by Marie Arana
Although Castro implied that anyone who wanted to leave Cuba was either criminal or insane, most Marielitos were law-abiding citizens who passed themselves off as “antisocials” or “misfits” to qualify for the exodus. Of the 125,000 who came, according to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, the great majority hailed from ordinary lives in Cuba and proceeded to ordinary lives in the United States. A small fraction of them—about 2,500—were convicts and mental cases thrown into the mix by Castro.
One of those was Carlos Buergos, eldest son of a stevedore, a wiry, blond, hazel-eyed descendant of Cubans and Eastern Europeans—a happy-go-lucky guy and convicted thief. He was hardly twenty-five when he clambered onto Florida soil, but he had already accumulated a history of misadventure.
His family was not the reason. His parents had raised nine children, a normal enough circle of siblings. But by the time America got him, he had fought in the hardscrabble war in Angola, crawled on his belly through a wilderness of corpses, been imprisoned in Havana for stealing and butchering horses, and then, on his release, been convicted again for attempting to escape Cuba. He was exactly the kind of Cuban that Castro did not want.
On May 9, 1980—one year into his twelve-year sentence for the attempted escape—Buergos’s dungeon threw open its doors, and he was taken to the port of Mariel. There, with very little ado, his wildest dream came true: he was put on a cargo boat bound for Key West. Forty-eight hours later—sunburned, sun blind, and dehydrated—he was whisked through a processing center with thousands of other refugees and put on a bus to Fort Chaffee, a military base in Arkansas. Five months later, he was in Washington, DC, free to go out into the crisp October afternoon.
IN THE BEGINNING
Man wasn’t born to live without purpose like a jungle animal, with no trace of humanity—in the interest of civilization, it is urgently incumbent on us to put into chains or destroy barbarians who live like savages in the wild.
—Editorial, El Mercurio, Chile, 1859
On the face of it, Carlos Buergos’s peccadilloes may have seemed petty by the time he reached twenty-five. He was a rapscallion, certainly; a damaged war veteran, perhaps; a scofflaw with two criminal convictions: horse theft compounded by highly contraband butchery, as well as a desperate attempt to escape his country. But to better understand Carlos’s journey requires a backward glance at the history—of the island, of the region, of a wild strain of violence that has crazed the Latin American story for more than five hundred years.
By the end of the fifteenth century, when the Spaniards arrived, the island that would become Cuba had long been subject to violent interventions, as had many of the scattered islands of the Caribbean. The Caribs, a warrior tribe that swept up from the heartland of South America and launched northward from its shores, had become expert navigators and, over the course of centuries, raided the docile island populations, enslaving females and castrating males. So it was that when Christopher Columbus stepped onto the Cuban shore on October 28, 1492, a history of terror and colonization had already rattled through the region, leaving the Arawak people—including the Taíno, and the Ciboney—hopeful that the Spanish interlopers might actually be defenders against an age-old scourge.
The Spaniards turned out to be anything but saviors to the Arawak. Or to the Caribs, for that matter. By 1519—barely a generation after the arrival of the conquistadors—the native population of Cuba had been decimated: by displacement, by disease, but most drastically by the Spanish order to slaughter any Taíno who dared resist his new masters. The conquering governor who would eventually feud with Hernán Cortés over the conquest of Mexico, Diego Velázquez, had ordered his men to force the Taíno to the mines. There was a perpetual shortage of labor, and the Spaniards wasted no time in raiding the surrounding islands for slaves and transporting whole populations to Cuba in bondage. The natives of Cuba, who by then were starving, having lost their ancient farmlands to Spanish cattle ranches, resisted at first. They refused to go quietly; refused to work. Many rose up in rebellion, killing their invaders in random ambushes or clear provocations.
To impose a corrective, the Spaniards swept into the village of Caonao and hacked off the inhabitants’ arms, legs, and breasts, leaving three thousand men, women, and children to die. “I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see,” wrote the friar Bartolomé de las Casas. But for all the friar’s remorse, the killing did not stop. The head tribesman of the Taíno was assured by his captors that, if he converted to Christianity before he was burned at the stake, he would go to heaven. He spat out his answer: if Catholics were all going to heaven, he would vastly prefer hell, so that he would never be forced to witness such cruelty again.
