“In Pogolotti, a few doors from the home of Juan Valdés and his wife Daisy, an entire family took on the task of building a raft inside their own house. Working day and night, fixing pine boards to tractor tubes, they made a boat that occupied their entire modest living room. They made oars out of baseball bats and mops, and a sail out of an old sheet, and came up with a creative solution when they found they weren’t going to be able to get the raft out the door.
“When they took it to the coast, accompanied by young and old neighbors from the neighborhood, everyone gave them advice on the trip or helped them carry the saints from the altar, which the mother of the family had in the back room of the house. Particular attention was lavished on Yemayá, goddess of the sea, and Elegguá, the one who opens paths. They launched the raft into the sea, and it felt the weight of the number of passengers and the provisions they had gathered for the dangerous journey. Instantly, it sank. After rescuing the saints, the family and those who supported them returned to Pogolotti and set about building a new boat.”
Thus began, in The History of Havana, a book of ours from fifteen years ago, the account of the 1994 rafters crisis.
Like Camarioca and Mariel, this event had not been a flash of lightning in a clear sky. Before, there were two rounds of migratory agreements with the United States that did not work, tens of thousands of Cubans who aspired to leave and could not find a way, another twist to the blockade called the Torricelli Act and various additional measures, numerous hijackings of boats, attacks on embassies, and even violent street protests and confrontations, not seen since 1960.
But above all, the moment was marked by the free fall into the black hole called the Special Period, a crisis much worse than any experienced since then, however it is measured: decrease in GDP, family consumption, transportation, blackouts, inflation, shortages of food, lack of fuel, etc. That’s how it was, although sometimes some who lived through it seem to have forgotten it, as if they were removing the bad memory of that dark 1993, storm of the century included.
According to the 1987 immigration agreement, the United States was going to grant 20,000 visas per year. However, in the seven years up to 1994, instead of 140,000, only 11,222 had been issued. The new President Clinton had declared, in 1993 when he became president, that the policy of “open doors” to Cubans was not going to “play along with the Cuban dictatorship to export the opposition” and to use emigration as an “escape valve” in the midst of an economic crisis (the Special Period) that reflected “the failure of the Havana regime.” Etc.
So the undocumented route increasingly became the method chosen to leave Cuba and specially to enter the United States. In 1985-94, 82,500 Cubans tried or managed to reach U.S. territory. Of them, more than 60,000 did so between 1991-1994, counting the rafters in the summer of 1994.
Once again, the United States applied a specially designed immigration policy to Cuba. As Siro del Castillo1 points out, in contrast to this policy, almost all of the 22,000 Haitians intercepted by the Coast Guard between 1981 and 1991 had been forced to return to Haiti, including those whose lives were in danger due to the prevailing violence. In 1991-1992 alone, more than 36,000 suffered the same fate. It was not until three months before the Cuban rafters crisis, in May 1994, that internal U.S. pressure over the Haitian crisis pushed Clinton to respond, in the tense climate of an election year, through a targeted naval operation to “welcome and protect” the Haitians, confining them to Guantanamo. More than 21,000 of them were there in August 1994, when the Cubans arrived.
In a previous text, I commented in detail on the context of the rafters’ crisis, and its connotation of national security for both countries. I pointed out that no macroeconomic analysis is sufficient to explain the socioeconomic and political causes of a crisis. As in Camarioca and Mariel, the Cuban government publicly warned the United States about the danger of that escalation of violence.
As an example, I evoke the case of the Baraguá motorboat, which covered the crossing between Regla and Havana, kidnapped at gunpoint twice in the space of a few months. Or the violent diversions of planes and boats, which included murders, without the U.S. authorities taking any action against the hijackers.
Once again, as in the chronicle of a death foretold, these useless warnings ended in an immigration opening, consisting of the suspension of regulations and requirements for legal exit from the country.
There were, however, numerous differences between Camarioca and Mariel, on the one hand, and the rafters crisis of 1994, on the other, both in their specific context and in their development and consequences.
The first is that the rafters were not waiting for someone to pick them up from Miami, nor did they have a set starting point. They could go to sea anywhere along a 30-mile coastline on either side of Havana. And no one messed with them.
In effect, a main difference between this emigration and the previous ones was the attitude of those who stayed with respect to those who left. As reflected in the anecdote of the Pogolotti family that Juan told me, solidarity and compassion prevailed. Unlike Mariel, whose traumas and rudeness are often cited as typical of leaving the country, in 1994 there were no acts of repudiation, coercion or pressure on groups to leave, nor on the part of the agencies in charge of law and order, nor of organizations, nor of the community.
However, that was not exactly a stroll. In fact, the other side’s reception was less good than on previous occasions, to put it mildly.
Unlike in 1965 and 1980, the U.S. Coast Guard did not escort them to safety in Florida, but rather detained them, and forced them into the Guantanamo naval base. There they were interned in a camp of tents set up on old landing strips, under the scouring sun typical of that part of the island, which they shared with that bunch of Haitians already confined to the base. In an area with no conditions, not even for livestock, with an infrastructure planned for a total of 5,000 people, consisting of marines, their families and service employees, more than 35,000 rafters were crowded together, surrounded by double coils of barbed wire, without running water and few latrines, for almost a year, until the United States decided what to do with them.
