PHOTOGRAPHER'S VIEW

BY TIM CHAPMAN
Herald Staff

On the day so many boats arrived, I drove straight from Miami to the Key West docks. I found boats of every type -- shrimp boats, speed boats, fishing boats -- and they all were crowded to the gunwales with refugees.

I knew I was witness to a great event. It was like being allowed to watch Ellis Island in a different century. So much joy, sadness, bewilderment, weariness and hope.
 
I stayed on the docks a month and photographed children alone, women alone, families who had left someone behind. I saw the faces of Miami relatives clinging to fences waiting to get a glance of a loved one they had heard was coming, faces of Miami relatives who had hocked houses for money to hire boats to pick up their families.

Then all of a sudden, I was photographing all men, alone -- lots of them, eyes red from the seawater and thirst. Many had been herded out of prisons straight onto boats bound for Key West. One minute in a Cuban hellhole and the next on a boat crossing the straits to freedom.

U.S. Customs inspectors were already frisking these men on the docks -- starting the downward spiral of the image of the Mariel refugees.

I followed the boatlift refugees to Eglin Air Force Base in Okaloosa County, where thousands of Marielitos, as they were becoming known, were sent to be processed. I photographed a sea of men holding up a baby in the joy of freedom and all it entailed, photographed men and women receiving a priest's blessing for the first time in their lives.

Even before I shot the pictures in Key West, I had been sent to Peru to wait for the arrival of the group who had crashed the Peruvian embassy in Havana. It was another dramatic scene. The group was brought off the plane in the middle of the night with Peruvian guards holding the press back with Uzis. They let us see the refugees the next day at a park, receiving boxes of food and being housed in tents.

Years later, I went back to Lima to photograph these bold Cubans who had first stormed the embassy. Ironically, they were far worse off than the refugees who came to Florida.

They were being denied employment in Peru. Some of the young girls were forced to sell themselves on the streets to help out their families, who still couldn't get to the U.S.

For several years, I continued to follow the boatlift refugees in Miami -- first the joy, then the resentment from Anglos, then the resentment of the established Miami Cubans, then the resentment of the Mariel refugees because they did not have what other Cuban Americans had. Crime waves were publicized in movies and written about over the years. I photographed a federal prison burned to the ground in Oakdale, La., by Mariel refugees who took it over after being imprisoned for years.

I know about the image of the Mariel refugee, but it is not the true image. The true image is to be found in the face of an old woman with a coat too large for her and her daughter smiling with her hand over her shoulder, comforting her and whispering, ``It's OK, mami, we are free.''