica airbase in the Florida Keys.

People who reached Key West were placed in resettlement camps until sponsorship and processing were complete, and Eglin Air Force Base was one of four additional camps set up by Executive Order (National Archives). The first 125 refugees reached Eglin on May 3, 1980 on a flight from Key West, and the camp eventually held 10,025, serving nearly 30,000 meals a day at its peak.

Critics have argued that Marielitos received less overall assistance than previous groups of refugees, citing skin color, sexual orientation and sheer numbers (National Archives). The earlier Freedom Flights are covered in the separate Digital Towns Miami guide.

Economists still disagree about Mariel and Miami wages: David Card found almost no wage effect, George Borjas found a 10 to 30 percent drop for Miami high school dropouts, and a later synthetic control study by Peri and Yasenov found no significant wage difference.

Card's 1989 NBER paper found that the Mariel immigrants increased the population and labor force of the Miami metropolitan area by 7 percent, most of them relatively unskilled, yet wages of non-Cuban workers in Miami over 1979 to 1985 showed virtually no effect (NBER Working Paper 3069).

Borjas reopened it in 2015. He reported that at least 60 percent of the Marielitos were high school dropouts and that, looking only at that group, the wage of high school dropouts in Miami fell by 10 to 30 percent (NBER Working Paper 21588).

Peri and Yasenov then matched Miami against a control group of cities with similar pre-1980 labor market trends and found no significant difference in the wages of non-Cuban high school dropouts in Miami after 1980; they attribute the large gaps in small subsamples to measurement error (NBER Working Paper 21801).

Clemens and Hunt offered a reconciliation in 2017: the conflicting Mariel results can be explained by a large change in the racial composition of the small Current Population Survey subsamples for Miami before and after 1980, a change specific to Miami and unrelated to the boatlift (NBER Working Paper 23433). In their reading the refugee evidence as a whole reinforces the existing consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers is small. A federal summary points the same way: the National Archives cites studies compiled during the Clinton administration finding that the influx raised the Miami workforce by seven percent but did not meaningfully affect native-born Miamians' employment or wages (National Archives).

Mariel Cubans in Miami entered with temporary status under the 1980 Cuban-Haitian Entrant Program and received permanent legal status in 1984 under a revision of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966.

President Carter announced an open arms policy in May 1980 and then, in June 1980, the Cuban-Haitian Entrant Program (CHEP), which gave arrivals temporary status, access to asylum processing and community assistance (National Archives). Haitians who had come to the United States before the boatlift also joined the exodus, according to the same National Archives account.

Permanent status came later. Under a revision of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, Mariel refugees from Cuba received permanent legal status in 1984, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 allowed Cuban-Haitian entrants to apply for permanent residency (National Archives). The National Archives also notes that analysts counted the handling of the boatlift among the factors in Carter's November 1980 defeat, and that the country marked the 40th anniversary of Mariel in 2020.

The law that settled the status of the Mariel generation still matters in Miami today. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services describes the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 as allowing Cuban natives or citizens living in the United States who meet its eligibility requirements to apply to become lawful permanent residents (USCIS), the same statute that was revised to cover Mariel arrivals in 1984.