JUAN O. TAMAYO

 Yaima Rios brags to her Havana neighbors about the gifts that her mother sends from Miami. But neighbors know the 28-year-old woman is inventing stories about the mother who abandoned her during the Mariel boatlift.

 Maida Donate shudders when she recalls the brutal attacks by pro-Castro mobs on Cubans who left through Mariel. For many former Castro backers like Donate, those mobs shattered their dreams of building a better society.

 Twenty years after the 1980 exodus, a look back at the events that shook South Florida shows they also sparked the worst crisis to hit Cuba in the 41 years that President Fidel Castro has been in power.

 Thousands of families were sundered, some forever. Security controls were tightened. Many Cubans who stayed but were suspected of disloyalty lost their jobs and became outcasts. The government tried to fill the jobs of those who left, but production suffered for years afterward, and Castro was eventually forced to experiment with capitalism to relieve the economic pressures on his regime.

 More important, Mariel destroyed the ideological commitment of many Cubans who had sacrificed for the previous 20 years to help Castro build an egalitarian and socialist Cuba.

 ``We all had to ask ourselves, what kind of socialism were we building if at the first opportunity 125,000 people want to leave, said Donate, now a Miami social worker.

 NO BOOKS PUBLISHED

 So deep and painful was Mariel's wound that even today no Cuban on the island has ever published any books or even academic reports on the domestic impact of the crisis.

 Television scriptwriter Rafael Saumell tried to write such a book in 1981, a fictionalized account of several real-life, apparently dedicated revolutionaries who had suddenly fled in the boatlift.

 He wrote about the Communist Party member awarded a car for his ``exemplary revolutionary work, the Army colonel who faked being a homosexual so he could leave, the intellectual who had written paeans to Castro.

 Saumell showed his draft to a friend who turned out to be a police informant. He served 4 1/2 years in prison for writing ``enemy propaganda. The book, Tales of the Endless Games of the Ocean, was never published.

 ``That gives you an idea of how sensitive Mariel was back then, recalled Saumell, who left Cuba in 1988 and now teaches at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

 But time has passed, and Herald interviews with two dozen Cubans who still live on the island or went into exile after 1980 have made it possible to paint a fuller yet still partial picture of Mariel's domestic impact.

 CASTRO BLUNDERED

 There's little question now that Castro blundered when he threw open the Peruvian Embassy in Havana and later the port of Mariel in a fit of anger after six Cubans broke into the embassy that April 1 to seek political asylum.

 Castro believed his revolution, then 20 years old, was so solid that he had freed some 3,600 political prisoners and allowed 100,000 Cuban exiles to return for the first time over the previous 18 months.

 ``Fidel expected 100, maybe a couple of hundred, disaffected people to go into the embassy. Instead, 10,000 went in, said one exile who was then an aide to Armed Forces chief Gen. Raul Castro, brother of the president. ``There were people with drums doing a conga line and chanting, `Going to the embassy, going to the embassy'; it was a collective craziness, historian Enrique Lopez recalled in a telephone interview from Havana.

 THE PRIVILEGED LEAVE

 Most shocking to Castro, many of those who rushed to leave were from the very sectors that the revolution had long favored -- the young, blacks and officials of the Communist Party, government and armed forces.

 `The very people that Castro said the revolution was made for, the people privileged by the government, were the ones leaving,'' said Felix Masud-Piloto, a DePaul University professor who has interviewed several Cuban government officials for a book he is writing on Mariel.

 Jesus Marzo, then a senior official with the government's central economic planning agency, known as JUCEPLAN, recalled his shock when a cousin he described as a pro-Castro ``fundamentalist announced he was leaving.

 ``He was defending the revolution one day and gone to Miami the next. This ultra-patriot turned out, like so many others, to have been hiding behind a mask, said Marzo, 62, now an agricultural consultant in Miami.

 REPUDIATION

 Castro quickly ordered government-organized mobs to stage ``acts of repudiation against those who wanted to leave -- vicious attacks in which the mobs beat some of their targets, forced others to march around with accusatory signs around their necks and trashed the homes of many others.

 It was a time to settle scores.

 ``Who was targeted for the worst treatment? The ones who had been the most `revolutionary,' who had denounced others for wearing blue jeans or other signs of disloyalty, said Domingo Amuchastegui, a former University of Havana professor now teaching in a Miami junior high.

 At least three Cubans are now believed to have been killed during the attacks, including one who accidentally drove his car into a mob. A policeman shot him on the spot, said a Havana resident who witnessed the incident.

 The so-called acts of repudiation initially helped Castro portray Mariel to Cubans as an expulsion of the island's unwanted escoria -- scum, like counter-revolutionaries, thieves, prostitutes and homosexuals.

 Yet in the end the mob attacks would rebound against him.

