The situation was reported on almost daily in the news. The local authorities called in vain to have the refugees diverted to Costa Rica and other destinations in Central America and the Caribbean—anywhere but Miami. Even among the Cubans who had been in Miami for some time, concern grew and some distanced themselves from the marielitos out of fear of seeing their reputation blemished. Their worries were understandable: according to national polls, by 1982 the large majority of the U.S. public held negative views of Cubans, more negative than of any other immigrant group in the country.19
The second story took off in downtown Miami about four months before the Mariel boatlift got under way. In the early morning hours of December 17, 1979, thirty-three-year-old Arthur McDuffie, a black motorcyclist, was beaten to death by an all-white group of policemen. Before the beating, McDuffie, an insurance salesman and a former U.S. marine, had been chased by the police at high speed through parts of Liberty City and Overtown. The reason for the chase was never quite clear, but police records did show that McDuffie had accumulated traffic citations and was driving with a suspended license. When McDuffie gave up and got off his motorcycle at the corner of North Miami Avenue and 38th Street, a scuffle ensued. The policemen handcuffed McDuffie, removed his helmet, and hit him savagely over the head with clubs and fists until he collapsed. It was a gruesome scene: “McDuffie lay immobile, his head split open and his brain swelling uncontrollably.”20 Subsequently, one of the police officers ran his vehicle over the motorcycle to create the impression that the injuries were the result of an accident. Four days later, McDuffie died in Jackson Hospital. The Dade County examiner would later testify that McDuffie’s wounds were “the equivalent of falling from a four-story building and landing head-first … on concrete.”21
The four police officers were suspended before the end of December. It turned out that they all had considerable track records of citizen complaints and internal affairs probes. Emotions ran high in Miami and the McDuffie trial was moved to Tampa. It started on March 31, 1980, a day before the Cuban dissidents in Havana headed for the Peruvian embassy. For that one day, at least, all eyes in Miami were on the trial. The four officers were indicted for manslaughter, as well as tampering with or fabricating evidence. The charge against one of them was later elevated to second-degree murder.
The trial lasted about six weeks. Then, on May 17, an all-white jury in Tampa announced the verdict: the four policemen were acquitted on all charges. The news sent shockwaves through the black community. Within hours of the verdict there were demonstrations in downtown Miami and in Liberty City. When police forces confronted the demonstrators, violence erupted, which quickly spread to the Black Grove and Overtown. The governor of Florida called in thousands of National Guard troops to restore order, but the riots still lasted a full three days. Eighteen people died, hundreds were wounded, and damages were estimated up to two hundred million dollars. They were the worst race riots in U.S. urban history, to be superseded only by the riots in Los Angeles in 1992.
This was not just about McDuffie, no matter how perverse the case or the outcome. “Many Miamians, whites as well as blacks, were shocked by the acquittals. But for blacks, the trial had a significance that went beyond the McDuffie case itself. It represented the truest, most damning test of the entire legal system.”22 Frustration among Miami’s blacks had been building for years in spite of, or maybe fueled by, the legal achievements of the civil rights movement. Economic advancement was wanting, relations with the Miami police had been profoundly hostile from the beginning, and it seemed that blacks could be discriminated against, maltreated, and even murdered with impunity. The six weeks of the McDuffie trial coincided with the first phase of the Mariel boatlift. The massive arrival of ever more Cubans and the media attention it demanded, precisely at this time, must have compounded a sense of isolation among many blacks, who received painfully little sympathy for their plight from other Miamians.
Figure 14. Riots in Liberty City following the McDuffie verdict: a National Guardsman tells a motorist to keep moving, May 19, 1980. © Miami Herald Media Company, 1980.
The third story’s origins lay in Francois Duvalier’s Haiti. Also known as Papa Doc, Duvalier was elected as Haiti’s president in 1958. His despotic and murderous regime terrorized the population and condemned the majority of Haitians to egregious poverty. According to many measures, Haiti was the most impoverished and most repressive nation in the Western Hemisphere. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of the more affluent Haitians had already left the country and sought refuge in places like New York, Paris, and Montreal. Despite its similar climate and tropical environment, South Florida prior to the civil rights movements did not appeal to Haitians because of its blatant racism.
After 1977, refugee flows toward South Florida started to pick up, slowly at first, and gathered momentum. By early 1980, the so-called Haitian boat people were streaming into South Florida almost daily, crammed into small rickety boats that were barely able to make the 720-mile journey. A number of efforts to reach South Florida failed dramatically. One of the most tragic incidences was in October 1981 when a flimsy vessel named La Nativité sank in a storm less than a hundred yards off the coast and thirty-three dead bodies washed upon the shore near Fort Lauderdale. The migrants were probably dumped off a large smuggling ship and herded onto La Nativité a few miles off the coast. The going smuggling fee was said to be around $1,500 per person.23
When the Mariel boatlift took off in May 1980, the Haitians, too, responded to the call for freedom. Refugee numbers increased rapidly in the early summer months and peaked in August 1980, at the same time that Cuban arrivals reached their highest volume. The number of registered Haitian refugees for that month was 2,477 and the total for 1980 was 24,530.24 That did not include those who escaped interdiction or detention—in the fall of 1980 it was estimated that every day about 200 Haitians entered South Florida illegally.
Between 1977 and 1981, approximately 60,000 Haitians sought refuge in South Florida. The local and national perception of Haitians was very negative, in part perhaps because so little was known about them. Indeed, Haitians have suffered some of the worst stereotyping in the modern history of the Americas. Many looked at the boat people as poor, uncivilized, voodoo-practicing peasants who were likely to carry diseases such as tuberculosis and, later, AIDS. These stereotypes fueled the resolve of local governments to lobby for stringent federal policies to curb Haitian immigration.
Figure 15. Intercepted Haitian refugees waiting to go ashore at the Coast Guard station in Miami, April 14, 1980. © Miami Herald Media Company, 1980.
Haitian refugees received a different legal treatment from Cubans as most were considered economic refugees rather than political ones. Many were sent back and others had to endure extensive clearance procedures. Krome Detention Center in southwest Dade County, the main site for the processing of Haitian refugees, was overflowing. It was common to be detained for prolonged periods of time. By July 1982, almost two years after the number of intercepted refugees peaked, there was a backlog of 32,000 cases. Being black, poor, modestly educated, and lacking good English-language skills, most of those who were allowed to stay faced an uphill battle. They settled in concentrated areas of Dade and Broward counties such as the area northeast of Overtown that would become known as Little Haiti, the city of North Miami, and Fort Lauderdale. Haitians became the largest immigrant group in Broward County in the early 1980s.
In more than one way, then, 1980 proved to be a turning point. First, it raised anxiety among non-Hispanic whites to the level of despair.25 In the eyes of Miami’s white establishment, their city was under siege. Near the end of the year, an English-only referendum was passed as a means to resist the Cuban siege.