MIAMI, United States. — A total of 130 Cuban migrants were deported from the Bahamas this Wednesday, reported the Cuban Ministry of the Interior (MININT).
The group, made up of 107 men, 22 women and one minor, arrived at the José Martí International Airport aboard a Bahamas Air flight.
The MININT indicated that all the repatriated migrants had left the country illegally by sea and that four of them “were transferred to the investigative bodies because they were alleged perpetrators of serious criminal acts, which were investigated prior to their departure.” .
The note, disseminated by official media, specified that it was the fourth operation —and largest— by air from the Bahamas in 2023, with which there are 297 Cubans returned from that country.
Between January 1 and October 2, 2022, the Bahamian authorities had detained 2,804 migrants: 1,916 Haitians and 519 Cubans, figures that exceed the number of arrests in the last three years.
Last December, some 125 Cuban rafters were still in that country waiting to be deported.
Maritime incursions by Cubans into the territorial waters of the Bahamas continued in 2023. Only between Sunday, January 8, and Thursday, January 12, did the authorities of that nation intercept 60 irregular migrants from the island.
The report from the Royal Bahamas Defense Force specified that 51 of these migrants were intercepted on January 8 near Cayo Anguilla by the crew of the HMBS Bahamas patrol vessel. The presence of these had been previously warned by the United States Coast Guard, which has reinforced its presence in the Florida Straits in the face of the massive arrival of Cubans on the coasts of that country.
