IT LACKED THE SCALE and profile of Tiananmen Square, but was no less brutal. In the early morning hours of July 13, 1994, Cuban fireboats rammed and attacked a rickety tugboat ferrying more than 70 would-be defectors away from the Port of Havana. Using water cannons, Fidel Castro’s ships quickly sank the wooden vessel, leaving its passengers to drown. More than half the Cubans on board plunged to a maritime grave. The survivors were left to tread water for over an hour before being plucked out of the sea and returned to the island.

At the time, the incident was lost amidst news of violent unrest in Cuba and the worst refugee crisis since 1980 (the year of the Mariel boatlift). Less than a month after the tugboat massacre, anti-Castro riots broke out near the famous Malecon boardwalk in Havana. Seeking to deflect widespread anger with Cuba’s moribund economy and post-Soviet food shortages, the dictator unleashed an armada of boat people, letting thousands of Cubans set sail for America on homemade rafts and wobbly boats. This ultimately led to the Clinton-Castro migration accord, which established new visa rules and codified the “wet foot, dry foot” policy.