At a time when Cuban immigrants are seeking political asylum at historically unprecedented rates, most press and scholarly accounts consistently mirror earlier portrayals of Cubans’ mass exodus from the island in one key aspect: they ascribe to refugees a primarily economic reason for their decision to leave and offer little discussion of political factors. To illuminate the need for such analysis, this article examines the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, when approximately 125,000 Cubans, most of them thirty years old or younger, left Cuba. No other exodus of Cubans was more demonized than the Mariel, both by Cuba’s supporters and leadership and by exile opponents of the communist state. Exploring how the intensification of ideological criteria for inclusion in the Cuban Revolution undermined the quality of Cubans’ liberation under socialism prior to Mariel, this article explores state policies and the deep politicization of everyday life and identity. Key political factors explain many young people’s alienation and the degree to which the Cuban state sanctioned and directed extreme measures of repression to discredit those who wanted to leave as lazy, sexually degenerate escoria (human trash).
