Between Two Crises

When the port of Mariel closed in September 1980, about 125,000 Cubans had reached Florida, and a few thousand were left in a kind of limbo. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) refused to admit about 2,000 people because of mental illness or criminal records¹, and in August of that year more than 1,700 who had confessed to serious crimes committed in Cuba were already in federal prisons². They could not stay under U.S. law, and Cuba would not take them back. Resolving that contradiction, along with the problem of hundreds of thousands of Cubans who wanted to leave by legal routes and could not, occupied the thirteen years between the Mariel exodus and the rafter crisis.

The excludables

In the immigration law of the time, Marielitos with serious criminal records or severe mental disorders were "excludable": people who had never been formally admitted and who could be denied entry. Many waited in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for Cuba to agree to take them back, and by early 1985 some had spent more than four and a half years avoiding deportation³. The Justice Department explained in 1988 that only 125 of the 125,000 people who came through Mariel, one-tenth of one percent, had been continuously incarcerated since their arrival; the rest of the detainees had committed crimes in the United States or violated the conditions of their parole⁴. By then the question was no longer only what Castro had brought in 1980, but what to do with those who had offended afterward.

The agreement of December 14, 1984

After several years of talks, on December 14, 1984 the two governments reached an agreement, set out in a joint communique and an implementing record³. The White House announced that day that Cuba would take back "approximately 2,700" people who came in the Mariel boatlift and could not remain because they had admitted committing serious crimes in Cuba, had committed them in the United States, or suffered from severe mental disorders⁵. The exact list had 2,746 names. Returns would be phased: up to 100 a month, with any shortfall made up later, and never more than 150³.

In exchange, the United States resumed normal visa processing in Havana, which had been suspended since 1980 except for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens because Cuba refused to receive the excludables⁵. According to Amnesty International, the agreement set at 20,000 a year the ceiling on Cubans the United States would admit if they met the requirements⁶; for 1985 Washington began to process up to 20,000 preference immigrant visas and the admission as refugees of up to 3,000 former political prisoners³. The White House statement added that the "vast majority" of the Mariel arrivals, whom it now counted at 129,000, had incorporated themselves into American life and were being processed by the INS for permanent residence under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966⁵.

Radio Martí and the 1985 suspension

The agreement lasted five months. On May 20, 1985, which Ronald Reagan called "Cuban Freedom day" in his diary, Radio Martí, the U.S. government station aimed at Cuba, went on the air. Reagan noted that day that Castro had responded immediately by canceling the immigration agreement under which the Mariel criminals and mental patients were being returned⁷. The agency that now runs the station acknowledges that the launch led to signal jamming and to the suspension of the migration agreement⁸. By then only 201 Cubans on the list had been returned⁴⁹.

Washington responded fifteen months later. On August 22, 1986, Reagan signed Proclamation 5517, which cited the Cuban declaration of May 20, 1985 suspending all procedures under the agreement and suspended the entry of Cubans as immigrants, with exceptions: immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, certain special immigrants, and those who had left Cuba before that date and were processing preference visas at designated consulates in other countries¹⁰.

The 1986 law: adjustment for entrants

Meanwhile, most Marielitos were regularizing their situation. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), signed on November 6, 1986, included a section designed for them and for the Haitians who had arrived at the same time¹¹¹². Section 202, titled "Cuban-Haitian Adjustment," says in its first paragraph:

"The status of any alien described in subsection (b) may be adjusted by the Attorney General, in the Attorney General's discretion and under such regulations as the Attorney General may prescribe, to that of an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence..." Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Pub. L. 99-603, section 202(a)¹¹

The beneficiaries were those who held the designation Cuban/Haitian Entrant (Status Pending) on the date of the law, or nationals of Cuba or Haiti who had arrived before January 1, 1982, whom the INS had on record before that date and who, unless they had applied for asylum before then, had not been admitted as nonimmigrants. They had to apply for adjustment within two years, be present in the country, and have resided in it continuously since January 1, 1982. The law waived several grounds of inadmissibility, dated residence to January 1, 1982, did not count these cases against visa quotas, did not require them to pay fees, and preserved the benefits of the Fascell-Stone amendment¹¹. The same law created an Immigration Emergency Fund to help communities facing future mass migrations, a direct response to the costs of Mariel¹².

November 1987: the agreement returns and the prisons burn

In November 1987, in talks held in Mexico City between State Department deputy legal adviser Michael Kozak and Cuban Vice Minister of Foreign Relations Ricardo Alarcón, Cuba agreed to reactivate the 1984 agreement⁹. The State Department announced on Friday, November 20 that normal preference visa processing, an expanded refugee program, and the return of the remaining excludables on the list, about 2,545, would resume⁴⁹. Spokesman Charles Redman spoke of more than 20,000 Cubans a year across several categories⁹.

