The Carter administration era opened the floodgates to Miami.

President Jimmy Carter’s name is indelibly tied to one of the largest sea exoduses in history, one that shaped Miami for years to come and arguably played a part in his reelection defeat: the Mariel boatlift.

Between April and October of 1980, about 125,000 Cubans came to South Florida in boats from Havana’s Port of Mariel, provoking political backlash for Carter, who, in a speech that May, said America would “continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom.”

His foreign policy left a profound impression in a city where thousands of Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan refugees fled from countries that his administration struggled to steer toward democracy — with little success.

Carter died on Sunday. He was 100 years old.

His years in office were marked by mass migration to the shores of South Florida, the rise of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and human rights and constitutional crises elsewhere. Almost half a century later, the failure of the Carter administration to advance democracies in the hemisphere remains a challenge for U.S. policy.

“Carter’s record in Latin America was mixed,” said Eric Farnsworth, a former State Department and White House official who leads the Washington office of the Council of the Americas and the Americas Society. “He had some real successes. He was the first to meaningfully put human rights at the center of policy in Latin America. The main challenge is that he seemed to misunderstand the true nature of violent dictatorships. He thought that by engagement and diplomacy, somebody like Fidel Castro might be convinced to change the path of the Cuban dictatorship.”

At the beginning of his presidency, in June 1977, Carter, the one-time peanut farmer from Georgia who campaigned on reorienting U.S. foreign policy following the end of the Vietnam War, vowed to put human rights and non-intervention principles at the center while working toward detente with the Soviet Union.

But the approach was immediately put to the test by the realities of Latin America and the Caribbean, as the region turned into a Cold War playground, with Cuba playing a central role, and other nations in the hemisphere found themselves rocked by political instability, armed conflicts and repressive dictatorships.

Carter would go on to have significant accomplishments in the hemisphere, like the treaty to transfer control of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panamanian authorities. Because he put human rights at the center of his diplomacy, experts also credit him for launching countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil, all under right-wing dictatorships, on a path toward democratization.

But without a regional policy framework, his administration was left to react to a series of crises whose ramifications are still being felt today in South Florida. And “by trying to put human rights at the center of policy in the Western Hemisphere, somehow, the United States ended up being soft on some of the worst human rights abusers in the hemisphere,” Farnsworth said.

“Maybe the lesson to be taken there is that human rights can be abused by the left as well as the right,” he added.

Engagement with Cuba

Despite tensions with Cuba, Carter wanted to lift the U.S. embargo on the island and improve human rights conditions there. He was unable to achieve either, despite his best intentions.

Instead, Carter was forced to deal with a mass exodus from Cuba skillfully exploited by Fidel Castro, which many observers believe contributed to his 1980 loss of the presidency against Ronald Reagan, whose landslide victory marked the first time since 1932 that an incumbent president was denied reelection.

Early in his presidency, Carter had engaged in direct talks with Castro. In 1978, he was interested in normalizing relations and opening a U.S. Interest Office that could work as a diplomatic mission in Havana. His administration also worked with a group of Cuban Americans who established a dialogue with Castro that resulted in the release of more than 3,000 political prisoners and the reestablishment of family travel.

But talks on normalization eventually failed when Castro refused to withdraw his forces fighting in Angola during the African nation’s civil war.

The release of Castro’s political prisoners marked an important achievement for Carter’s foreign policies, but it was shortly overshadowed by one of the largest sea migration events in modern U.S. history — the Mariel boatlift.

After years of isolation, economic scarcity and lack of political freedoms, discontent spread in Cuba. When a group of Cubans entered the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking asylum, Castro saw an opportunity to get rid of critics while creating another problem for Carter, whose administration would now face immigration challenges at home.

Castro forced exiles in South Florida who had rented boats to pick up their relatives on the island to take other passengers, mostly men, who were criminals or mental health patients. While less than 3,000 migrants were deemed inadmissible by U.S. immigration authorities, the narrative about Mariel and criminal refugees became entangled with national politics and anti-immigrant sentiments. Eventually, the handling of the Mariel boatlift, along with a worsening economy, an energy crisis and the Iranian hostage crisis, became one of the factors that led to Carter’s defeat at the polls.

On top of the 125,000 Cubans that came to South Florida, about 25,000 Haitians also arrived in boats in South Florida fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship at home.

Declassified State Department documents show that if he had been reelected, Carter intended to lift the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Over the years, he remained an advocate of lifting sanctions but also pushed for human rights and democracy in Cuba.

