After five years, the United States reactivates its embassy in Cuba and reissues immigration visas

The US Embassy in Havana resumed its consular services this Wednesday and the full visa release for Cubans wishing to settle in the United States, after a hiatus of more than five years, but with no signs of “normalisation” of relations with the island.

The reopening comes amid a record migration of Cubans arriving by the thousands in the United States both by land – across Mexico’s northern border – and by sea via perilous journeys on rustic rafts or via smugglers crossing the Straits of Florida.

Earlier this Wednesday about 200 people gathered in a park near the diplomatic headquarters to attend appointments called by US officials – by telephone or by mail – or find out how to obtain visas, something impossible since 2017, when the activity The consular service has practically stopped due to the sanctions imposed or strengthened by the government of Donald Trump.

Former Republican President Trump has banned travel and the sending of remittances, launched a harassment of third-country companies trading with Cuba and ships carrying oil, and canceled permits for cruise ships, among over 400 measures during his four years of government.

“We entered and everything was very fast. Now I have to look for a visa and now I can travel,” Melissa Vázquez, 18, told AFP agency euphoric, noting that she had waited “seven years” to be able to meet her father who lives in the United States.

For Eduardo González, who also went to the diplomatic headquarters early, the expansion of consular services in Havana is “favorable” to Cubans who want to go to the United States, because they no longer have to go to a third country to complete the paperwork bureaucratic ., as was the case up to now.

Claimed by a sister, González, 49, saw his family reunification process halted in 2017 when the US consulate closed due to alleged health incidents affecting its officials.

“I was waiting to deliver a document” and “I don’t know yet if they will give me a solution,” he said on Wednesday with moderate optimism.

Approach

The US embassy said in a statement Friday that the “expansion” of its consular services seeks to “ensure safe, legal and orderly migration.”

That mission announced in March the reopening of your consulate, Notice which was followed by several high-level meetings on the topic of migration, first in Washington and then in Havana, with the aim of reactivating bilateral migration agreements, interrupted under the Trump government (2017-2021).

In May, the consulate began issuing limited family reunification visas and in September announced the full processing of visas, excluding tourist visas, by January 2023.

“We have taken very discreet steps to steer bilateral cooperation towards compliance with migration agreements,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in December.

For analyst Michael Shifter, of Georgetown University in Washington, “it is a good sign that the governments of both countries are discussing how to manage migration flows in an orderly and rational way”.

But those talks “were limited to migration issues, particularly in the context of the acute migration crisis,” warned Jorge Duany, a Cuba expert at Florida International University.

Hit by the worst economic crisis in three decades, Cuba is facing its largest migration exodus.

Those departures have skyrocketed since November 2021, when Nicaragua, a strong ally of Havana, scrapped visas for the islanders, who mostly fly to that Central American country to begin an overland journey to the United States.

According to official US data, between December 2021 and the same month in 2022, Border authorities intercepted Cubans who had entered illegally on 277,594 occasions to the country by land. Illegal emigration by sea has also increased dramatically in recent months.

The Cuban government acknowledges that Washington handed over more than 20,000 immigrant visas last year for the first time since 2017, a figure set in 1994-95 migration agreements.

Even if in Washington “they don’t want to admit it, there is a direct link between the intensification of extreme measures against the Cuban economy and the speed with which the migratory flow has soared”, the deputy director of the Cuban Foreign Ministry for United States Johana Tablada told AFP in November.

Joe Biden’s promises

Even if he relaxed some of Trump’s provisions against Cuba, the president of the United States Joe Biden avoided resuming Barack Obama’s policy of greater rapprochement (2009-2017), of which he was vice president.

When he arrived at the White House in January 2021, the Democratic president promised to review his Republican predecessor’s policy towards Havana, but he toughened his speech after the anti-government protests in July 2021, the largest in recorded history. island in six decades of the one-party regime.

Last month, Biden reiterated his call for the release of “hundreds of political prisoners” after those protests. His government keeps Cuba on a list of countries that sponsor terrorism and recently included it in another of the countries that threaten religious freedom.

For Duany, “Biden is trying to recalibrate his policy towards Cuba, to strike a middle ground between Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ and Obama’s ‘approach’, but so far the changes in US policy towards Cuba island were minimal”.

“At the moment there are no conditions to move towards normalization of relations,” said Shifter.

Source: AFP

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