For the detained Cubans, the news meant deportation. The federal detention center in Oakdale, Louisiana, held 1,038 inmates; the Atlanta penitentiary held 1,394⁴. On Saturday, November 21, around 6:30 p.m., between 200 and 300 detainees tried to force the main entrance at Oakdale; when they failed, they set fire to buildings and took hostages, 36 in all, until they controlled the entire compound⁴. On Monday the 23rd, Atlanta erupted: there were fires and looting, one inmate was killed by a tower guard's gunfire while trying to attack an employee, the only death of the two uprisings, and the rioters came to hold 102 hostages⁴.

"The events that we are discussing today were literally unprecedented in several respects in the history of American corrections." Arnold I. Burns, Deputy Attorney General, testimony to Congress, February 4, 1988⁴

The riots had nothing to do with prison conditions but with international politics, the Justice Department stressed. The negotiations involved an Atlanta lawyer who assisted the detainees and, on the ground, Bishop Agustín Román, one of the Cuban American community figures the government consulted. Oakdale surrendered on November 29 with no hostage killed or seriously injured; Atlanta released its last 89 hostages in the early hours of December 4. Among the terms agreed was a moratorium on repatriations until each Cuban's situation could be fairly reviewed⁴.

The end of the Soviet subsidy

Eighties migration policy rested on a Cuba sustained by the Soviet Union. According to the Cuba Platform, Soviet subsidies averaged $4.3 billion a year between 1986 and 1990, 21.2% of Cuba's gross national product, and the re-export of Soviet oil bought at preferential prices came to supply more than 40% of the island's foreign currency¹³. When that support vanished, the economy collapsed. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) puts the contraction of the Cuban economy between 1989 and 1993 at an estimated range of 35% to 50%¹⁴. The government named it the "Special Period in Time of Peace" and imposed rationing designed for wartime: 80 grams of bread per person per day, blackouts of up to 20 hours, buses idled for lack of parts; in 1993 more than 50,000 Cubans suffered optic neuropathy from vitamin deficiencies¹³. The U.S. Congress summed it up in 1992 by finding that changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had drastically reduced Cuba's external support and threatened its food and oil supplies¹⁵.

From a trickle to a current: the rafters from 1989 to 1993

In the 1980s illegal departures by sea were rare. According to Holly Ackerman and Juan M. Clark, authors of a 1995 study of the rafters, the number of arrivals rose in three jumps, in 1989, 1991, and 1994: dozens a year before 1989, hundreds in 1989 and 1990, thousands from 1991¹⁶. CRS summarizes it this way: from a few hundred in 1989 to a few thousand in 1993¹². In 1993, 3,656 rafters reached the United States, according to Amnesty International and the University of Miami's Cuban Heritage Collection⁶¹⁷.

Those leaving were mostly young men, many married with families on the island. Between 1991 and 1994 the crossing lasted nearly four days on average, with cases from one to 34 days; until the summer of 1994 most left in small boats, often motorized and carrying between six and twenty people, and between 30% and 40% set out on inner tubes or drum rafts with no control over their course¹⁶. Cuban and U.S. sources cited by Ackerman and Clark spoke of mortality as high as 75%, though the authors cautioned that without Cuban records any figure is an estimate¹⁶.

Two facts help explain the pressure. Cuba relaxed the minimum age for requesting an exit permit beginning in 1990, and by August 1992 anyone over 20 could apply, but the United States granted few visas: according to Amnesty International, only about 2,700 in 1993-1994, against a ceiling that the 1984 agreement set at 20,000 and that was raised to 27,845 in 1990; in August 1994 there were 19,700 applications pending⁶. The Cuban government maintained that Washington denied visas while welcoming everyone who arrived by sea, thereby encouraging illegal departures⁶¹⁶.

Brothers to the Rescue

On May 15, 1991, Brothers to the Rescue began flying. It was an organization of volunteer pilots from the Miami exile community who flew over the straits looking for rafters¹⁶¹⁷. According to the organization itself, it was born after a fifteen-year-old rafter died of dehydration¹⁸. In the following years it grew to 35 pilots and 15 small planes making 32 weekly flights of six or seven hours; its flights led to more than 4,200 rescues¹⁶. It also dropped water and supplies on the Bahamian cays where many rafters stopped along the way¹⁶¹⁸.

The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992

On October 23, 1992, the Cuban Democracy Act, title XVII of Pub. L. 102-484, popularly known as the Torricelli law, took effect¹⁵¹³. Among its findings, Congress stated that Cubans were showing their desire for freedom by risking their lives in "hazardous flights for freedom" to the United States and other countries¹⁵. The act prohibited licenses for foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade with Cuba¹⁹¹³, barred vessels that had traded in Cuban ports from loading or unloading freight in the United States for the following 180 days unless licensed, and ordered limits on remittances intended to pay for Cubans' travel to the United States¹⁹.

