In two years, Cuba records the largest mass migration since the 1959 revolution

First Amendment: 01/29/2024 – 21:13Last update: 01/29/2024 – 21:12

5 minutes

In the midst of rampant inflation, as well as the collapse of agricultural production and the slow recovery of tourism in her country, the 30-year-old left in August, disillusioned by the rapidly deteriorating economic situation.

“It was very difficult to solve and meet basic needs,” this independent trader told AFP from Miami, where she lives. “There was nothing, and the issue of power outages was unbearable, and the issue of foodstuffs and the price of the dollar” was rising non-stop. Arrived in November.

Like many of her compatriots, Elsa traveled to Managua and from there she traveled a perilous route of about 3,000 kilometers until she reached the US border.

US Customs and Border Protection announced on Saturday that in 2023, it recorded more than 153,000 irregular entries of Cubans into their country. Another 67,000 people headed directly to American soil thanks to the program known as parole, which was implemented by the Joe Biden administration a year ago.

Combined with the more than 313,000 people who entered without papers in 2022, this “represents the largest number of Cuban immigrants ever recorded in two consecutive years since the beginning of the post-revolutionary Cuban exodus in 1959,” says Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Office. . Florida International University Research Institute.

Within two years, at least 533,000 Cubans had arrived in the United States, a number equivalent to 4.8% of the population of 11.1 million. This is without counting entries with other types of visas for which official numbers are not available.

“big loss”

This wave of migration was preceded only by the Mariel wave, in the 1980s when 130,000 Cubans left, followed by the “rafters” in 1994 of 35,000, and the flight for political reasons between 1960 and 1963 of 300,000 at the beginning of the revolution.

Duany adds that during these two years, “many young people with high educational and professional levels left,” which “represents a major loss of human resources” for Cuba, which has one of the oldest populations in the region.

Latin America and Europe are also destinations for tens of thousands of Cubans, but there are no official global figures.

For example, 36,574 Cubans sought asylum in Mexico between 2022 and 2023, while at least 22,000 entered Uruguay and hundreds arrived in Chile, according to official figures from these three countries seen by AFP.

Radebel Peña, a 28-year-old carpenter, flew in April from Havana to Georgetown, Guyana, which does not require a visa for Cubans. He then toured Brazil and headed to Bolivia, where he entered Chile illegally in May.

“There is everything here. By working with dignity, you live well,” he told AFP in Valparaíso, central Chile, where he works construction even without immigration documents.

“intolerance”

The mass departure began in November 2021, when Nicaragua, an ally of Cuba, removed a visa requirement for Cubans. An escape valve for the island mired in the worst economic crisis in three decades.

In 2023, an unusual traffic of sub-charter flights carrying Cuban migrants to Managua also rose, a phenomenon that prompted Washington to impose sanctions on these airlines in November.

In Europe, Spain is one of the favorite destinations for islanders, especially after the adoption of the so-called Descendants Law in 2022, which allows the descendants of Spaniards to obtain citizenship.

Marco Antonio Napoles Alvarez, a 24-year-old waiter from Holguin province, hopes to travel to Madrid in March with his sister, after obtaining a Spanish passport.

“We are planning to settle there to see if things go well,” he said as he left the embassy, ​​his Spanish passport in hand.

Meanwhile, Raul Bonaccia, a 35-year-old playwright, remained in Madrid in September on an artistic residency visa.

“If you want to live in the port country,” like the AFP, what happens in the isla debía has a lot to do with the poor people and decepcionado of the “intolerancia” in the country’s government for the Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC) , unique).

He says his work “Iphigenia” was censored, a classic that he reinterpreted with the theme of migration.

© 2024 Agence France-Presse