Only a week ago, Jorge Felix Ramirez was at Havana's harbor, screaming at Cuban authorities to let a hijacked water taxi loaded with refugees sail away from his beleaguered country.
"Let them go, let them go,"' Ramirez recalled shouting from the plaza at Malecon. He said authorities threw rocks and beat the thousands of protesters who had gathered at the seaside plaza.Just two days later, Ramirez and six others boarded a rowboat for their own voyage to Florida and freedom, joining the record numbers of Cubans who have made the journey this year. His hands were blistered from three days of rowing.
Last week's events in Cuba and the swelling stream of migrants like the 28-year-old Ramirez - who arrived in Key West early Thursday - are resurrecting a disturbing memory for South Floridians: the Mariel boatlift.
In 1980, Cuban President Fidel Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans to sail from the port of Mariel and swarm to South Florida, stressing the state's social services to the breaking point. Many of those refugees were convicted criminals and mental hospital patients.
After the latest disturbances in Havana, Castro threatened to release another huge wave of refugees. He blames the United States and its longstanding sanctions and immigration policies for his Caribbean nation's economic woes.
"Castro's insistence that United States policy is responsible for the rising number of Cubans fleeing their homeland is simply untrue," State Department spokesman David Johnson said. "The key factor is the Cuban government's failure to implement meaningful and significant political and economic reforms."
Cuba began a disastrous plunge after the collapse of its Soviet bloc benefactors. For the past two years, it has been also been wracked by poor sugar harvests, a mainstay of its economy.
"The situation is desperate," said Arturo Cobo, head of the Cuban Transit Center on Stock Island, just off Key West. Cobo was the coordinator of the Key West refugee processing operation for Mariel in 1980.
"In 1980, it was like heaven . . . compared to now," Cobo said. "It's not that Cuba was good in 1980. Food was rationed, but they had food. Now, it's zero. No food, no medicine, no electricity."
The Transit Center, which receives refugees after they are processed by federal officials, has seen nearly 700 Cubans pass through its doors in just the first two weeks of August. So far this year, more than 5,500 Cubans have been rescued in the Florida Straits, surpassing the 3,656 in all of 1993.
The refugee numbers in 1980 were swelled by the so-called boatlift or "Freedom Flotilla," when U.S. boaters sailed across the Florida Straits to pick up Cubans in Mariel and bring them to Florida.
Cuban exiles - even those who came over in Mariel - say another boatlift is not the answer.
"If they keep coming like they're coming, that's fine," said Juan Carlos Amorro, a 31-year-old Key West fisherman. "But if the Americans go and look for them, and take them, Fidel will stay in power because it would take away the people that he doesn't want. That's what he is hoping for."