Like Elsa, who was unable to provide for herself, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have left the island over the past two years. An unprecedented bloodletting since the advent of the Revolution in 1959.
The thirty-year-old decided to emigrate in August in the face of the rapid deterioration of the economic situation on the island which has been facing its worst crisis in thirty years since the end of Covid-19, with uncontrolled inflation and a fall in production. agricultural and a mixed recovery in tourism.
“It was very difficult to meet basic needs, there was nothing. The problem of power cuts was unbearable, there was also the problem of (the price of) food” while the peso devalued sharply since 2021, explains from Miami this trader who does not want to give her last name.
Like many of her compatriots, Elsa flew to Managua, Nicaragua, and traveled overland to Mexico, where she stayed for three months before crossing the U.S. border in November.
Cubans queue to enter the United States embassy in Havana, January 9, 2024. © Yamil Lage, AFP
According to the latest figures made public on Saturday, in 2023 the American authorities recorded 153,000 irregular entries of Cubans, and 67,000 nationals of the island were able to legally reach this country through a program called Parole, implemented a year ago. year by Washington to curb illegal immigration.
In 2022, 313,000 irregular entries of Cubans had been recorded.
In two years, at least 533,000 Cubans have joined their northern neighbor, or 4.8% of the population (11.1 million inhabitants). Not counting entries with other types of visas, statistics for which were not immediately available.
“This figure represents the largest number of Cuban migrants ever recorded in two consecutive years since the first post-revolutionary migrations in 1959,” Jorge Duany, director of the Institute of Cuban Research at the International University of Cuba, told AFP. Florida.
In the three years following the Castro Revolution, 300,000 people fled the country, mainly for political reasons. Subsequently, 130,000 Cubans left the island in 1980 and 35,000 in 1994.
The Nicaraguan valve
In addition to the United States, thousands of Cubans have left for Latin America or Europe, swelling the figures of the exodus, but no official global data is available.
Over the past two years, for example, 36,000 Cubans have requested asylum in Mexico, 22,000 have arrived in Uruguay and several hundred in Chile, according to official figures from these countries collected by AFP.
Radibel Pena, 28, flew in April from Havana to Georgetown, Guyana, which does not require visas for Cubans. From there, he crossed Brazil, Bolivia before illegally entering Chile in May.
"Here, there is everything. If you work, you live well," he explains to AFP from Valparaiso in Chile, where he is an undocumented construction worker.
This unprecedented wave of migration started at the end of 2021 when Nicaragua, an ally of Cuba, no longer required visas for Cubans, a relief for the government in the face of the crisis.
Read alsoCuba is going through its most serious economic crisis in 30 years
Departures then accelerated, while the economy plunged in the wake of the resurgence of American sanctions and the consequences of the pandemic, which worsened its structural imbalances.
In Europe, Spain is the preferred destination, particularly since the promulgation in 2022 of a law known as “democratic memory”, which allows certain descendants of Spaniards to obtain the nationality of this country.
Marco Antonio Napoles, a 24-year-old waiter from Holguin (East), hopes to emigrate to Madrid in March with his sister after obtaining his Spanish passport. “We intend to settle there and see if everything goes well,” he said in front of the Spanish consulate in Havana.
Raul Bonachea, 35, playwright, took advantage of an artistic residency in September to stay in Madrid. Despite several jobs, "I couldn't pay for housing and food," he told AFP.
He also denounces "intolerance" on the island, where only the Communist Party is authorized. He says he staged “Iphigenia”, adapting it to the context of Cuban migration, but the play was censored.
With AFP
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