American, Cuba Officials Meet in Effort To Stem Biggest Tide of Migrants From the Island in Decades

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security say Cubans accounted for half of the migrants processed at the southern border in March, second only to the number Mexicans.

Cuba's vice minister of foreign relations, Josefina Vidal, at Havana April 19, 2022. AP/Ramon Espinosa

American diplomats met their Cuban counterparts on Thursday for the first time in four years for immigration talks aimed at stemming what is shaping up to be the largest exodus to America from the communist-ruled island nation in decades, if not history.

The talks in Washington were aimed at re-establishing what the State Department called a “safe, legal, and ordinary” migration process between the countries, which it said is “consistent with U.S. interests in fostering family reunification and promoting greater respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in Cuba.”

Officials of the two countries had been meeting twice a year since the 1990s as part of a series of Migration Accords reached between 1984 and 2017. Those meetings ended, however, in 2018 when the Trump administration stopped processing visas at its interests section in Havana because of the so-called Havana Syndrome ailment hitting American diplomats.

Since then, any Cubans seeking permission to visit or emigrate to the United States have had to make their application at the American embassy at the South American capital of Georgetown, Guyana. American officials said in March that they would resume some limited visa processing at Havana next month but that the primary location would remain nearly 2,000 miles away in Georgetown.

One of the few remaining options for many Cubans, then, is entering the United States illegally via the southern border, and tens of thousands of them are doing just that. Not since the Mariel boatlift in 1980, when more than 100,000 Cubans were allowed to leave the island on boats sent by relatives in South Florida, has the United States seen such an influx of Cuban migrants.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security reported this week that Cubans accounted for half of the migrants processed at the southern border in March, second only to the number Mexicans. They said more than 32,000 Cubans were detained, a record high and more than double the number they saw in February.

If the current pace continues through the end of the fiscal year, the department has said, more than 150,000 Cubans could be detained at the border this year. An unknown number cross without being caught.

A primary reason for the increase in Cuban foot traffic at the border is that the government of Nicaragua, which is ideologically aligned with Cuba’s communist regime, stopped requiring visas for travelers from the island in November. Rather than risk the dangerous crossing by sea or spend the money to travel to Guyana with no guarantee of a successful visa application, many Cubans are simply flying to Nicaragua and traveling overland to the American border.

Because of long-standing preferential treatment for Cuban refugees, those who do manage to make it to the border are rarely denied entry under the Title 42 Covid mitigation rules faced by asylum seekers from every other country.

Few of them are deported. The Washington Post, citing data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reported recently that the agency has deported 20 Cubans in the past five months and only 95 during the entirety of fiscal year 2021.

One reason is that Cuba has stopped allowing flights full of deportees between the two countries. Resuming those flights was said to be one of the issues on the table in Thursday’s meeting.

Conditions on the island, as documented by the handful of independent media outlets there, are now as bad or worse than they were during the so-called Special Period in the early 1990s when Cuba stopped receiving subsidies from Moscow following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Tourism, the country’s main source of hard currency, cratered during the coronavirus pandemic and has yet to recover. Prices for basic goods have skyrocketed, and lines to purchase the few items that are available can stretch for hours. Rolling power blackouts are the norm across the country.

Unrest over the economic conditions spilled into the streets in July 2021 — the largest protests since the 1959 revolution — leading to a harsh crackdown by the government. Dozens of protesters, many of them teenagers, were arrested and jailed, with some of them recently sentenced to 30-year terms in a series of mass trials.

Cuban government officials on the island have said they want to restore order to the immigration process and called the current U.S. immigration policy toward the island “incoherent.”

Deputy Foreign Minister Josefina Vidal told a group of journalists in Havana on Tuesday that while America offers financial assistance to other countries in the region to create jobs and economic stability that deters migration, it does the exact opposite when it comes to Cuba.

Ms. Vidal said Washington applies “maximum pressure to the economic order” through “coercive measures” against Cuba such as the embargo that has been in place since 1962.


The New York Sun

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