BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

It was April 3, 1980, just days before the Mariel boatlift erupted, and senior Carter Administration officials were meeting to consider the turmoil lashing Cuba.

An avalanche of Cuban exiles had returned to the island for the first time, delivering capitalist gifts like blue jeans to relatives who suddenly realized that Fidel Castro had only beggared their island.

Ten groups of asylum seekers had crashed vehicles into the Peruvian and Venezuelan embassies in Havana, and growing numbers were hijacking boats and planes to Florida. Washington estimated up to 1.2 million wanted out.

The Carter administration officials agreed to draft a contingency plan in case Castro unleashed another mass exodus like the Camarioca boatlift in 1965, which brought 5,000 Cubans to U.S. shores.

It was too late.

Over the next six months, more than 125,000 Cubans left from Mariel in a wrenching flight that rocked the foundations of Castro's regime, changed the face of Cuban exile and South Florida and contributed to President Jimmy Carter's electoral defeat.

Today, Mariel is many things to many people -- a ticket to freedom, a family reunification, a bittersweet symbol of the exiles' presence in Miami and, to policy makers in Washington, a cautionary tale -- as in, "never again.''

Castro was already angry that U.S. officials were not punishing boat and plane hijackers fleeing the island. But anger turned to outrage when a Cuban guard at the Peruvian embassy was shot and killed April 1 as two men, a woman and a child punched a stolen city bus through its gates.

Castro blamed the death on the asylum seekers -- the guard was, in fact, shot by other guards -- and demanded their return.

DOORS ARE OPEN

When Peru refused, on April 4, Good Friday, Castro withdrew the rest of the guards and sent bulldozers to remove the sentry boxes outside the embassy. Havana radio announced the doors were open: "We cannot protect embassies that do not cooperate in their protection.''

A trickle of new refugees soon turned into a torrent. Cubans abandoned cars nearby and rushed into the 10-acre embassy complex. One bus driver announced to his startled passengers, "We're not stopping until the embassy.''

By Easter Sunday, 10,800 Cubans packed the grounds, some sleeping across each others' knees, some on the branches of mango trees soon stripped of leaves as hunger set in. Refugees relieved themselves anywhere they could, and the stench was nauseating.

An old woman died on the grounds. A baby boy was reportedly born.

Cuban guards returned and closed off the embassy Sunday afternoon as Havana radio branded the mass of asylum seekers inside as "scum, "worms'' and "delinquents ... anti-socials, bums and parasites.''

THE CAR SALESMAN

Cuban officials offered them safe conduct passes to return to their homes and await an orderly airlift to Peru. About 4,400 did, and many were viciously pummeled by pro-government mobs at every turn. Their national ID cards were stamped with an "R'' in blue ink, its exact meaning unknown but clearly not good.

On April 16, the first 250 embassy refugees were flown to Costa Rica, for later transfer to other countries. Peru offered to take in 1,000, Spain and Venezuela 500 each, Costa Rica 300, Ecuador 200, Canada 300 and Belgium 150. Initially, the U.S. State Department described the embassy crisis as a beef between Cuba and Peru, and offered to admit only 3,500 embassy refugees.

But Castro soon redirected his torrent of Cuban malcontents at his old nemesis, the United States.

He offered a deal to Napoleon Vilaboa, a Miami car salesman, Bay of Pigs veteran and player in the 1978 negotiations that had freed 3,900 political prisoners: Bring boats from Miami, and they can take back one exile's relative for every embassy refugee they take out.

"Now they will begin to harvest the fruit of their policy of encouraging illegal departure of Cubans,'' the official Granma newspaper declared.

INVITATION FROM FIDEL

Havana radio repeatedly broadcast the sensational announcement: Anyone can leave. Just tell your exiled relatives to pick you at the port of Mariel, 20 miles west of the Cuban capital.

Suddenly, Cubans were asking themselves if the two decades of Castro revolution had been worth it. Their cousins and friends in the United States had houses and cars, and they were stuck in a failed communist system.

"Cuba is going through its most convulsive moments in 20 years. Tens of thousands of people are leaving country through Mariel, hundreds of thousands of others are thinking about it and still other hundreds of thousands are ... hunting down and savaging those who are leaving,'' Wayne Smith, then head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, wrote in a cable to Washington.

On April 19, led by Vilaboa's 41-foot fishing boat Ochún, named after a Santeria god, at least 30 boats left the Miami River for Cuba. Exiles, deliriously happy to be able to rescue relatives and give Castro's image a black eye, would hire, beg, borrow and sometimes even steal the vessels.

The Mariel boatlift was on.

Two vessels returned from Mariel to Florida April 21 with 48 embassy refugees -- but no relatives. On the same day, about 60 boat captains met at the Fourth of July restaurant in Key West to plan the next wave.

On day two, 35 more Cubans arrived in Key West. On the third day, 2,746. By the end of the first week, more than 5,000 had made it to U.S. shores, equaling the entire Camarioca boatlift. The numbers for the daily arrivals and even the total have fluctuated over the years.

WHITE HOUSE WAFFLING

Meanwhile, the Carter administration waffled, consumed by the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt that April 24 and caught between concerns for the safety of the refugees and the fear that angry exiles would riot in Miami if the president ordered a halt to the boatlift. And it was an election year, with Carter having to fend off Democratic rival Sen. Edward Kennedy for his own party's nomination.

