Office of the Historian

98. Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski) and the White House Chief of Staff (Watson)1

Washington, April 28, 1980

TO

  • The Vice President
  • The Secretary of State
  • The Secretary of the Treasury
  • The Secretary of Defense
  • The Attorney General
  • The Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare
  • The Secretary of Transportation
  • The Director, Office of Management and Budget
  • The Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency

SUBJECT

  • U.S. Operations—Caribbean Refugees

The President reviewed the conclusions of the Vice President’s meeting on U.S. policy to Cuban refugees, and the options paper for that meeting and approved Option No. 2, as modified by the meeting to reflect the goal of “trying to control the flow of Cuban refugees into the United States.”2 This strategy includes the following components:

—strengthen and enforce existing laws to serve as a deterrent to further voyages by Cuban-American boats;

—seek to persuade the Cuban-American community to stop or at least to discourage the boatlift;

—maximize international pressure on Castro to resume the airlifts, to permit an orderly and humane evacuation of refugees, to place this issue back into its appropriate international context, and to place Castro on the defensive;

—after appropriate preparation, call for an international conference (preferably under UN auspices and including those nations which already have pledged to receive some of the Cuban refugees) to negotiate an international formula with Cuba to resettle Cuban refugees in a humane manner. (This could include an international processing center in Havana.)

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On the immediate operational side, the influx of Cuban and Haitian refugees requires the highest degree of coordination of the Federal government’s domestic resources to insure that the President’s policy decisions are fully implemented.

Jack Watson will assume lead responsibility for convening and directing an interagency group to achieve that result. Jack has already moved to establish such a group and to set-up the necessary lines of communication and control.

  1. Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Brzezinski Material, Country File, Box 14, Cuba, 4/80. Confidential. Vance resigned on the day this memorandum was distributed.↩
  2. See Document 97.↩