Antonio Ferrer, his wife and their two children found themselves among thousands of other exiles, including former inmates of Cuba's prisons and insane asylums, when they arrived at this Florida military base on their search for freedom.
The criminals and mental patients, though, were less fearsome than stone-throwing mobs that had attacked Cuba's Peruvian embassy, where they had sought refuge before being allowed to sail from the communist island to Key West in 1980, Ferrer recalled.
"I thought one time that, after all the rocks that were thrown and the broken heads, soldiers were going to come in and start shooting," Ferrer said in a recent interview from Miami, where he lives. "After all that, Eglin was a walk in the park."
PHOTO: AP
Like Vietnamese refugees five years earlier, the Cubans got their first taste of the US -- from Southern fried chicken and cowboy movies to the July 4 US independence day celebrations -- at tent cities hastily put up at Eglin, which is located in northwestern Florida.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Vietnamese resettlement camp and the 25th for "Campo Libertad," or Camp Liberty, as the Cubans called their facility.
Both sets of refugees overcame strange food that made some sick, culture shock and long waits to be processed and assigned sponsors who would help them remake their lives. Most Vietnamese were passive and cooperative, but the Cuban camp was filled with tension that erupted into a minor riot.
Authorities blamed the clash partly on "agitators" planted by Cuban President Fidel Castro's government among the 10,025 exiles who went through Eglin's camp. Crowded conditions and impatience to be released also were factors, according to historical records on what the military called Operation Red, White and Blue, for the colors of the US flag. They were part of a "freedom flotilla" that took about 125,000 Cuban exiles to the US from April through October 1980.
Ferrer, 55, now an air conditioning designer in Miami, steered clear of one barracks he described as a "nightclub."
"It was a party for some of the criminals and cross-dressers until the military officers got serious and made the rule that 11pm was lights out," he said.
Five years earlier, in May through September 1975, 10,085 refugees, mostly Vietnamese, had gone through a similar camp during Operation New Arrivals. The Eglin refugees were among 130,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who came to the US in 1975 after the communist takeover of South Vietnam.
"We had a good time" at Eglin, said Truong Nguyen, then a teenager and now 48, but he added, "The only things we were allowed to do was study English and watch movies."
Nguyen said refugees were amazed by the quantity and variety of food although US cooking took some getting used to. The first meal at Eglin for most Cubans was a box lunch, said Captain Gerald Brown, a civilian Department of Defense police superintendent who pulled duty at both camps.
"Apparently at that time Cuba did not have apples or milk," he said. "You would have thought we were giving them a million dollars."
However, Nguyen's favorite -- beef stew -- and other US dishes such as ham and eggs for breakfast, did not go down well with the Cubans. Military cooks were brought in after many refused to eat food prepared by a contractor.
An Air Force spokesman then had told reporters some Cubans were getting sick from eating too much because US food was not as filling as beans and rice they were accustomed to. A 1975 Independence Day celebration included fried chicken, watermelon and aerobatics by two civilian stunt planes.
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