As if one Caribbean headache were not enough, President Clinton may be facing a Cuban refugee crisis on top of the festering mess in Haiti. For the past three years, Cubans have been fleeing the island in record numbers -- in crop-dusters, jet fighters, helicopters and anything that floats, including ferries, tugboats and homemade rafts.
More than 5,000 Cubans already have illegally reached U.S. shores this year, and the influx appears to be growing. This month thousands of Cubans gathered at Havana's port upon hearing rumors that ferries would take them to Miami, then began to riot when Fidel Castro's Interior Ministry police stopped them. "What does it matter to us if they want to go?" Castro declared. "If they want to establish a route between Regla or Casablanca [in the Havana suburbs] and Miami, we can establish one." He threatened to let in "boats that want to come here from the United States to pick up relatives."
Deja vu? The incident raised the specter of a repeat of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which more than 125,000 Cubans -- many of them convicts and mental patients -- flooded Florida. That exodus dealt a heavy blow to the Carter administration, and the then governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, lost his bid for re- election, in part because he had to use the National Guard to put down riots among Cubans interned at Fort Chaffee.
Now Clinton faces the same dilemma Carter did. In 1992, Clinton courted Florida's important Cuban-American vote by backing moves to tighten the 33-year-old embargo on Cuba but still lost the state. He hopes to win Florida and its 25 electoral votes in 1996. The administration's current strategy is to prevent Florida's Cuban-American community from setting out in boats to pick up desperate relatives in Cuba as they did in 1980. Last week U.S. officials arrested three Cuban-Americans and seized their speedboat for trying to ferry Cubans to Florida.
But the Cuban economy has deteriorated since the collapse of the Soviet Union ended Moscow's generous subsidies. And stiffened U.S. sanctions aimed at forcing democratic change could prompt more Cubans to leave.
The administration rebuffed Castro's threat to unleash another Mariel, but it still lacks a coherent response to a growing number of hijackings. Two weeks ago U.S. officials detained five Cubans who had stolen a tugboat, but last week they let go all but one of the Cubans who had commandeered a Cuban Navy vessel and a crop-duster to reach the United States. Turning back thousands of fleeing refugees would enrage Miami's Cuban community, and with as many as 1 million Cubans believed ready to leave, Clinton's maneuvering room is shrinking.
