Mariel Boatlift, Part Two
The post-Mariel boatlift brought a totally different situation to Miami. When Castro permitted boats from Miami to come to the port of Mariel in Cuba, load them up with Cuban citizens, and take them back to Miami, the hapless Jimmy Carter was president at the time, and like most everything else in his presidency, his decisions screwed things up royally.
After the first few boats had made the round-trip from Mariel to Miami, the boat captains were telling anybody who would listen, and that included then-President Jimmy Carter, that Castro was emptying his prisons and insane asylums and mixing them in with the normal people on the boats heading for Miami. This was obviously a disaster for Miami, but the Cuban population in Miami was screaming at Jimmy Carter to let their relatives get out of Cuba before Castro stopped the boatlift, and Jimmy Carter did what he always did: dithered and wavered, while tens of thousands of the criminally insane poured into Miami.
So the worst people imaginable that "happened to be Cuban" ended up wandering the streets of Miami, overpowering the police force, overloading the court system, and, in general, for all intents and purposes, shutting down law and order in Miami.
This even further opened the door for an almost complete takeover of South Florida by Colombian drug cartels who paid off politicians and judges and ended up being free to smuggle drugs and kill anyone who got in their way, and the police were all but powerless to stop it..... And I got that bit of information from a Dade County cop who was my next-door neighbor.
So when I was talking about "Cuban criminals" in a previous blog, I was referring to the actual criminals that Fidel Castro sent to Miami during the Mario boatlift, and not the Cuban exiles, who were then, and still are, some of Miami's most patriotic citizens, and having lived with communism are some of the staunchest anti-Communists in the country.
Theboondork
A snapshot of my tiny home comfortably sitting at the rodeo arena boondocking Park, in Wickenburg, Arizona, waiting for me to decide on a plan of what to do next.... It's got a long wait.
A storm came to town yesterday afternoon, but as usual for the desert it ended up being much ado about nothing.
Desert rainstorms all have the same problem, there's a lot of ruckus, uproar, and even a bit of a kerfuffle, but when it's over most of the moisture stays in those black clouds or pretends to fall as Virga, as the clouds sail over the Rocky Mountains and dump a ton of snow on some unsuspecting community….. I guess that's why they call it a desert.