Only on April 22 did the State Department begin issuing threats to boat captains of jail sentences, stiff fines and the confiscation of their vessels.

But while Washington talked tough, the U.S. Coast Guard was frantically towing dozens of disabled Freedom Flotilla vessels, plucking refugees from the ocean, and bringing them all ashore. At one point it warned captains not to exceed their passenger limits, and "encouraged'' them to file float plans.

Asked in the middle of the crisis if the Carter administration had its act together, an exasperated U.S. government spokesman confessed, "It is not possible to get the act together.''

The southbound rush would not stop. On April 24, trailered boats were lined up 50 to 100 deep at Key West, waiting their turn to be launched, and the Coast Guard counted 1,000 craft heading for Cuba. The next day, 1,500 vessels were reported anchored in Mariel.

EL MOSQUITO

Conditions at the port were horrible. Cubans waiting to leave were jammed into a filth-strewn tent camp appropriately named El Mosquito. They were strip searched and their valuables were taken. U.S. boaters who ran out of food as they waited for their human cargo had to pay Cuban officials $5 for a ham sandwich.

The first known fatalities came April 29, when the Coast Guard found two bodies in a capsized vessel. Another 14 refugees drowned May 17 when the 36-foot pleasure craft Olo Yumi, overcrowded with 52 passengers, capsized in five-foot waves. By Coast Guard count, 25 Cubans died at sea during the boatlift.

The Olo Yumi's overcrowding was nothing unusual. Cuban authorities repeatedly forced boat captains to break their passenger limits, sometimes at gunpoint. Other captains who wanted to leave empty were threatened by the exiles who had hired them.

Not all passengers were refugees, however. Hundreds of men, their heads shaved, wearing no shoes and ill-fitting civilian clothes or what appeared to be prison uniforms, were forced aboard the vessels by Cuban officials after hasty releases from prisons and mental institutions.

In a May Day speech, a boastful Castro all but challenged Washington to try shut down the boatlift. "We really have an open road. Now let us see if they can close it,'' he declared.

Four days later, Carter plunged the crisis into utter confusion when he told a League of Women Voters convention in Washington, "We'll continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from communist domination.''

The exodus surged, and on May 11, 4,588 Cubans arrived in Key West aboard 58 vessels -- the one-day record for the boatlift.

Carter later claimed he had been misunderstood, and on a nationally televised speech May 14 he ordered a crackdown on southbound boats. But the president, who had tried harder than all others to improve relations with Cuba, was branded an irredeemably nice guy who could not compete with the crafty Castro.

COAST GUARD STEPS IN

The Coast Guard began seizing or detaining vessels with gross safety violations and large commercial vessels like shrimpers, and by May 20, the southbound movement had all but stopped. By mid-June, the northbound flow of refugees had slowed to a trickle -- though the boatlift did not officially end until Sept. 26, when Cuban officials ordered the 150 vessels still in Mariel to leave empty-handed.

All told, more than 5,000 vessels had brought more than 125,000 refugees to U.S. shores, including 750 unaccompanied minors.

The new arrivals passed through a web of now notorious processing and holding sites: The Truman Annex in Key West; Eglin Air Force Base, Fla.; Fort Chaffee, Ark.; Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., Fort McCoy, Wisc.; Miami's Orange Bowl and Tamiami Park; the tent city under the I-95 exit at Southwest Seventh Street, at the foot of Little Havana.

And their initial joy turned to bitterness, then anger, as the camps were hit with overcrowding, rapes and stabbings -- and lengthy delays in relocations in part blamed on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA.

Protests erupted at Eglin and Fort Chaffee, and more violently later at several of the U.S. prisons that held Mariel "excludables'' -- the 2,746 criminals and mentally ill that Havana agreed in 1984 to take back. To date, 1,840 have been deported to Cuba.

The wave of Mariel refugees that hit U.S. shores carried the speed and punch of a hurricane.

An estimated 85,000 settled in a Miami, which then had a population of 350,000 and was already racked by an economic downturn and high unemployment. The county school board faced a $24 million deficit.

THE WELCOME COOLS

The new refugees, initially welcomed with jubilation, soon began to grind on older Cuban exiles, Anglos and African Americans alike.

They were younger than previous waves of Cuban migrants -- average age around 31 -- more middle and lower class, more dark-skinned. Some were disappointed at the hard life they found in Miami. And some older exiles saw them as somehow damaged by the years of Castro's rule they had endured.

Three decades later, the Mariel refugees are as successful and integrated as other Cubans in South Florida. The average Mariel arrival earned more than $32,000 in 2005, -- $10,000 more than the average Miami-Dade resident, pollster Sergio Bendixen reported at the time.

Bendixen added that the Mariel refugees, who arrived in the United States all but penniless, were perhaps the fastest to integrate economically of any immigrant group in U.S. history.

This story was based on The Miami Herald reports during 1980, a brief history of Mariel by retired Coast Guard Vice Admiral Benedict L. Stabile and Dr. Robert L. Scheina and the following books: Finding Mañana, A memoir of a Cuban exodus, Mirta Ojito; and Presidential Decision Making Adrift, The Carter Administration and the Mariel Boatlift, David W. Engstrom.