A total of 252 Cubans have been returned to the island in recent days by the authorities of the United States and Mexico, an amount that is a measure of the unstoppable exodus that Cuba is suffering.
From the United States, 225 people who had tried to reach that country “using precarious boats or through human trafficking were deported on Monday and were intercepted on the high seas by the US Coast Guard and returned to the island,” said the Ministry of the Interior. quoted in the official newspaper Granma.
“So far this year the US Coast Guard has returned 3,999 people,” the Ministry added. He added that 28 Cubans were returned by Mexico, bringing the total to 1,697 returned from that territory.
Meanwhile, the Cuban immigration authorities maintain at 312 those returned from the Bahamas, with a group of 27 citizens since the previous report on September 2.
According to his calculations, the total number of Cubans returned from these three countries amounts to 6,008 from January to date in various air and sea operations.
According to his calculations, the total number of Cubans returned from those three countries amounts to 6,008 from January to date in various air and sea operations.
The Coast Guard has detained nearly 4,500 Cubans on the Florida coast since October 1, 2021, when the current fiscal year began, to date.
The Department of Customs and Border Protection of the United States (CBP, for its acronym in English) registers, in turn, 177,848 Cuban migrants who have arrived in that territory.
The figure exceeds the largest exodus of Cubans to date, in 1980, when 125,000 people left through the port of Mariel in just seven months.
The US Embassy in Havana, which has recently increased its consular services suspended since 2017, warned this Sunday of the increased surveillance in the Florida Straits before the unstoppable flow of people who try to reach the country by that route.
Experts link the increase in the departure of Cubans in the first place with the serious economic crisis that the country is going through, reflected in the shortage of basic products such as food and medicine and the partial dollarization of the economy.
This situation derives fundamentally from a combination of the impact of the pandemic, the tightening of US economic sanctions and failures in national economic management.
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