37 Cubans, among whom there are three children between the ages of two and 15, have been stranded at the El Dorado airport in Bogotá since this Saturday. The migrants seek to “continue their way” to Nicaragua, but the Colombian immigration authorities allege that their transit visas are false.
Sadira Cecilia Mayor, a 33-year-old from Havana, details 14ymedio that the 37 travelers left the Havana airport yesterday at 9:45 am on a Wingo airline flight. “Some of us made a stopover here to continue on another flight to Panama or Managua, but the final destination for all of them was Nicaragua.”
In the case of Mayor, he had to wait 16 hours in El Dorado to catch another plane, which he finally missed because the immigration authorities declared the 37 passengers “inadmissible”, with which they cannot continue their trip to another country and have been warned that they will be repatriated to Cuba.
According to Mayor, when they arrived -after noon- at the El Dorado airport, some of the travelers on the flight passed immigration controls without problems, but others did not. “They told us that the transit visas were false, but we had not had any problems when we presented them to the airline in Havana to board the plane.”
In most cases, transit visas were managed and paid for online by family members living abroad. “But now they tell us that it is a fake website, a hoax, because they have cloned the page of that Colombian migration process and that everything looks exactly the same but instead of ending in .co it ends in .com and It has one more script.”
“They told us that the transit visas were false, but we had not had any problems when we presented them to the airline in Havana to board the plane”
Due to the congestion of the Colombian consulate in Havana, the option of processing the permit digitally was a less complicated and faster possibility for travelers, the woman details. However, the process ended up being false. “We feel cheated.”
Once the process is paid on-line, the travelers received by email the confirmation of a supposed transit visa that they presented to the flight check in Havana. “We did the checkin, we went through migration in Cuba, they checked our papers again to get on the plane and nobody told us anything that they were false,” Mayor details.
“What we want is to continue towards our destination. We are already here and it doesn’t cost them anything to let us continue but they say they can’t because the law doesn’t allow them to let us continue,” he tells this newspaper. Mayor has tried to contact the Bogotá office of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, but has received no response.
The travelers have not yet considered an application for political asylum in Colombia and are concentrating their efforts on claiming to continue their journey, but they fear that the next morning the authorities will repatriate them on a flight that leaves for Havana.
Among the migrants there is a barber, a bicycle taxi driver and a computer engineer, in addition to many other occupations. Most sold all their belongings to pay for the trip. “I didn’t have my own house but to be able to pay the ticket I sold all my clothes,” explains Mayor. “There are people here who no longer have anything in Cuba.”
“They don’t give us food, what little we have been able to eat we have had to pay out of pocket and, of course, since this is an airport, everything is very expensive,” he laments. They are escorted by the police to the place where they have been able to buy some hamburgers to prevent them from escaping.
Last February, the former director of Cuban Television Yailén Insúa Alarcón requested political asylum in Colombia
Last February, the former director of Cuban Television Yailén Insúa Alarcón, 42, requested political asylum in Colombia. The journalist and her husband spent 11 days sleeping on the floor of Bogotá’s El Dorado airport until got a safe conduct to exit the air terminal.
Both were stranded in Colombia after not being able to board a flight that would take them to Nicaragua. “As soon as I arrived in Bogotá, the airline employee told me that she could not board the flight to Managua because she had a ‘do not board’ order from the Nicaraguan government and was considered a persona non grata,” she said in an interview with 14ymedio.
In his application for political asylum, Insúa alleged fear of retaliation if he returned to the Island due to the conflicts with the authorities that led to his departure from the official media. “It was a thorn in their side and since 2017 I can’t work in any medium. I even had to give classes to be able to support myself,” she explained to this newspaper.
Cubans need a transit permit to make a stopover in Colombia on their way to other destinations, but in mid-February, the Colombian consulate in Havana reported that new applications for transit visas will not be accepted until the applications are completed. are still pending, due to increased demand.
“Applicants of all types of visas are reminded that they should not acquire and pay for air tickets without having a consular appointment date, as well as that all types of visas, including Transit Visas, are subject to the discretionary power of the consular authority. competent to approve, require or deny, as the case may be,” added a note from the Foreign Ministry.
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