The Caribs, who were roundly feared in the New World, did not fare much better. When Columbus returned on his second voyage in 1493 and found all the Spaniards he had left behind gone, dead—killed in a wave of xenophobia—he decided to take an even more aggressive tack. He found it useful to call any tribespeople he encountered “Caribs” so that his men could enslave entire populations with impunity. The Caribs reputedly practiced cannibalism—although whether they killed to eat or ate the already-dead is up for debate, and the whole claim may have been a rumor promulgated largely by the Spaniards—but it proved to be a handy distinction. As far as the Spanish Church was concerned, there were three Indians who warranted capture and enslavement: cannibals, idolaters, and sodomizers. The Caribs were said to be all three. Columbus’s writings reveal that he was very aware of the profit and advantages that might accrue if he accused whole tribes of cannibalism or simply labeled them all as Caribs in order to dispose of them as he wished. In such ways did Columbus institutionalize the concept of good and bad Indians, and then assign labels freely to suit his purposes. In time, all who inhabited the coast of Venezuela as well as the Antilles—from Cuba to Curaçao—were accused of cannibalism and thus were candidates for hard labor in the mines. The indigenous peoples of Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia were eventually labeled Caribs, too, leaving them open to whatever whims the conquistadors had in mind: slavery, rapine, even extermination.
When Columbus put a number of “Caribs” in chains and brought them to Spain after his second voyage, the chaplain of Queen Isabella’s court dropped his books to rush down to the open market at Medina del Campo and see the New World monsters for himself. The holy man later wrote that, as he watched “the cannibals” being herded back onto the boats, he couldn’t help but think that they “showed all the ferocity and bestiality of fierce African lions when they realize they’ve fallen into a trap. Anyone who lays eyes upon them will admit to a kind of horror in the gut, so atrocious and diabolical is the savagery that nature and cruelty have imprinted on their faces. I confess this as much for myself as for those who accompanied me more than once to look upon them there.”
It was the effect Columbus had intended. The stage was now set for the rampant brutality that would follow in the Americas. It was no surprise then, ten years later in 1503, when the queen spelled it out in the event there was any doubt: “If such cannibals continue to resist and do not admit and receive my Captains or men on such voyages by my orders, nor hear them in order to be taught our Sacred Catholic Faith and be in my service and obedience, they may be captured and are to be taken to these my Kingdoms and Domain and to other parts and places and be sold.”
As a result, thousands of indigenous tribespeople who were arbitrarily labeled Caribs were forced into slavery, or driven into jungle or mountain, or killed. Within twenty-five years, most of the Indians of Cuba were gone, their lands replaced by livestock. By 1520, the Indians of Hispaniola had been uprooted and shipped off to hard labor elsewhere. Within a half century, because indigenous populations in the New World had been so reduced by war, disease, and starvation, the conquistadors called for a broader definition of the criteria under which locals could be enslaved. Women and children became fair game. A village of tribespeople might be called Caribs for the conve
nience of the capture, or the kill. Sir Walter Raleigh, no lover of Spain or Portugal—joked that he himself was a Carib—a cannibal—fair game.
Eventually the Spanish Crown granted licenses to make war against the Caribs a sangre y fuego—that is, to lay waste to populations entirely. In Brazil, which Pedro Álvares Cabral had colonized in 1500, the Portuguese continued the ruthless practices that had been lucrative for them on the African coast, where they had been slaving since the 1460s. Mass killings, torture, brutality—learned to perfection in the Crusades, in the wars to expel the Moors, in the rape of Africa—became an easy expedient for conquest and settlement. And then acceptable governing tools. In the age-old campaign to expel the Muslims and Jews from Iberia, after all, the goal had always been “limpieza de sangre,” or racial purity. That term, “cleanliness of blood,” in all its airbrushed arrogance, brings to mind the muddy contemporary expression “ethnic cleansing,” which, truth be told, means genocide.
