Florida Sen. Marco Rubio warned Americans on Monday that Cuba’s dictatorship may try to suppress the uprising by deporting many poor Cubans into Florida.
“I’m warning you; this is what they do. They’ve done it twice already,” Rubio said in a Senate speech. He continued:
Things get bad, and they say, ‘Look, if you don’t lift sanctions, if you don’t go back to the Obama-era policies, if you don’t get rid of the embargo, it’s inevitable — we’re going to have 50,000 people take to the ocean and head towards the United States.
They’ve used that against us twice. They did it in ’94, they did it in 1980 with the Mariel boatlift, and President Biden needs to be clear — whether it’s through private channels or saying it publicly — be abundantly clear we will make the encouragement of mass migration towards the United States as a hostile action and act accordingly. That cannot be tolerated.
“I hope the president will be very clear with the regime in Cuba that we will not tolerate them encouraging a mass migration event,” he said.
The 1980 Mariel boatlift delivered an estimated 125,000 poor migrants — including criminals — into Florida. Roughly 25,000 Haitians also used the route to get into Florida.
The 1994 “Cuban raft crisis” delivered another 35,000 Cubans to Florida.
The arrival of the migrants tends to nudge down wages, push up rents, and to shift wealth towards employers and property owners.
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