No Human Contact by Pete Earley

Author:Pete Earley [Earley, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Citadel Press
Published: 2023-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

If anyone in Atlanta had grounds for revenge, I did.

—THOMAS SILVERSTEIN

ERES LA GUARDIA ASESINA?” ONE OF THE INMATES, WHO HAD PRIED OPEN the steel door of Silverstein’s side pocket cell, asked him.

“No hablo espanol,” Silverstein stammered, recalling one of the few phrases he’d picked up from his Mexican Mafia pals.

“Are you the guard killer?” a different prisoner in the doorway asked in accented English.

Silverstein eyeballed the men watching him. It was obvious to him that they were Cubans.

“Yeah, I am.”

The men began to cheer.

The Cuban prisoners were rioting. The Atlanta prison was in flames in November 1987. Their grievances had been boiling for years because of events dating back to the spring of 1980. Cuba’s economy was collapsing and desperate Cubans swarmed onto the Peruvian embassy grounds in Havana, seeking asylum. An angry Fidel Castro declared that any Cuban who wanted to flee could escape from the island, but only through the tiny port at Mariel. Thousands swarmed there, only to learn that no country wanted them—except the U.S. President Jimmy Carter said he would welcome the Cubans with “open arms and an open heart.” Some 125,000 Cubans headed for Florida during a three-thousand-boat flotilla.

Castro had mixed 23,000 inmates from his prisons and mental asylums with the fleeing others. An overwhelmed U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service only caught 250 of Castro’s “undesirables.” While most Cuban refugees were welcomed, several thousand were sent to detention camps, mostly at old army bases, for investigation and processing. As the months dragged on, conditions at the camps deteriorated. Frustrated detainees rioted in 1983. Four thousand were transported to BOP facilities. A federal appeals court ruled the Cubans were not U.S. citizens, which meant they were not protected by due process and could be held indefinitely in prisons until Castro agreed to take them back. The State Department got Castro to accept roughly 2,600, but the dictator changed his mind after President Ronald Reagan launched Radio Martí, a government-funded station that blasted Cuban airways with anti-Castro news. The “gusanos”—worms, as Castro called them—had become the BOP’s problem.

The bureau began shipping the Cubans to its penitentiary in Atlanta. Not all of them were criminals or mentally ill. Government guidelines were so poorly written that Cubans, who already had been processed and freed, were subject to arrest and deportation if they were stopped by police for any reason, even traffic violations. Each month, hundreds arrived. The BOP crammed eight Cuban prisoners into ten-by-twenty-foot cells with a single toilet. Conditions became inhumane. To ease the overcrowding, the BOP spent $17 million to construct an “Alien Detention Facility” in Oakdale, Louisiana. Security was light—a single twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence—because one thousand of the nineteen hundred Cubans detained there had been approved for release and were simply waiting for somewhere to go. Months passed. Only eighty were freed. Tempers flared. A second chain-link fence was added with bundles of razor wire dropped between the two barriers.

In Atlanta, Cubans began losing hope. Seven killed themselves and 158 others attempted suicide. Others became violent.

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