Cuba's Mariel boatlift
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In April 1980, thousands of Cubans tried to escape the country by claiming asylum at the Peruvian embassy in Havana.
In response, Cuban President Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel to anyone who wanted to leave, including criminals. From April until October more than 100,000 Cubans left for the US. Mirta Ojito was one of them. She spoke to Simon Watts in 2011.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Photo: Cuban refugees in 1980. Credit: Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:56.4 | In this episode, we're going back more than 45 years to a mass exodus from Cuba. |
| 1:02.1 | Ever since Fidel Castro came to power following the Cuban Revolution, |
| 1:05.9 | the country's communist government had periodically restricted emigration. |
| 1:10.2 | In May 1980, thousands of Cubans scrambled to the harbor at Mariel, west of the capital, Havana, in an attempt to leave the country for the United States. In 2011, Simon Watts spoke to one of those who made the crossing. |
| 1:24.5 | It's now a huge and open-ended migration, with 4,000 Cubans making the crossing daily. |
| 1:30.2 | 22,000 have come so far in 700 boats shepherded by the US Coast Guard to landfall at Key West. |
| 1:37.3 | Smaller pleasure boats have been just as crowded and at even greater risk to the fleeing Cubans. |
| 1:42.3 | The Mariel crisis started when five Cubans rammed a bus through the walls of the Peruvian |
| 1:48.5 | embassy in Havana. |
| 1:50.1 | After a diplomat agreed to look into their asylum requests, hundreds more people broke into |
... |
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