Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America

4 Around 1979: Mariel, McDuffie, and the Afterlives of Antonio

4 / Around 1979: Mariel, McDuffie, and the Afterlives of Antonio I turn now to the cultures of two 1979 Miami murders, seeing in them still other signs of the circulation of race in Cuban America. In March of that year, a white Cuban American was found dead on SW Eighth Street, killed as a consequence of his work in the illegal-drug economy. No one was ever charged in the murder. This was Antonio López, my father. In December, an African American was murdered on North Miami Avenue, with a white Cuban American police officer, among others, implicated. No one was ever convicted in the murder. This was Arthur McDuffie. The figure of a murdered Cuban American drug dealer appeared in the lyrics of the many African American rappers who intertextualized the 1980 Mariel boatlift-migrant protagonist of the 1983 film Scarface. The violence represented in the Scarface metatext, which includes the 1930 pulp novel, the original 1932 film and its remake, and the rap revisions, was both state and market sponsored. The killing of Arthur McDuffie and the 1980 African American uprising in Miami after the acquittal of everyone charged in the murder and its cover-up are still other manifestations of such violence. The story of Antonio López, needless to say, is personal to me. So, too, in a different way, is that of Arthur McDuffie, through a remarkable, print-culture coincidence, as I show. The two encourage me to consider the cultural and historical alignment of those two signal Miami Cuban American and African American events of 1980: boatlift and uprising. In April 1980, a driver rammed his bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana. Over 10,000 people eventually sought asylum around 1979 / 155 on its grounds. By the end of the month, the Cuban government had declared the town of Mariel, just west of Havana, an open port. Starting in April of that year, over 120,000 people crossed the Florida Straits to the United States, making the Mariel boatlift the third wave of postrevolutionary Cuban migration, following the initial departures after 1959 and the U.S.-sponsored Freedom Flights between 1965 and 1973. Marielito, whose diminutive ending, like the -ito in negrito, combines affection and disdain, came to signify the 1980 migrants. So did another word, heard at the port of Mariel and on the streets of Hialeah and Miami, a word now stripped of any pretense toward the affectionate: escoria—dregs, dross, scum.1 Escoria was a manifestation in popular speech of the idea of a lumpenproletariat , criminal, disabled Mariel migrant, after accounts of how the Cuban government had used the episode to depopulate its prisons and mental hospitals. In Areíto, for example, Lourdes Casal wrote that the migrants were “overrepresented” by “marginal elements, delinquents, [and] lumpen” who, lacking the education necessary for incorporation into the Cuban revolution, lived off “the black market and theft”; they were “undesirables” with “prison records.”2 El Sol de Hialeah, a local newspaper with a perspective in obvious contrast to Areíto’s, echoed Casal, only it recognized in the “undesirables” a Castro plot: the “Tyrant infiltrated a great number of delinquents, the depraved, and even the insane,” thus “infesting the Cuban colony with those dangerous species and provoking the protest and rejection of the native citizenry.”3 Meanwhile, the literary journal Mariel, among whose directors was the boatlift migrant Reinaldo Arenas, editorialized that the aim of media representations of the “undesirables” was to “deform the social as well as the political content of the exodus” through a focus, at the expense of regular refugees, on “those who had been driven to crime and insanity by the very government that was expelling them irresponsibly.”4 Loathed as a timeless infestation, suffered as a historical deformation, the escoria appeared across all manner of Cuban American discourses on Mariel. Such undesirability, in more or less tacit ways, also involved the sexuality of the Mariel migrants. Important here were the experiences of gay men in managing the institutions of Cuban departure and Cuban American arrival.5 The place of sexuality in imaginings of a Mariel undesirability is contiguous with that of race: in particular, the Afro-Cuban identity of the migrants, who arrived in a predominantly white Cuban America. The front page of El Expreso de Miami, another local newspaper , exhibited the peculiarity of Cuban American admissions regarding 156 / around 1979 the...