I remember the euphoria. It rushed across Calle Ocho like a carnival, joyful honks and impromptu banners fueled by radio reports that the island of Cuba had burst open.

Get in your boats! Go get your families! Port Mariel is open! The radio announcers exhorted the masses.

 It was early April 1980, just days after 10,000 asylum-seeking Cubans jammed the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, seeking to escape the island. At Mariel, thousands camped out in the swamps, waiting for a ride to Key West.

 Cuba faced economic and moral devastation. Something had to give. So Castro gave us Mariel. At first, Cubans in Miami, separated from their homeland for 20 years, seemed ecstatic, if only for the chance to embrace those fleeing Castro. Exiles scrambled to rescue their relatives. They borrowed money, sold possessions, took out second mortgages to buy boats.

 It didn't take long for them to follow the lead of Napoleon Vilaboa, a Miami car salesman who had taken part in the 1978 dialogue between exiles and Havana, as he headed across the Florida Straits, on a 41-foot fishing boat named after an African goddess of love, Ochun.

 A murky figure who later would claim he was working for the Cuban government during Mariel, Vilaboa commanded a rag-tag flotilla that would deliver from Mariel 125,000 Cuban refugees, a wave so formidable that it would transform South Florida.

 But this Freedom Flotilla, welcomed with gusts of euphoria, quickly spawned conflicts. For the exiles, as for the refugees, a chasm opened between expectation and reality.

 In our years of separation, many exiles had come to believe that the Cuba of our memories was somehow suspended in time, waiting for the fall of Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, on the island, many Cubans had grown to believe Miami was a place of unconditional welcome, instant success and automatic luxuries.

 Somewhere along the passage, the mirror cracked. They were not like us, went the eventual hisses.

 The first two boats arrived on April 21, bringing 55 refugees to Key West. The next day, 35 more Cubans arrived from Mariel. On Day Three, there were 2,746.

 From where I stood, in the front lines at various processing and relocation sites, I could hear the increasingly wary comments of exiles at the sight of a refugee group that seemed so different. There were streams of single, young men. There were many blacks, the largest such group this predominantly white exile population had seen.

 There were thousands of homosexuals, whose professed sexual orientation became a ticket out of Cuba. But in declaring themselves gay, they gained a double stigma -- not only were they Marielitos, they were gay in a culture where such identities were still kept hidden, for the most part.

 On May 5, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed that all those Cubans seeking freedom from Communist domination would be welcomed with ``an open heart and open arms .''

 The next day, he declared a state of emergency, approving $10 million in emergency refugee funds to reimburse voluntary agencies in South Florida for their help in processing the refugees.

 Soon after, the exile community declared its own unofficial state of emergency. Exiles distanced themselves from the new arrivals. They joked about the unofficial refugee dress code, the rolled up pitusas, the Lee blue jeans favored by the youths eager to dress in American garb. They bristled each time the newly arrived Cubans uttered socialist terms, like compañero -- comrade.

 CRITICAL YEARS

 For the exile community, these were critical years. After two decades, our leaders finally had broken into the political establishment, their influence moving beyond Miami and toward Washington, D.C. Exile businesses were thriving. Corporate boards were Cubanizing. The scent of cafe wafted into the corridors of power. There was too much to lose with unflattering associations -- thus the distance was established. Initially affectionate, the term Marielito came to represent a stigma that would remain for at least a decade.

 The very image the Cuban government had put out about those departing via Mariel -- that they were ``scum,'' delinquents, social misfits -- was propagated by some of Castro's most strident opponents in exile. In their haste to save their own image, exiles bought into Castro's labels.

 The consequences of this culture clash filled the old Krome North refugee facility. The director, Siro del Castillo began to track a disturbing trend: Mariel refugees left homeless after what officials termed ``family breakdowns.''

 ``Some of the family fights were over simple things, different habits, things like leaving the door open and letting the air conditioning escape,'' recalls del Castillo, who went on to run the refugee camp at Fort Chaffee, Ark.,, and later operated a halfway house for refugees in New Orleans.

 `RESENTMENTS'

 ``There were mutual resentments. The Marielitos demanded respect for having to endure the Castro regime. Meanwhile, the exiles were saying, `We worked very hard to get what we have,' '' says Del Castillo.

 But those early clashes would generate a significant transformation: A new culture started to emerge, more open and diverse, more stratified, and 20 years closer to Cuba. This Mariel culture did more than any of the previous migrations to shatter the walls between Cubans on the island and Cubans in Miami.

 ``The Mariel generation opened it up. We made it necessary to keep in touch with the island. It was no longer taboo to communicate with Cuba or with the Cuban people,'' says Raul Hernandez, a doctor who arrived on the boatlift.

 At the time, though, the long-term benefits didn't seem to make a difference. Even Hollywood got into the act, dealing a defining blow to the refugees when it immortalized a fictionalized Marielito nicknamed Scarface. To erase the public scar, a group of exile civic leaders formed an anti-defamation group called FACE, Facts About Cuban Exiles.

 Lourdes Cue was barely 7 years old when Mariel happened. An only child, she was happily playing with her newly arrived cousins from Cuba. They had come into her life one day, magically, three young girls in donated dresses, holding bags filled with orange gumballs.

 Today, Cue plans lectures and seminars for FACE, as its executive director. At 25, she represents the so-called Generation ñ Cuban-Americans, and she promotes the lasting, popular take on Mariel: It was a great contribution to who we are.

 PERSPECTIVE

 ``Mariel made exile more representative of the island,'' says Cue, who remains close to her cousins. ``We see it now. . . . Distance is the only thing that allows us to properly understand the things we've experienced.'' From a distance, we can even see that we were not that different at all. Not even from those Castro labeled ``scum.''

 Raul Hernandez is one who bore such a label, stamped in a police document containing his ``confession'' that he was a ``social parasite and a bum.''

 After he had requested permission to leave the country, the Communist Party militants in his town mobbed the clinic where he was on duty. He escaped with the help of the local police -- who left him, unprotected, on a nearby street.

 Seeing his chance to leave at Mariel, he signed his confession and prayed none of the officials at the Cuban port found out he was a doctor. In those terrifying sequences, he remembers feeling like an outcast, banished from his country.

 Once settled in the States, he started working with the U.S. Catholic Conference, in refugee resettlement, a job that took him to several American cities before bringing him to Miami eight years ago.

 FEELING AT HOME

 Today, he coordinates Cuban and Haitian programs for the agency, finding glimpses of his own escape in the stories of other refugees -- refugees without labels. At 50, he feels quite at home. In fact, he says, in many ways his life began when he landed in Key West 20 years ago.

 ``Literally, I found out I could breathe,'' he remembers. ``Finally, finally I could breathe.''

 And for the exiles at the other side of the chasm that opened up with Mariel, there was also a new gust of fresh air.

 ``Go anywhere in the world, to any city, and toss in a random 125,000 refugees,'' says del Castillo. ``I'd say we came out of this very, very well.''

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald