'Marielitos' Face Long-Delayed Reckoning: Expulsion to Cuba
By FRANCES ROBLESJAN. 14, 2017
MIAMI — They were some of the most feared people in South Florida, men who became cinematic fodder and, long before Donald J. Trump uttered the term “bad hombres,” ones who really did give some immigrants a bad name.
For almost 40 years, they were also pawns in the cold war between the United States government and Fidel Castro: once and future criminals who joined a mass flotilla of refugees that left Mariel Harbor and landed on Florida’s shores, then bedeviled Miami and other American cities that had taken them in.
The United States did not want them. Nor did Cuba, which refused to take them back.
On Thursday, President Obama announced the immediate end of the so-called wet-foot, dry-foot policy, which allowed Cuban migrants to stay in the United States if they reached its shores, special treatment that drew the ire of the Cuban government. The flip side of the deal got far less attention, but it effectively closed one chapter in the tortured relationship between the two countries: Cuba agreed to take back up to 500 criminal Mariel refugees.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/14/us/cuba-us-migrants.html?emc=edit_th_20170115&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284
