HAVANA, Cuba. – Every time it is done a round of immigration talks between the governments of Cuba and the United Statesthe representatives of the Cuban regime generally declare that their main concern, and therefore the most important demand they make to Washington, is that they comply with the 20,000 annual immigrant visas that they promised to deliver.
However, according to statements by the Cuban Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, collected by the newspaper Granmain the most recent round of conversations on this topic, the Castro delegation “conveyed the concern of the Caribbean nation regarding the legal limbo in which some Cubans find themselves in US territory, and who have not been given a specific legal status.” .
Mr. Fernández de Cossío did nothing more than repeat the arguments with which the Cuban ruling party tries to explain the exorbitant wave of migration that is causing what some describe as a “demographic emptying” of the Island. One of those arguments would be the privileged treatment that The United States grants to Cubans who intend to enter its territory by any means, which the official described as an “attraction factor.”
The other argument – of course, it could not be missing – is related to “the push factor, directed and encouraged by the economic blockade policy that represses the living standards of Cubans on the Island.”
But, if the vice minister’s concern were truly true, he would have to list the internal factors that lead Cubans to leave the Island, even risking their own lives, as happens when they jump into the sea in rustic boats, or when they try to cross the Darien jungle in Panamanian territory.
Why doesn’t Mr. Cossío ask his government to stop putting pressure on Cubans who seek to make their life project on the Island outside the State?
On the contrary, the vice minister looks the other way so as not to see the fines, price caps and forced sales that apply to non-state economic actors; the obstacles they impose on farmers so that they cannot freely market their productions; and more recently the prohibition on MSMEs from carrying out wholesale sales.
Given the announcements of possible deportations of Cubans in the United States, the official said that “it is quite unfair to try to deport hundreds of thousands of Cubans who are rooted in that territory, and therefore have made their lives, families and jobs there.”
Here it is worth noting that, more than concern for the fate of those Cubans in the northern neighbor, the vice minister sheds “crocodile tears” at the hypothetical return to the Island of those hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom no longer have anything here homes, jobs or ways to support themselves. They would therefore be a boiling cauldron that could unleash new popular protests against the regime.
It has emerged that approximately 850,000 Cubans have arrived in the United States from 2022 to date, which means that the current migratory wave already greatly exceeds the departures through the Mariel, in 1980, and those caused by the Rafting Crisis, in 1994. .
Curiously, this massive migration occurs after the monetary regulation was applied in 2021, which triggered inflation and devalued salaries and pensions, which led many ordinary Cubans to cross the thresholds of misery.
Here is another internal element that enhances the migration of Cubans, and that Vice Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío prefers to ignore.
