Cuba faces its largest exodus driven by the economy and the pandemic

Roger García Ordaz does not hide his numerous escape attempts. He tried to leave Cuba eleven times in wooden boatsStyrofoam and resin, and he has a tattoo for every failure, including the eight sea rescues by the US Coast Guard that brought him home.

Hundreds of rickety homemade boats set off this year from the shores of Baracoa, a fishing village west of Havana where Garcia, 34, lives, so many that locals refer to the city as “Terminal Three”.

“Of course I’ll keep throwing myself overboard until I get there,” he said. “Or if the sea wants to take my life, so be it.”

Living conditions in Cuba have long been precarious, but today growing poverty and despair have prompted the largest exodus from the Caribbean island since the late President Fidel Castro came to power more than half a century ago.

The island has been hit doubly by tougher US sanctions and by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has gutted one of Cuba’s lifelines: the tourism industry. Food has become even more scarce and expensive, lines at poorly stocked pharmacies begin before dawn, and millions of people suffer from power outages for hours every day.

A record year

In the past year, nearly 250,000 Cubans, more than 2 percent of the island’s 11 million population, have immigrated to the United States, most reaching the southern border by land, according to US government data.

Even for a nation notorious for mass exodus, the current surge is remarkable: bigger than the 1980 Mariel Bridge and the 1994 Cuban Girder Crisis combineds, until recently the two most important migratory events on the island.

But while those movements have peaked in a year, experts say this migration, which they liken to a wartime exodus, has no end in sight and threatens the stability of a country that already has one of the largest populations in the world. world oldest in the hemisphere.

The avalanche of Cubans who also leave it has become a challenge for the United States.

Cuba, today one of the main sources of migrants after Mexico, he has become a major contributor to the avalanche of undocumented immigrants at the US-Mexico border that has been a major political liability for President Joe Biden and which his government considers a serious national security concern.

“Cuba’s numbers are historic and everyone recognizes that,” said a senior State Department official who is not authorized to speak on the matter.

Many experts say US policy toward the island is helping fuel the very immigration crisis the administration is struggling to address. To appeal to Cuban-American voters in South Florida, Donald Trump abandoned President Barack Obama’s compromise policy, which included restoring diplomatic ties and increase island travel.

Trump replaced it with a “maximum pressure” campaign that escalated sanctions and severely limited the amount of money Cubans could receive from their families in the United States, a key source of income.

“This is not rocket science: if you devastate a country 150 kilometers from your border with sanctions, people will come to your border looking for economic opportunitiessaid Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Obama and was the point person in talks with Cuba.

Although President Biden has begun to withdraw from some of Trump’s policies, he has been slow to act for fear of angering the Cuban diaspora.

Cooperation

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The White House also expressed concern about human rights on the island following the Cuban government’s crackdown on mass protests last year. “These two reasons, a domestic policy and a foreign policy, are mutually reinforcing,” LeoGrande said.

While any significant sanctions cancellations remain off the table, the two governments are engaged in efforts to address the extraordinary increase in migration.

Washington recently announced this will resume consular services in Havana in January and will issue at least 20,000 visas to Cubans next year in line with long-standing agreements between the two nations, which officials hope will discourage some people from attempting dangerous journeys to the United States. .

Havana agreed resume accepting flights from the United States of deported Cubans, another measure to try to discourage migration. The Biden administration also repealed the limit on money Cuban-Americans can send to family members and authorized a US company to process wire transfers in Cuba.

the Cuban government he has long blamed sanctions on Washington already a decade-long trade embargo to cripple the country’s economy and drive people off the island, and says a law in place since 1966 that offers most Cubans who meet certain criteria a fast track to residency is one reason main reasons for the increase of the migration of the island.

But Cuba also has a long history of use migration to rid the nation of those it deems disaffected. As political discontent grew on the island, Fidel Castro publicly asked the agitators – he called them “degenerates” and “worms” – to leave the country.

About 3,000 people left the port of Camarioca in 1965 and 125,000 left Mariel’s in 1980. In 1994, street protests displaced some 35,000 people. Cuba’s free fall has been accelerated by the pandemic: Cuba’s financial reserves have dwindled in the past three years and it has experienced supply problems.

Imports, mainly food and fuel, they were cut in half. The situation is so dire that the government electric company boasted this month that the service was uninterrupted for 13 hours and 13 minutes for one day.

Last year, fed up with the economic decline and lack of freedoms exacerbated by Covid, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets in the largest anti-government protests in decades. A crackdown followed with nearly 700 people still jailed for human rights.

Cubans with less resources try to leave by building makeshift boats, e at least 100 have died at sea since 2020according to the U.S. Coast Guard, which has intercepted nearly 3,000 Cubans at sea in the past two months alone.

But these days, most Cuban immigrants fly out of the island, with relatives overseas often paying for the airfare. Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at New York University who is on sabbatical on the island, said the increase in the number of migrants does not take into account the thousands who have left for other countries, including Serbia and Russia.

“This is the biggest quantitative and qualitative brain drain that this country has had since the revolution,” he said. “They’re the best, the brightest, and the ones with the most energy.”

The New York Times