[Valigator]

letter to Newspaper last month ..."hey I included 50 caliburs"

Just a quick comment.....I love the way you sugar coat the Mariel experience...especially your writer Ruth Morris...her " woe is the Marielitos" attitude is enough for some of us to wonder which planet she dropped down from? Why doesn’t one of you go on the FDLE website under the title "Thugs" or "Career Criminals" and check out the names? Look back on your stories and define when the terms "home invasion" and "car-jacking" became common verbage in your paper? Check out the years Florida citizens purchased the most amounts of weapons for home protection? After the Mariel experience, most Floridians other than hispanic, didn’t give a damn about Cuba. In fact alot of us just wanted it blown up and be done with it. Mariel took whatever compassion the average Floridian had to the Cuban plight and demolished it. Your quote "Cubanologists believe that it's unlikely another large-scale, haphazard Mariel exodus will occur again. Subsequent history, such as the smaller 1994 rafter exodus, the Elián Gonzalez confrontation, the "truckonaut" saga and the "wet foot, dry foot" controversy all prove immigration will remain a volatile public policy issue without measures to address the underlying pressures behind the exoduses."

You bet it won’t occur again. If you think the minutemen on the Mexican borders are fed up? Wait until you see Floridians sitting on the beaches with 50 calibers even if it smells like another Mariel.