 Many members of a wave of top regime officials that defected in the mid- and late-80s singled out the mobs as the root cause of their break with the system, said Ernesto Betancourt, a former Radio Marti official who interviewed the defectors for the U.S.-government's station.

 ``People in the (Communist) party were asking themselves, `Why don't these people have the right to leave?' said Donate. ``We saw the ugliness, and that was not what we had worked to build.

 FAMILIES SHATTERED

 Beyond its blow to Cuba's body politic, Mariel shattered thousands of families as husbands left wives, mothers left children and teenagers left their parents for the promise of a better life abroad.

 Many returned later, and Miami travel agents estimate that Mariel-era refugees now make up a disproportionate chunk of the 120,000 or so Cuban-Americans who visit the island on an average year. But some never went back.

 Yaima Rios was 8 when her mother fled and left her in the care of a grandmother. The only news from the mother since then was that she had remarried in Miami and adopted a girl, said one neighbor.

 ``Yaima has invented an entire relationship with her mother in Miami, and she assumes the role of mother for all of the little kids around, but she has been under psychiatric treatment almost since Mariel, said the neighbor.

 SILVER LINING

 Mariel had a silver lining of sorts for the government and some of the Cubans who stayed behind.

 The neighborhood watchdog Committees for the Defense of the Revolution quickly reassigned the fully furnished homes of those who left to the worst-off families in their area.

 Marzo said Castro immediately ordered that all food rations assigned to those who left be diverted to a special account personally controlled by the president, for future redistribution as he saw fit.

 Many ill-trained but politically loyal Cubans were promoted to jobs abandoned by the Marielitos, and production at state-owned enterprises suffered for years afterward, Marzo added.

 Violent crimes fell after Mariel, Donate said, probably less because of the departure of several thousand criminals during the boatlift than because of the psychological calm that usually follows a national crisis.

 LENGTHY CRISIS

 The last boat left Mariel Sept. 25. But the crisis continued to impact Cubans for years afterwards.

 Just months after the boatlift ended, state security agents launched a nationwide search for people in sensitive jobs who had tried but failed to leave and stayed on as tapaditos -- the hidden ones.

 Many were demoted to menial jobs. ``They were thoroughly marginalized and their lives were hell, said former army Capt. Jorge Bedia, who fled in 1992 through the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo.

 The Interior Ministry tightened its links to the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and ordered government, military and party officials to report all contacts with visiting exiles within 24 hours, Bedia added.

 Scores of homesick Marielitos later returned to Cuba -- streaks of hijackings erupted in August of 1980 and in mid-1983 -- and many landed in prison. Saumell said he was jailed with ``several tens of them, and recalled the case of a mentally handicapped teenager named Sergio Ortega.

 Ortega had been in a mental institution when police drove him to Mariel. But once in Miami he missed his parents and hijacked a jetliner back to Cuba. Thrown into Saumell's prison, he tried to hang himself.

 ``He failed in the suicide but got worse every day. He was put in solitary, did not bathe and was covered in excrement, said Saumell, who lost contact with Ortega when he was transferred out of Havana's La Cabaña prison.

 CAPITALISM

 One year after Mariel, Castro began a secretive experiment with capitalism, using the remote eastern towns of San German and Cueto, total population 85,000, to test food markets where farmers and buyers set prices, not the state, and stores that sold hard-to-find goods at higher prices.

 ``They were the only places in Cuba at the time where you could buy a steak or pork, or walk into the hardware store and buy door hinges, recalled Bedia.

 The farmers' markets were officially approved in 1982, but Castro shut them down again in 1986 after complaining that peasants were becoming ``millionaires and undermining Cuba's egalitarian society. He allowed them to reopen them again in 1993.

 PERIOD TO FORGET

 For Castro, Mariel now appears to be a period he would rather forget.

 The Cuban government has scheduled no events marking its 20th anniversary, and Castro mentioned the word Mariel only once during a six-hour speech last August entirely devoted to an otherwise minute recounting of the long history of U.S.-Cuba migration disputes.

 The former Peruvian Embassy in Havana's Miramar section, which for years housed a museum devoted to the boatlift, was torn down last summer to make way for a tourist hotel still under construction.

 But even today, the memories of Mariel and the exodus of up to 35,000 rafters in the 1994 balsero crisis remain so strong among Cubans that they are willing to give credence to the slightest rumor of another mass migration.

 Camilo Rodriguez, 62, retired Communist Party member, only heard the last part of a government radio announcement last month warning that the U.S. policy of welcoming illegal Cuban migrants could easily spark a new mass exodus.

 Rodriguez immediately packed the bare necessities into a shopping bag and headed for a friend's house across Havana to tell her, said the friend's amused daughter.

 ``He turned up at my mom's house, with his little bag all packed, said the daughter. ``He was all excited, shouting, `Get ready! Get ready! They are opening another Mariel!' ''

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald