Cuba lives a new 'boom' of emigration

Hundreds of Cubans line up outside the Panamanian embassy in Havana, Cuba.

This occurs the day after the Panamanian government announced that it will require transit visas for Cubans. Ismael Francisco (AP)

"Oh, my son, this is a drama, everyone who can leaves," says a woman waiting her turn in front of the Mexican Consulate in Havana to apply for a visa.

Like every weekday, a mass of people queue here after making an appointment months ago through the website of the diplomatic headquarters.

On the screen of his cell phone, a young man watches a video of his compatriots swimming across the Rio Grande to the rhythm of reggaeton El champion, fashionable on the island.

He says that one of the authors of the song, called Kimiko, has just arrived in the United States through the Mexican border.

"He was already baptized," he comments in line, when an official calls the next one by his name.

As it is practically impossible to get an appointment at the Consulate for a date soon, some pay hundreds of dollars to someone they do not know to have the interview brought forward, with no guarantee of obtaining the entry permit.

The "management", the result of desperation, has been invented by some savvy people and usually ends in a scam.

That is what this good woman talks about in embarrassment while she waits, confessing that if she is given the tourist trip, she does not plan to return: “My two children left a year ago with their wives for Central America.

They are already in Miami, where my first grandson was just born.

My mother and sister left after the Special Period, so I am left alone.”

Thousands, tens of thousands of people like the relatives of this lady, have left the country in recent times by different means.

But now it's different.

What is being experienced is a true stampede, young people are leaving, entire families, some have even sold the house to pay for the trip, is the comment on the street.

The authorities assure that there are many more who remain and that the United States manipulates the matter to give an image that one cannot live in Cuba.

But the drip doesn't stop.

Row last April at the Mexican consulate in Havana. Yander Zamora

"The current Cuban migratory crisis —which I don't know why it hasn't been described as such— makes me enormously sad, because it's like a wave that grows and, from what I perceive, it will continue to grow, it will continue to impoverish us," affirms the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, author of

, the great novel of post-revolution exile, who is currently presenting the book in Spain.

The data from the Department of Customs and Border Protection of the United States are eloquent.

In seven months, from October 2021 to April of this year, nearly 115,000 Cubans entered US territory irregularly through the Mexican border, three times more than during the last fiscal year (between October 1, 2020 and 30 September 2021, when 38,500 Cubans arrived in the US by the same route).

Travel has increased exponentially since Nicaragua announced in November that Cuban citizens would no longer need a visa to enter the Central American country.

Thousands of people have since left the island for Managua, the first stop on a journey that involves falling into the hands of coyotes and smugglers, crossing borders and paying bribes to corrupt officials until reaching the northern states of Mexico, an adventure risky that can cost migrants between $8,000 and $10,000 to reach their destination.

In December, 7,983 Cubans entered the United States through the southern border.

In January there were 9,700, almost double the number in February, 32,000 last March and a record 35,000 in April, the same number of people who left the island during the 1994 raft crisis.

Cuban migrants during their stay at the "Casa del peregrino" shelter in Mexico City. Nayeli Cruz

“It is a silent Mariel.

We are talking about the fact that in recent months almost the same number of emigrants entered through Mexico as during the entire exodus of 1980, when 125,000 people left.

And the trend is going to continue,” highlights a Cuban sociologist, who indicates that those who emigrated to other countries, for example to Spain, or those who try to leave by sea despite the risk of being deported by the coast guard do not enter this statistic. North Americans—nearly 1,000 rafters were intercepted in the last four months, more than in the entire previous fiscal year.

According to the Cuban authorities, from January to date more than 1,300 Cubans have been repatriated to the island from Mexico, the US and the Bahamas, when in all of 2021 deportations were 1,500.

Mexico has even had to enable a weekly flight (and sometimes two) to return illegal immigrants.

The causes of the current exodus are diverse, although perhaps the main one is the galloping deterioration of living conditions and the ordeal that survival in Cuba has become due to the extremely acute crisis that the country is going through, aggravated by the pandemic, inflation derived from the so-called “monetary order”, the inefficiency of the state productive system and the slow pace of economic reforms.

Of course, the intensification of the US embargo, which Havana considers the main cause of its ills, also weighs heavily.

A perfect storm that has put the country before a migration crisis of uncertain consequences.

"More than anything there is a general discouragement, an absolute lack of hope that the situation will improve," says another boy who is queuing to buy a ticket at the office of the Copa airline, which flies to Central America.

"People don't give anymore," he says, "young people don't have the incentive to stay, and the best leave, the university students, the most prepared, and even people with good positions...".

This is confirmed by a European diplomat, who recounts that two employees have just left for the United States at his embassy who had a salary of about 1,000 dollars a month, much higher than any salary on the island: “When I asked them why they were leaving, one He replied: 'there is only one life'.

Central American, Haitian, and Cuban migrants share connections at a Mexico City shelter.

Nayeli Cruz

The Cuban government has admitted in the press "the sustained increase in irregular emigration" and also in repatriations.

But he blames Washington for stimulating this flow by keeping laws in force such as the Cuban Adjustment, which grants benefits to emigrants from the island and makes their deportation practically impossible, and also for failing to comply with the migratory agreements signed between the two countries.

These establish that the US must grant a minimum of 20,000 emigrant visas per year, something that has not happened since the Trump administration dismantled its consulate in Havana due to alleged "sonic attacks" against its officials, which have never been proven.

In a recent high-level meeting between the two countries to discuss migration issues —the first of the Biden era—, Cuba blamed Washington for having an "incoherent" policy, which on the one hand exacerbates the country's difficulties through the embargo and on the other prevents orderly migration.

Havana assures that, in addition, Washington has pressured countries such as Costa Rica or Panama, which now require a transit visa for Cubans who intend to travel to Nicaragua, a measure that has caused scenes of chaos and huge queues in front of these embassies in the capital. Cuban.

For one reason or another, or rather all together, when things get tight in Cuba, leaving has always been an escape valve.

And now they are very tight.

Faced with the bleeding, which has no sign of a solution, prominent academics, intellectuals and creators such as Padura himself have shown their concern about something they consider a drama that mortgages the future of the nation.

The issue is debated almost daily on the networks, and the government is increasingly being asked to urgently introduce the changes that the country needs (and not just economic ones), to give people hope.

Migrants, mainly from Cuba, block the Paso del Norte border bridge in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.JOSE LUIS GONZALEZ (Reuters)

Padura —who has never wanted to leave his country— has a privileged observatory in the humble Havana neighborhood of Mantilla.

The writer (Princess of Asturias Award for Letters 2015) lives near a store where tremendous queues form daily to get the most modest basic necessities, such as sausages or detergent.

“I watch every noon and every night that I can the news on Cuban television and I hear about a country.

But I go out into the streets of my neighborhood, or any neighborhood in Havana, and I see and they talk to me about a different country, as a parallel.

That country of the street is an overwhelmed country, on the verge of despair due to the lack of almost everything”, he points out.

He says that he has seen people spend all night in front of a store to buy whatever it is that they are going to sell the next morning.

"I hear almost everyone complain that they don't have enough money to begin with," so, says the writer, "nobody should be surprised then that there are so many people, of any age and condition, looking for a way to leave that real country, to go anywhere, by any means”.

Leaving, he observes, has become “the only option for many and perhaps the escape valve for social pressure.

And I fully understand that people make that decision, because the discourse of the news does not relieve them of their problems and because life, you know, there is only one.

Same thing they told the ambassador.

Like Padura, the filmmaker Fernando Pérez, author of cult films like

or

, sees in the crisis and in that divorce between the street and the official world the cause of many evils.

“I am not an economist, but we have taken so long to make some decisions, that now is the worst time and they do not give an answer.

The official discourse goes on one side and reality on the other.

That is very harmful.

People need answers, they need dialogue.

How to maintain a dialogue?

At the opposition level?

I don't want to be an opponent, but how am I going to follow you, if what you tell me has nothing to do with my reality? ”, He said in a recent interview with the digital media Oncuba.

A Cuban couple prepares to cross the Rio Grande in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.

FELIX MARQUEZ (AP)

Pérez (Havana, 1944) is from another generation, but he puts himself in the shoes of those born after the crisis of the 1990s, who are the ones who are mainly leaving now.

He thinks that Cuba needs not only economic changes, but also political ones, if it wants to offer a future to its youth.

“More and more young people are leaving because they can't find the space to express themselves and develop.

That is the worst thing that can happen to us as a country.

I feel that young people are constantly faced with what they are allowed to do and not with what they need or want to do based on their own ideas, which are often different from ours”, he says.

Many people with a certain degree of commitment to the system feel the same pain and concern as Pérez, that "time is running out and the fracture is getting bigger."

“Change is going to come from young people;

it's not going to come through the 'established channels'.

They are going to be wrong more or less, but the change is natural and it is going to come from them”, assures the filmmaker.

In the midst of this debate, the recent departure to the United States of prominent Cuban jurist Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada, a former professor at the University of Havana, an institution that years before had marginalized him and practically expelled him, generated a real duststorm in the academic and intellectual world. for their critical positions –but from left-wing approaches-.

Even a personality like Raúl Roa Kouri, who was Cuban ambassador to the United Nations for 15 years, commented on Facebook: “It is a shame that Julio has been forced to leave the country.

A Martian, patriot and true socialist…”.

In the queue at the Mexican consulate no one knew his name.

People were on something else.

Waiting for his turn.

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