MIAMI, United States. – Several dozen Cubans residing in Sepen, an illegal settlement near Playa Baracoa, west of Havana, clashed with authorities and soldiers on Monday, demanding that they not abort their plans to leave the country on rafts to the United States. , as can be seen in a video posted on Twitter by Cuban activist Albert Fonse.
Fonse himself confirmed to CubaNet that several people were injured during the confrontation and that at least four had been detained.
After the violent clash between the neighbors and the military, one of the protesters addresses the authorities and demands that they not interfere with his plans to leave the Island.
“If they don’t want us because we are an illegal community, if we don’t fit in this country because our salary is not enough to buy in stores in hard currency and there is no oil for the thermoelectric plants to work, we decide with our lives what we want” , defended.
“You want to take care of us, but don’t take care of us that way, like parents who punish their children and don’t let them learn. (…) Do not take care of us so much and allow us the opportunity to be able to decide for our lives, ”she added.
Later he assured: “We are not going to steal anything from anyone’s house. When an artifact is found [balsa] there are 15,000, 30,000, 100,000, 300,000 pesos from each united family to be able to leave”.
“We are Cubans like you, who have another position at the moment, but once the current went away, once they didn’t have food like we don’t have it today. They once had nothing like we don’t have. What changed position? Congratulations. Let us make the decision for our lives,” he told authorities.
“In the end, you can’t take care of what you don’t have anymore. We don’t have a way to buy a glass of milk because it’s in foreign currency. We don’t have how to buy a pair of shoes because it’s in foreign currency”, he lamented.
“We are a humble people who are not stealing anything. We don’t want to steal anything from the government, we don’t want to steal 100 liters of oil to mount ourselves in an artifact. We don’t care if we go on a sail or in a tank or in a camera. I know that you want to take care of us as a good government, but you don’t have that capacity because right now there is no power and my daughter is being bitten by mosquitoes. If she catches me with dengue, what do I do?” she asked.
Likewise, the man asked the authorities not to attack Cubans who choose to migrate illegally. “Don’t attack us when we’re making a boat, what they should do is give us a medal. We spend our time, we spend our money, and on top of that we risk our lives through the Florida Straits,” he said.
“What they should do is a monument to the rafters, to those who want to leave, that in the end what we do is help the government because when we send a remittance of 100 dollars our family does not perceive it. In the end, those 100 dollars go to the Government (…) and it is in your interest that all of us who have [sic] here we go”, he sentenced.
Every week, dozens of Cuban rafters They approach the coast of Florida, where they are generally intercepted by agents of the United States Coast Guard and then deported to the Island. However, many of them have perished at sea before reaching land.
Cuba is experiencing a massive exodus that has surpassed the Mariel crisis and the rafters’ crisis of 1994. Since October 1, 2021, the beginning of the current fiscal year, only the crews of the US Coast Guard travel by sea. They have intercepted 4,614 Cubans, a figure that exceeds the number of migrants from the island intercepted each fiscal year from 2017 to 2021.
According to the agency, the statistics have behaved as follows: 5,396 Cubans intercepted in fiscal year 2016; 1,468 in 2017; 259 in 2018; 313 in 2019; 49 in 2020 and 838 in 2021.
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