The Hope for a New Life, So Close and Yet So Far

By Dana Stevens, The New York Times
March 23, 2005

Beyond the Sea (Más Allá del Mar)" - not to be confused with the recent Bobby Darin biopic of the same English title - tells the story of the Mariel boatlift from Cuba, which began in April 1980 after a Havana bus driver crashed through the fence of the Peruvian embassy in a bid for political asylum. Within days, more than 11,000 Cubans had crowded onto the embassy grounds, refusing to go until they were granted permission to leave the island. Later that month, Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel, about 90 miles from Key West, Fla., to a small armada of American shrimp boats, fishing vessels and other private craft that over the next several months would ferry more than 125,000 Cubans to exile in the United States.

"Beyond the Sea (Más Allá del Mar)," directed by Lisandro Pérez-Rey, combines archival clips from that chaotic exodus, known in Cuba as the "explosion of 1980," with interviews with the boatlift refugees, or Marielitos, looking back at the events. The refugees recount the indignities of life in 1970's Cuba: one woman says she was arrested for practicing the Afro-Cuban religion Santería in her home; another says she was accused of "ideological deviance" for wearing bell-bottom pants and listening to Beatles records.

The accounts of the boatlift itself are harrowing. Many families say they were given only a few minutes to pack their belongings before being split up and loaded onto different boats for the journey.

Some of the film's subjects are immigrant success stories: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a successful hairstylist with a million-dollar art collection and a transsexual performer who completed her male-to-female transition after arriving in the United States. Others have fared less well, like a young man currently serving a 417-year sentence in a Florida prison for a double murder he says he never committed.

The film briefly explores darker topics, like the anti-Marielito bias among Cuban-Americans already living in South Florida, but its overall tone is rosy and upbeat, as survivors speak of their faith in the value of hard work or remember the boatlift as "the best thing that ever happened to me." These tales of upward mobility seem at odds with Mr. Pérez-Rey's choice to include a clip from the 1983 remake of "Scarface," in which Al Pacino, playing a Marielito thug, introduces a machine gun as his "little friend."