To Our Readers: Sep. 5, 1994

Two weeks ago, when the first signs of a new Cuban exodus began appearing, TIME layout artist Edel Rodriguez decided to review the magazine’s 1980 coverage of the Mariel boatlift. He expected some of the images to look familiar. But he was stunned to discover an account by correspondent Richard Woodbury of the voyage of the shrimper Nature Boy from Mariel to Florida. “I said, ‘My God!’ ” Rodriguez recalls. ” ‘That was my boat!’ “

For Bill Clinton, “Mariel” is shorthand for all that must be avoided this time around: another 125,000 new Florida residents courtesy of Fidel Castro. Rodriguez’s associations are more personal. He was eight when soldiers came to his family’s door in the town of El Gabriel and told them to clear out. An aunt in Hialeah, accepting Fidel’s open invitation, had sent a boat for her relatives. Rodriguez remembers his father, a photographer, ceding their home and possessions to the state. The family then spent a tense, hungry week at a quickly erected processing center. On board Nature Boy, in addition to 27 Rodriguez kin, the regime had placed several American journalists and 50 other strangers, some of them released prisoners. Edel’s father warily stayed awake all night; young Edel slept through the voyage.

On arrival in Miami he recalls being mystified by toothpaste, apples and English. But he soon adapted. In high school he won a TIME-sponsored art scholarship by creating a hypothetical cover for the magazine. Later, another stipend enabled him to attend Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where he majored in painting. Graduated just two months ago, Rodriguez designs our Letters, Contents and To Our Readers pages (including this one). TIME has also used his illustrations.

Now an American citizen, Rodriguez, 23, returned to Cuba for the first time last December. He was shocked by the smallness of the house he thought so large as a child, and by the simplicity of Cuban life, as well as by its tension and poverty. Many of his boyhood friends confided that “as soon as they got the chance they’d be out of there.” He believes them: two cousins have arrived in the U.S. by raft in the past five years.

Rodriguez grudgingly supports the Clinton Administration policy of detaining Cuban refugees at Guantanamo, on the ground that they should not be granted privileges denied to Haitians. But he fails to see why deserving members of both groups should not be allowed to follow in his own successful wake. “I’ve driven across the U.S.,” he says, “and there’s plenty of space.”