The Mariel boatlift - El Mariel in Spanish - was a refugee crisis created by the Fidel Castro´s government in 1980, when he allowed to leave Cuba thousands of citizens that wanted to leave their country and go to the United States. Besides facing a humanitarian emergency caused by the sudden flow of people, American authorities confronted a sensitive security theat posed by the arrival of numerous Cuban criminals that had been released by the Castro government to deliberately harm the US.