In 2002, he traveled to the island, called for free elections and brought attention to the Varela Project, a plebiscite initiative led by the opposition leader Oswaldo Payá. The visit played out in ways Carter could not foresee.

Granted by Castro the unprecedented opportunity to give a speech, televised live nationwide from the University of Havana, Carter spoke of democracy, civil liberties, political prisoners and the Varela Project. He even mentioned the claims disputes over confiscations of U.S. properties after Castro took power in 1959.

Many Cubans, especially the younger generation, had never heard of many of the issues before, even less on state television, nor had they seen a foreign leader openly calling Castro to allow for a democratic transition. Viewers were stunned. But while Carter’s words resonated among many, they made Castro even more determined to prevent the plebiscite proposal from posing a risk to his rule.

Less than a year later, Castro imprisoned 75 dissidents, many directly involved in the Varela Project.

Rise of the Sandinistas

Similarly, Carter’s efforts to push the Anastasio Somoza regime to improve its human-rights record and prevent a socialist revolution in Nicaragua failed.

When Carter came to office, Nicaragua was already mired in conflict. Somoza’s rule was being challenged by a Marxist guerrilla group supported by Cuba, the Sandinista National Liberation Front. After one of its attacks, Somoza ordered a fierce crackdown, and Carter cut off aid to Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan ruler lifted the state of siege to restart the flow of U.S.. aid, but the Sandinistas took the opportunity to launch new attacks.

Various attempts by Carter to seek a mediated solution to the conflict collapsed. When Somoza refused such plan in January 1979, Carter ended military assistance to the Nicaragua National Guard.

The Sandinistas took power just a few months later under the leadership of Ortega and quickly declared a state of emergency, abolished the constitution and began confiscating private property.

Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans fled to South Florida.

Many years later, in 2006, Carter was in Nicaragua to monitor elections in which Ortega was set to win the presidential elections. At the time, Carter told Reuters that he thought Ortega had changed.

“His demeanor, his approach and his public statements are radically different from what I knew in the ‘80s,” Carter told Reuters.

Ortega is still in power as the head of one of the most repressive regimes in the hemisphere.

Haiti and human rights

In Haiti, Carter faced a dilemma he had wrestled with several times: He wanted to support friendly governments but found their resistance to peace and democracy challenging his push on human rights.

When Carter came into office, he inherited a U.S. ally in Haiti, President-for-Life Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the son of the country’s former dictator, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The Carter administration continued to provide assistance and Haiti was receiving about $41 million despite its sordid human rights record.

That support led to increased criticism of U.S. policy as critics of the Duvalier regime accused it of exploiting the aid to tighten its hold on the country. They also pointed out that Haitians were increasingly fleeing on boats only to be turned away by the U.S. and denied legal status if they made it onto land.

Eventually, Haitian refugees found reprieve under the Carter administration. They were treated the same as Cubans and considered refugees with the establishment of the Cuban-Haitian Entrant Program in June 1980. The program granted temporary status and access to asylum processing and assistance to fleeing Cubans and Haitians.

A different world?

Despite the setbacks during Carter’s presidency, Andrew Young, the administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, believes that had Carter won a second term, the world would be a far different place.

A few months into the job, Young arrived in Haiti with a list of political prisoners given to him by Haitians and others and asked for a private meeting with the young Haitian dictator, who was then 26 years old.

“I went back to his office, took this list out of my pocket, and said, ‘I don’t know who’s on here, but friends of mine say that these people have been unjustly convicted,” Young said.

“I said there are many other places in the world that are far worse than Haiti. But they don’t get the publicity you get because they’re not as close to the United States,” Young added. “I said it would really do Haiti good, and it would help me and the people in jail if you could find a way to do whatever you think is right.”

On Sept. 21, 1977, months after the visit, 106 Haitian political prisoners were released, including Robert “Boby” Duval, a well-known soccer player who told the Miami Herald in 2008 that Carter saved him from death after he had spent eight months imprisoned on the grounds of the presidential palace where prisoners were being hogtied, beaten and tortured.

While his record in Latin America and the Caribbean has detractors, few question Carter’s values and intentions. His time in office coincided with a difficult time in history, in some ways bearing similarity with current international affairs. Scrutiny over his legacy might help to get some answers for today’s world.

“Carter, I believe his heart was truly in the right place,” Farnsworth said. “He truly wanted to make peace. ... He wanted to reevaluate the traditional U.S. posture in the region, trying to reduce the tensions of the Cold War. Those are laudatory goals. But the question is, did that desire, at some point, overwhelm the ugly reality of what was possible in the region at the time? I think that’s the question that historians will have to answer.”

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