The Cold War is rarely thought of as having had a fiery battlefront on US soil, but it directly led to the partial destruction of federal prisons in Louisiana and Georgia. Overshadowed by bloodier prison uprisings that had more lasting impacts on the American prison system, the Oakdale prison riot is the rare intersection of American mass incarceration and its fraught international diplomacy. On November 21, 1987, a geopolitical maelstrom culminated in a prison uprising.
Cuban nationals were being held in American federal prisons indefinitely, unable to be released into the United States and unable to be deported back to their country of citizenship. They were often denied court hearings. On November 20, news of their imminent deportation back to Fidel Castro’s Cuba served as the metaphorical match that lit the spark of frustration. The Oakdale Federal Detention Center in Oakdale, Louisiana, went up in flames, literally. The one in Atlanta followed close on its heels.
What is now known as the Oakdale prison riot is hardly a part of America’s collective consciousness, despite the event’s gravity at the time. Prisoners, nearly stateless, took control of multiple federal buildings, not only the prison in Oakdale but simultaneously seizing control of the even more infamous federal prison in Atlanta. Their chief demand has rarely been seen before or since: to not be released, if being released meant being returned to Cuba.
Background
To understand the Oakdale prison riot, one must first understand the geopolitical context that produced it. By 1979, the Cold War was reaching levels of tension not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1980, Castro’s Cuba allowed over 125,000 Cuban nationals to immigrate to the United States from the Port of Mariel, earning the operation the name the Mariel boatlift and the emigres the name Marielitos. They landed in Key West, Florida and were processed by immigration authorities.
It is estimated that over 16,000 of the Marielitos were considered “undesirables” by the Cuban regime, having criminal records. That number was inflated by the fact most had committed minor offenses—both homosexuality and being transgender were considered criminal offenses in Cuba—or had merely dissented against the regime. A much smaller proportion, about 2,700, had been convicted of dangerous crimes.
Even though most were received by President Jimmy Carter’s administration as political refugees, by 1987 around 7,600 were in confinement in the US. Of those, 3,806 were detained as excludable aliens, many of whom had served sentences for crimes committed on US soil. Exercising what little political power the small island nation could while staring down the world’s most powerful superpower, Cuba simply refused to accept any deportees. The US was foisted into a challenging position as the number of Cubans designated for deportation mounted, leaving them stranded in interminable detention.