Castro’s Worms

By now the scene is familiar: the ragtag flotillas of overloaded boats doggedly plying the Florida Straits. But when I first noticed my neighbor’s 53-foot sport fishing boat absent from its dock I just assumed that he was on an extended cruise to the Bahamas. Then another neighbor—a Cuban-American PhD—left hurriedly for Costa Rica to claim a sister who had gained sanctuary in Havana’s Peruvian Embassy, along with over ten thousand other victims of Castroism. Only then did I realize my yachtsman neighbor was not lolling about Cat Cay, but working the 110-mile width of the Florida Straits to bring out fugitives from Caribbean Communism.

The now-massive sealift began slowly and tentatively. Then, as more and more “gusanos”* crowded the Mariel docks, Cuban exiles in south Florida organized a Dunkirk-style boat bridge that has, at this writing, brought more than eight thousand Cubans to the Florida Keys. Officials of the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) were quickly submerged by the human tidal wave; adding to their burdens was Washington’s ambivalence about the status of the new refugees: were the Cuban “boat people” to be subtracted from a limited Cuban quota, or admitted without regard to numbers? Would the U.S. accept only 3,400 of the Peruvian Embassy supplicants, with Costa Rica and the Andean nations expected to absorb the rest? And with Castro permitting this new exodus, could the beneficiaries claim political-refugee status and therefore be granted such services as welfare payments, medical aid, and food stamps?

EH

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E. Howard Hunt

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By now the scene is familiar: the ragtag flotillas of overloaded boats doggedly plying the Florida Straits. But when I first noticed my neighbor’s 53-foot sport fishing boat absent from its dock I just assumed that he was on an extended cruise to the Bahamas. Then another neighbor—a Cuban-American PhD—left hurriedly for Costa Rica to claim a sister who had gained sanctuary in Havana’s Peruvian Embassy, along with over ten thousand other victims of Castroism. Only then did I realize my yachtsman neighbor was not lolling about Cat Cay, but working the 110-mile width of the Florida Straits to bring out fugitives from Caribbean Communism.

The now-massive sealift began slowly and tentatively. Then, as more and more “gusanos”* crowded the Mariel docks, Cuban exiles in south Florida organized a Dunkirk-style boat bridge that has, at this writing, brought more than eight thousand Cubans to the Florida Keys. Officials of the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) were quickly submerged by the human tidal wave; adding to their burdens was Washington’s ambivalence about the status of the new refugees: were the Cuban “boat people” to be subtracted from a limited Cuban quota, or admitted without regard to numbers? Would the U.S. accept only 3,400 of the Peruvian Embassy supplicants, with Costa Rica and the Andean nations expected to absorb the rest? And with Castro permitting this new exodus, could the beneficiaries claim political-refugee status and therefore be granted such services as welfare payments, medical aid, and food stamps?