The Mariel Effect: Deserving Freedom and Other Myths of Exile

This testimonio provides a personal narrative of the overt discrimination endured by Cubans arriving in 1980 and how the term “Marielito” operated to racialize Cubans entering the U.S. during the crisis, thereby distinguishing the newly arrived from previous Cuban exiles who were deemed as more deserving of freedom. This account conveys the ways in which Cubans who were not part of the boatlift, but who instead found themselves in transit to the U.S. during the crisis via different routes were impacted by the crisis in terms of the animosity they faced and having to navigate a state of being in refugee limbo, suspended between nations and communities, ni de aquí, ni de allá.

The overt discrimination endured by Cubans arriving in 1980 was marked along racial, classed, and political lines, and those arriving via Mariel received not only differential treatment but were left unprotected under the newly minted Refugee Act. The difference in reception, both by the Federal government and by the established Cuban community, was utilized to designate the population as undeserving of what Mimi Nguyen has called “the gift of freedom”; an assemblage of liberal political philosophies dependent on regimes of representation and structures of enforcement that measure and manufacture freedom. Utilizing Nguyen’s theorization, this personal account addresses the systems that regulate which racialized populations merit freedom and thereby citizenship, and which are considered racially undesirable, their ability to integrate into the nation, and into the community, subsequently called into question. The testimonio intersects the historical impact of Mariel with the contemporary regimes of representation within Cuba designed to designate labor migrants from Oriente to Havana as undeserving of entry.