by Jim » Tue Jul 03, 2018 12:45 pm
The illegal immigrant problem reminds one of the Mariel boat-lift of 1980 (125,000 immigrants), when Castro consigned some of his folks to the evils of the USA. This reminder appeared in TIME in August last year:
In order to save face, Castro put forward the narrative that the Cubans who sought to leave the island were the dregs of society and counter-revolutionaries who needed to be purged because they could never prove productive to the nation. This sentiment, along with reports that he had opened his jails and mental institutes as part of this boatlift, fueled a mythology that the Marielitos were a criminal, violent, sexually deviant and altogether “undesirable” demographic.
In reality, more than 80% of the Marielitos had no criminal past, even in a nation where “criminality” could include acts antithetical to the revolutionary government’s ideals. In addition to roughly 1,500 mentally and physically disabled people, this wave of Cubans included a significant number of sex workers and queer and transgender people—some of whom were part of the minority who had criminal-justice involvement, having been formerly incarcerated because of their gender and sexual transgression.
Castro felt forced to do this account of a period of serious unrest in the citizenry. The current “asylum-seekers” were in no greater danger than were nearly all the Cubans then. Carter simply accepted the Cubans, as democrat leaders want Trump to do now regarding the immigrant-influx, no questions asked with respect to whoever makes it through Mexico to the border. Obama faced the same problem in 2014 and placed people in cage-like facilities, pictures of which have been used by the media as current, an example of fake-news.