Miami. Jan Nijman

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      Figure 13. Mariel refugees arrive at Key West on board the Lady Virgo, 1980. State Archives of Florida.

      About 125,000 marielitos entered the United States over the next six months. Eighty percent ended up in Miami.¹⁸ The first groups of new refugees were greeted with sympathy and enthusiasm. But when the size of the stream of refugees started to register in South Florida, apprehension set in, and when it became apparent that Castro had used the event to rid himself of delinquents and mental patients, apprehension turned to panic. Even if the actual numbers of “deviants” remained a matter of speculation, there could be no doubt that the marielitos were very much unlike the wealthy entrepreneurial classes of the first wave of refugees. Most were poor and had little education. Criminal elements soon made their presence known. Already during the summer months of 1980, South Florida saw a spike in crime rates, particularly in Miami Beach and Little Havana, where many of the newcomers were housed.

      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.