That situation, and the promises of the United States about the benefits of the normal migratory mechanism, led more than a hundred rafters to return to the country, walking through the minefield next to the perimeter of the base, on the rafts themselves, or asking the U.S. authorities to do so.
To ingratiate himself with Miami’s hotheads, insulted by the treatment of Cubans as if they were Haitians, Clinton applied the counterproductive recipe of shooting at everything that moved: he blocked remittances, restricted the sending of family packages, suspended charter flights, announced that military planes would support radio and TV Martí broadcasts, required that Cuban Americans and academics apply for specific licenses to visit the island. Having confined the rafters to the base just 72 hours after the outbreak of the anticipated crisis, it took only 11 more days to reconsider and propose the search for a migratory agreement with Cuba that would stop that flotilla.
In that first agreement, it was established that they were going to guarantee, using the migratory categories that were necessary, 20,000 entries as immigrants to Cubans residing on the island. That they were not going to let anyone enter who did not comply with that legal procedure; so they would intercept everyone who tried to do it in boats, and they would return them to Cuba, turning them over to the authorities. In other words, they were going to stop treating them as persecuted, repressed, deserving of refuge or political asylum, dissidents, etc. That Cuba was going to cooperate in this surveillance of its coasts, that it would accept all those intercepted by the United States, and that it was not going to sanction or adopt any punitive measure or limitation of rights against those who returned. Compared to Camarioca, and above all, with the very long Mariel maritime bridge, the crisis of the rafters ended right there: scarcely 25 days.
As of the signing of a second agreement, on May 2, 1995, the United States would gradually take out the more than 30,000 people locked up in the Guantánamo base, and let them enter the United States, as part of the agreement of 20,000 visas established in September 1994. When they finally landed in Miami, the last ones in January 1996, they were not called exiles, freedom fighters, or opponents of communism, but simply “rafters.”
Who were these newcomers? According to field research2 undertaken by a team of Cuban academics in 1993-94 on the composition and motivations of the Cuban rafters, more than 50% attributed their decision to family-related reasons: reunification, alleviating their economic situation, being able to claim their departure from abroad, as well as the difficult circumstances at that time to maintain their families.
They sought to resolve the material conditions that they lacked, such as housing, as well as professional fulfillment and personal freedom. They all emphasized work motivation as their future life horizon.
This research showed that in the flow of rafters there were very few women, blacks or mestizos, as well as country people; and that those under 30 predominated. Their educational level was similar to that of Cuban society. Most had expectations of having family and friends to support them; and were convinced that this was the “fastest way and with the highest probability of success,” as soon as they could reach the United States.
The subsequent effectiveness of the 1994-95 agreements can be measured by the number of Cuban vessels intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). Between 1995 and 2014 alone, before Obama’s short spring with Cuba began, the USCG had captured and returned just over 26,000 Cubans. In comparative terms, this figure was significantly lower than the 31,000 Dominicans and 27,000 Haitians intercepted in the same period.3
As I pointed out, the rafters of the Special Period would not be bid farewell with acts of repudiation, but with gestures of solidarity and brotherhood, hugs and prayers. Cuban society had changed; and politics too. From now on, emigration was going to mean, more and more, part of a family survival strategy. In this logic, the majority did not stop looking back or break with their Cuban life, long before Facebook or WhatsApp appeared, and the regular flights of commercial airlines.
Compared to pre-crisis Cuba in the 1990s, fifty or one hundred dollars sent or brought each month to relatives and friends came to mean, for many families with no other dollar income, a way to keep their nose above water. Soon the total of these remittances, sent by Western Union or brought by travelers, reached figures of hundreds of millions throughout the island. Most reached white Cubans living in the capital, or major urban areas, and ended up in a growing network of dollar stores and currency exchange houses. Next to many agricultural markets legalized in that same year of the rafters, a CADECA (exchange house) was located, so that remittances in foreign currencies could be exchanged for Cuban pesos to buy vegetables, fruits, pork. Although corner bodegas continued to distribute meager rations of some essential foods, hard-currency stores became suppliers of oil, canned goods, dairy products, beer, soap, detergent, and other essential products.
The last measure of that eventful year of the rafters was the approval of the convertible peso, instead of the dollar. Since then, the CUC became part of our daily life and of a more hopeful domestic economy, tied to the collection of foreign currency. And so it would remain, for a longer time than previously thought, when the rate of migratory growth would stop growing, despite the ups and downs of the economy.
***
1 Siro del Castillo, “La crisis de los balseros: una mirada al tema migratorio veinte años después,” Catalejo, Temas blog, 2014. http://tinyurl.com/otxsjd9.
2 Collective of authors (1996): Los balseros cubanos. Editorial Social Sciences. Nuevos Pinos Award.
3 Siro del Castillo, loc. cit., based on sources from the U.S. Coast Guard Maritime Migrant Interdiction current statistics–July 28, 2014, and the Yearbook of Immigrant Statistics, Homeland Security, 2012.
TN: Quotes from the book The History of Havana were retranslated from
the Spanish.
Author
Rafael Hernández
