No one is surprised that the queue to enter the office of the Ministry of the Interior in Centro Habana extends to the entire block. The anxiety of Cubans to obtain a passport, especially now that the United States has announced its new temporary permit programis expressed in shoving, shouting and all kinds of tricks to expedite the processing of the document.
Those interested gather at the corner of Castillejo and Jesús Peregrino streets. They ask for the last one and walk to the end of the line, many meters away from the office door. This Tuesday, dozens of Cubans protested in the vicinity of the Directorate of Identity, Immigration and Foreigners because the facility – one of the most central in the capital – still does not have the application to accept electronic stamps, essential to obtain that or any other document.
Those who have obtained paper stamps –generally through resale– go to the office almost at dawn. Although it seems like a single tumult, there are several well-differentiated queues: the first to scan the identity card –requirement to take a turn and carry out the procedure another day–, the second to request the documents, the third to collect them and the last to extend the passport.
In the queue there are not only young people and adults, there are the elderly, pregnant women and people carrying their young children
“Those who take shifts today will have the 30th,” reports an office worker, whose informal dress contrasts with the severe uniform of the other officials of the Ministry of the Interior. One by one, the office worker takes photos of the IDs and people jostle to get to her. “There’s a pipeline of requests,” she warns.
“The people who are here are the ones who came last year to ask for a turn,” explains one of the women who handed in her card in December. “The normal time frame for them to call you is twenty or thirty days. That gives you a measure of how many people are leaving the country,” she says.
However, many regret that it is common to come to collect the passports on the stipulated day and they are not yet ready. In the queue there are not only young people and adults, there are the elderly, pregnant women and people carrying their young children.
“Now you are going,” several people say to an elderly lady, who leans on her cane. “You have to get out of here,” insists the woman, while enthusiastically explaining to those waiting next to her that her son intends to take her to live with him in the United States, so she can rest and “take a walk,” as he tells her that “He already worked enough in Cuba.”
His parents accompany a young man who has just turned 18: “You have to get his passport before the Service takes him,” says the father, alluding to the immediate “count” that the Armed Forces launch in the pre-university school to prevent young people of military age emigrate.
At eight in the morning, the officials begin to call four by four those who have been waiting for several hours. “I paid 500 pesos to get in line and get in first and look how they slipped in,” complained a man, lagging behind at the first call.
Even if the two procedures are carried out on the same day, the waiting time for the passport is different from that for the card and always lasts at least one or two months. The news that the US plans to deliver a total of 30,000 monthly visas to Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans – provided they have, among other requirements, a “sponsor” – and the enactment of the Democratic Memory Law, which benefits Spanish descendants, has further overloaded the Cuban system of formalities.
Another huge queue stretched this Tuesday in front of the Carlos III Post Office, in the portals of the Grand Lodge of Cuba building. The objective: to obtain the necessary stamps to cover a procedure. Very few were able to reach the sales window before demand outpaced office bookings.
José Manuel Valido, director of institutional communication of Correos de Cuba, issued a note on your Facebook page on the crisis in the sale of stamps, which was disseminated by the official press this Monday.
“The tax stamp on documents is not a postage stamp, it is a stamp for procedures, whose responsible entity in the country is the Onat [la Oficina Nacional de la Administración Tributaria]. Correos de Cuba markets them (according to the demand), based on what it receives from Onat through Trasval,” Valido justified.
The reason why the system is overwhelmed, says the official, is that “external factors” were not foreseen, “such as the so-called ‘law of grandchildren’ of Spain and others approved in the country, which generated a demand much higher than what was conceived for this type of stamps and, consequently, the crisis was created”.
Valido also mentioned, of course, the official excuses such as the US embargo and the lack of foreign currency, necessary to buy “paper money”, and also blamed “illegalities” for the lack of stamps.
Regarding electronic stamps, he stated that it was an idea that was proposed “before the crisis”, but that “as almost always happens with technological development projects”, the initiative ended up taking a “slow and tortuous” path, dependent on several organisms, and with great difficulty to “put them in agreement”.
It is assumed that, for the use of electronic stamps, there is already the support of the Etecsa telephone monopoly and the Ministry of Justice, but as regards the Ministry of the Interior -which administers immigration and identity documents-, its incorporation into the system, Scheduled for December 2022, it simply “did not happen,” reproached the official.
Valido hopes that electronic stamps will soon become part of everyday reality, “if each institution involved does what it is supposed to.”
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