The summer of 1994

In June 1994 violence around departures grew: Cuban authorities shot and killed a man trying to escape, and between July 13 and August 8 at least 37 people trying to flee and two Cuban officials died in a series of boat hijackings, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO)²⁰. The worst episode occurred on July 13. The tugboat 13 de Marzo left Havana harbor in the early morning with 72 people aboard and, about seven miles from shore, was rammed and sprayed with high-pressure hoses by Cuban state vessels until it sank, according to the complaint examined by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In 1996 the IACHR found the Cuban state responsible for the deaths of 41 people, ten of them minors, and for harm to the 31 survivors; Amnesty International spoke of at least 35 missing at sea²¹²². The Cuban government denied any responsibility and attributed the sinking to an accident caused by the occupants themselves²².

In the first six months of 1994, 3,554 rafters arrived, nearly as many as in all of the previous year⁶. Three weeks after the tugboat sank, on August 5, Havana saw the largest protest against the government since 1959, and what followed is the rafter crisis.

Notes and sources

New York State Department of Correctional Services, Division of Planning, Research and Evaluation, "The Mariel Cuban Problem," April 1991 (NCJ 142919), p. 5. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/142919NCJRS.pdf back
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977-1980, vol. XXIII, document 118, "Summary of Conclusions of a Mini-Special Coordination Committee Meeting," August 20, 1980. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v23/d118 back
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Solicitor General, Garcia-Mir et al. v. Smith et al., No. A-582, memorandum for the respondents before the Supreme Court, October Term 1984. https://www.justice.gov/d9/osg/briefs/1984/01/01/sg840055.txt back back back back
Arnold I. Burns, Deputy Attorney General, statement before the Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the House of Representatives on the Mariel Cubans, February 4, 1988 (NCJ 109240), pp. 1-9 and 16. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/109240NCJRS.pdf back back back back back back back back
Larry Speakes, "Statement by Principal Deputy Press Secretary Speakes on an Agreement With Cuba Concerning Immigration and Refugee Matters," December 14, 1984, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/121484c back back back
Amnesty International, "United States/Cuba: Cuban "Rafters", Pawns of Two Governments," AMR 51/86/94, October 1994, pp. 1-2. https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/amr510861994en.pdf back back back back back
Ronald Reagan, White House diary entry of May 20, 1985, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute. https://reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/white-house-diaries/diary-entry-05201985 back
U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), "Martís' broadcasting to Cuba marks 35 years," May 20, 2020. https://www.usagm.gov/2020/05/20/martis-broadcasting-to-cuba-marks-35-years/ back
"Mariel "excludables" to be sent home," The Christian Science Monitor, November 23, 1987. https://www.csmonitor.com/1987/1123/afill23a.html back back back back
Ronald Reagan, "Proclamation 5517: Suspension of Cuban Immigration," August 22, 1986, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/082286a back
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Pub. L. 99-603, sec. 202, 100 Stat. 3359, 3404-3405 (November 6, 1986). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-100/pdf/STATUTE-100-Pg3359.pdf back back back
Ruth Ellen Wasem, "Cuban Migration to the United States: Policy and Trends," Congressional Research Service, R40566, June 2, 2009, pp. 1 and 6. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R40566.html back back back
The Cuba Platform, "The Special Period," accessed November 11, 2026. https://cubaplatform.org/special-period back back back back
Mark P. Sullivan, "Cuba: Issues for the 111th Congress," Congressional Research Service, R40193, January 13, 2010, section "Economic Conditions." https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20100113_R40193_3a7f6d861b415e292123710edac487f034f97445.html back
Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, Pub. L. 102-484, div. A, title XVII, sec. 1702, 106 Stat. 2575 (October 23, 1992), codified at 22 U.S.C. 6001. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2020-title22/html/USCODE-2020-title22-chap69-sec6001.htm back back back
Holly Ackerman and Juan M. Clark, The Cuban Balseros: Voyage of Uncertainty, Miami, 1995, text deposited in DukeSpace (Duke University). https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12962 back back back back back back back
University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, "Crisis & Response: The Rafter Crisis of 1994 and the U.S. Response," digital exhibit Between Despair and Hope: Cuban Rafters at the U.S. Naval Base Guantánamo Bay, 1994-1996, 2011. https://scholar.library.miami.edu/digital/exhibits/show/guantanamo/crisis back back
Brothers to the Rescue (Hermanos al Rescate), "Background and Information," accessed November 11, 2026. http://www.hermanos.org/Background%20and%20Information.htm back back
Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, Pub. L. 102-484, div. A, title XVII, sec. 1706, 106 Stat. 2578, codified at 22 U.S.C. 6005. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2020-title22/html/USCODE-2020-title22-chap69-sec6005.htm back back
U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), "Cuba: U.S. Response to the 1994 Cuban Migration Crisis," GAO/NSIAD-95-211, September 18, 1995, p. 2. https://www.gao.gov/products/nsiad-95-211 back
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report No. 47/96, Case 11.436, "Victims of the Tugboat "13 de Marzo" v. Cuba," October 16, 1996 (University of Minnesota Human Rights Library). http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/cases/1996/cuba47-96.htm back
Amnesty International, "Cuba: The Sinking of the "13 de Marzo" Tugboat on 13 July 1994," AMR 25/13/97, July 1997. https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/amr250131997en.pdf back back