If you ever worry about the quality of news on the Internet, consider a recent story at BuzzFeed from reporter Adrian Carrasquillo. The writer notes indignantly that Donald Trump’s infamous campaign comments about Mexican immigrants were not unprecedented: Speaking on a radio talk show, in 2011, Trump had anticipated his claim that “Mexico was sending criminals and rapists” to the United States (in Carrasquillo’s words) by “appear[ing] to suggest Fidel Castro had hatched a similar gambit.”
Here is what Trump said in 2011:
Carrasquillo acknowledged that Trump’s facts are not imaginary—”Trump was speaking about the Mariel boatlift in 1980, when more than 125,000 Cubans came to the U.S. because of the island’s floundering economy”—but he seems to have gleaned what knowledge he has about the Mariel boatlift from the Internet, or perhaps a friend or neighbor: “Castro did send prisoners and mentally ill people to the U.S. mixed in with other refugees,” Carrasquillo wrote.
In fact, of course, it was not Cuba’s “floundering economy”—Cuba’s economy, it could reasonably be argued, has always been floundering—that prompted the exodus; it was Fidel Castro’s malice. The Jimmy Carter administration, as Democratic administrations tend to do, had been seeking a rapprochement with the Cuban regime, and in early 1980, Castro—habitually angered by the official American welcome to Cuban refugees—rewarded Carter’s credulity by emptying his nation’s jails, prisons, and mental institutions and sending their occupants, in overcrowded vessels, across the Straits of Florida to Miami.
It was an extraordinarily cruel, and cynical, gesture on Castro’s part; but of course, hardly surprising. And in any case, it swiftly halted Carter’s flirtation with Cuba.
What Adrian Carrasquillo doesn’t appear to know, however, and what gives this episode contemporary resonance, is that the Mariel boatlift, and its attendant migrant crisis, had political repercussions that extend to the present day. One of the repositories for Cuban criminals chosen by the Carter White House was Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where there were subsequent riots and mass escapes. The governor of Arkansas, one Bill Clinton, was furious that his state had been chosen to pay the price for Carter’s misjudgment—and he complained loudly and publicly about it. So loudly, in fact, that it made Carter’s efforts to settle refugees elsewhere politically toxic.
Jimmy Carter never forgave Bill Clinton for the Mariel/Fort Chaffee debacle. And vice versa, since it was one of the main reasons which led to Clinton’s defeat for re-election in November 1980. It also explains the continued enmity between the senior living Democratic ex-president, Carter, and Clinton—whose wife Hillary is currently running for president.
A handful of lessons may be drawn from all this: The roots of political issues are deep and complicated; the settlement of refugees is a sensitive matter; and it seldom pays presidents to trust the Castro regime. From a journalistic standpoint, however, it raises an urgent question: Does BuzzFeed employ editors with knowledge of events before, say, 2011?
