OUR OPINION: WHAT WE HAVE IN COMMON IS GREATER THAN THAT WHICH DIVIDES US

They left Cuba in desperation in search of a better life here. The 125,266 Cubans who arrived on our shores via the 1980 Mariel boatlift were a hardy bunch. To leave, they survived leaky boats, rough crossings and attacks on their personal dignity in Cuba. Once here, their image was tarred by the behavior of criminals, a minority among them.

Failure of communism

Twenty-five years later, we can see that the Mariel refugees overcame stereotypes, assimilated, succeeded economically and pursued the American dream. They followed the time-worn path traveled by immigrant groups before and after them, only made more difficult by their arrival in the largest single human tide to wash up so abruptly on American soil. In the process, they enriched South Florida.

Marielitos showed the lie of the Cuban revolution. They were younger and darker than the Cuban exiles who preceded them in the 1960s. Most had grown up under 20 years of communist indoctrination, yet they desperately leaped at the chance for freedom. The pent-up frustration that led to their mass defection was a clear sign that the communist revolution had failed to produce the promised egalitarian paradise.

Fidel Castro and the mobs that assailed the Marielitos before they left the port of Mariel called them escoria (scum) and gusanos (worms). In fact, Castro packed boats with common criminals and mentally ill people, homosexuals and others considered deviant by the regime. Even so, a study showed that by 1990, Mariel refugees generally had attained the same economic success as the 1960s exiles had attained 10 years after arrival.

False generalizations

Many Marielitos had U.S. help, but they still faced big obstacles. The criminal minority tainted the whole group. Crime shot up in Little Havana. Rioting by Mariel detainees at Fort Chafee, Ark. -- and years later in an Atlanta penitentiary -- propelled negative stereotypes nationwide. Scarface, the movie about a violent, Marielito drug trafficker, and the Time magazine cover story Paradise Lost didn't help. Even established Cuban exiles bought into the false generalizations.

Mariel refugees parachuted into tough times here in 1980. They saw race riots erupt in Miami after white cops were acquitted in the death of Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance salesman. Their welcome exposed the unjust treatment of Haitian refugees who were denied asylum and returned to a murderous dictatorship. The cocaine trade flourished. Altogether, the difficulties pushed many whites to flee South Florida.

South Florida survived and thrived, nonetheless, and so did the Marielitos. Today they are indistinguishable among us as doctors, teachers, artists. They continue to pursue the American dream like others who have blended seamlessly into our community fabric. Even the criminals among them won justice last year when the U.S. Supreme Court ended a policy that detained them indefinitely after they had served out their sentences.

A valuable lesson

In the end, Marielitos disproved the stereotype, injected new blood, ideas and vitality into our Cuban community and paved the way for the continuing stream of Latin American newcomers. Their experiences provide a valuable lesson to all of us in this great multiethnic experiment:

What we have in common -- our desire to leave a better world for our children, for one -- is much greater than what divides us. We are much stronger when we pull together than against each other. To Mariel we owe a hardier South Florida.