Indeed, as the friar las Casas recorded, “Spaniards would brag about their panoply of cruelties, each trying to best the other on novel ways to spill blood.” They excelled in torturing Indians for information, slaughtering a crowd to force an entire village into submission, practicing their swordsmanship by carving Tainos from chest to groin, spilling their entrails. “All this, and more, I saw, so foreign to human nature,” las Casas wrote sadly. “I shudder to tell it.” The bloodletting that followed in the Americas—as well as the atrocities imposed on ten million Africans who were abducted, enslaved, and shipped across the seas to replace the natives’ dwindling numbers—did not abate for hundreds of years, until 1804, when the French colony of Saint Domingue rose up, slaughtered its white masters, and established the Republic of Haiti, at which point a collective shudder rippled up and down Latin America’s spine, from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, and the downtrodden dared to think that they might try violence in return.
Spain had come to the Americas with a long history of racial bloodlust: the Muslims of Granada had slaughtered its Jews; Castile’s Catholic king personally led a bloodbath against Semites; in time, more than a hundred thousand Jews were massacred in the 1391 pogroms; King Ferdinand’s wars against the Arab infidels, which ended the very year that Isabella sent Columbus to do his will in the New World, had forged generations schooled in “holy wars” and their attendant brutalities. Portugal was no different. Accustomed to maritime adventures in which it was sport or good business to invade the lands of the darker races and subjugate incompatible universes, Iberia was convinced it was ready for whatever the New World would bring. Hadn’t medieval lore held that the periphery of their known world harbored cannibals, dog-faced humans, and monsters of nature? Reality could hardly be worse. And yet the Iberians were not alone in their appetite for venturing beyond their territories and enslaving distant populations. As fate would have it, when Old World met New on the warm sands of the Caribbean, the native peoples of the Americas knew something about the business of rampant ambition. They, too, had seen their share of conquest and conflagration. They, too, had been erstwhile conquerors.
For all the contemporary revisionist scholarship that has portrayed Latin American Indians as docile, peaceable innocents in the face of Spanish and Portuguese ruthlessness, the archaeological evidence suggests otherwise. Indigenous America had its war hungry as well as its peaceful nations. From Cape Cod to Cape Horn, the pre-Columbian hemisphere teemed not only with large, diverse populations but also with bellicose tribes that reveled in vanquishing their neighbors and appropriating their wealth. The Taíno, portrayed by Columbus as the “good,” peace-loving Indians of the Americas, indeed had been known for their wars and butchery. The Spaniards eventually decimated the Taíno in Cuba and Hispaniola, reducing them in the course of fifteen years—by disease, forced labor, and outright massacre—from one million souls to a pitiable sixty thousand. But it does history no service to claim that the Taíno were not proud fighters in their own precolonial sphere.
There is no argument about the pugnacity of the indigenous of Central America, however. The Tlaxcalans, skilled warriors who eventually collaborated with Hernán Cortés in overpowering Montezuma, had been engaged for the better part of a century in a state of perpetual war against the Aztecs. The Aztecs themselves were past masters at genocide, memorializing their truculence in vast, fearsome walls of severed heads. The skull towers at Tenochtitlán alone were said to number as many as 136,000 decapitated crania, embedded into the stone. One can only imagine the carnage in the killing fields of the Mexica, the horrific stench of death, the deranged cries of victory as one head after another was ripped from its trunk and borne high. Raising a hewed head by the hair was seen as controlling an enemy’s vital force—the head itself was the governing member, to be sure, but, to the indigenous American, a man’s mane contained his spiritual essence, his vis vitae. In 1487, a mere five years before the New World arrival of the conquistadors, Montezuma II’s predecessor, Ahuitzotl, conducted a mass execution of his enemies, ordering his armies to capture and behead eighty thousand victims in order to end a punishing drought and famine, revivify the Empire of the Sun, and consecrate the holy site of his Templo Mayor. These were trophies offered to the Aztec gods, ensuring the orderly progress of seasons and the ongoing renewal of the cosmos.
One of those gods, Xipe Totec, ruler of war as well as earthly abundance, was known as “the Flayer,” since he wore masks or capes of flayed human skin, carved from the faces and bodies of live captives. Tied intimately to the notion of the natural world, ritual flaying among the Aztecs was a form of paying tribute to the miracle of a dry seed, which molts its husk before germination; bloodletting was a form of feeding the earth with vital energy; ripping a beating heart from a chest was tantamount to seizing the very wonder of life itself.
The Mayans, no strangers to these practices, had their infamous killing alleys, where advancing armies would be duped by a wall behind a wall, trapped, and slaughtered in vast numbers. They, too, favored decapitation and torture, and not only in times of war. There was the ballgame celebrating the powers of darkness and light, for example; the Mayans called it pitz. Before the start of a game, a Mayan priest would bash in a female prisoner’s skull, lop off her head with a razor-sharp obsidian blade, and drag her bleeding body across the grounds of the ball court to feed the Earth Mother before a vigorous match of pitz. For this and other customary ceremonies, the Mayans and Aztecs needed captives, conquered tribes, sacrificial fodder. In such ways was warfare in those Americas seen as part and parcel of the ritual of worship—a necessary practice to perpetuate the natural order of things.
Although time and vast distances separate the ancient peoples of the Caribbean and Central America on the one hand and those of South America on the other, there is surprising concord in their uses of violence. The Aztec god Xipe Totec, “the Flayer,” and the Moche god Ai Apaec, “the Decapitator,” seem cut from the same cloth, conjured by similar imaginations. They both represent darkness and light, death and birth, chaos and order, folded—paradoxically, perhaps, to our Western minds—into a single figure. Great good was attributed to their benevolence, and great atrocities were carried out in their names. The Inca and Moche civilizations of Peru, too, may have brought a semblance of order to their citizens and appealed to a mass respect for the law, but they were also cultures built on a war model, in which land-grabbing, forced slavery, and human sacrifice were the governing principles of the day.
Imagine then, when such cultures, tempered by centuries of war and ambition, were faced by invaders as hard-bitten as the Spaniards and the Portuguese. As fate would have it, up and down the Americas at the very end of the fifteenth century, the most powerful of those cultures—the Caribs, Taíno, Aztecs, and Incas—all found themselves in reset mode, reorganizing after punishing defeats and civil wars, or crippled by a deadly plague that seemed to waft through before the invasion itself, like a diabolical herald of the catastrophe to come.
As for the tribe
s that were unprepared for pitched battle—the isolated Arawaks of the Bahamas, for instance—there was nothing to be done but face the onslaught. Columbus had commented on their languid, gentle nature when he first saw them on the shore of his New World, but he had no qualms about enslaving hundreds and shipping them off to die at sea or be sold at the slave markets of southern Spain.
The Muíscas—the formidable, emerald-rich federation of tribes nestled in the Andean highlands called Bacatá (Bogotá)—fared no better. By the time the Spanish expedition that had begun in the Caribbean port of Santa Marta wended its way more than six hundred miles upriver through jungle and mountain to reach the Muíscas, the vertiginous voyage had taken a heavy toll on the invaders. From the 700 men who began that expedition on the coast, only 160 survived. But Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada was so driven by the vision of El Dorado and his conviction that the lord cacique of Bogotá was none other than the gold-dusted prince of lore, that he persevered, arriving in that Andean aerie prepared to do whatever necessary to bring it to its knees. No sooner did he arrive with his slavering mastiffs and his steel-toting soldiers than he demanded that the lord chieftain present himself. When he didn’t, Jiménez de Quesada issued the order to fight, slaughter the population if need be, ransom its chieftains for gold, seize their emerald mines, and found a city for Spain. He called it Santa Fe de Bogotá—the sainted faith of Bogotá—a cynical twist, given that the lord cacique of Bogotá was killed, his successor—Sagipá—tortured and sacrificed, and if any sainted faith was expressed in the process, it was the faith that Jiménez would soon be a very rich man. Indeed, by the time the victory was secured and the booty gathered, he would steal more than seven thousand emeralds in the rout.