Hundreds of thousands of Cubans desperate to leave the island’s flailing economy and reunite with family in the U.S. but unable to get visas in their own country have been forced to fly to Central America and make tortuous journeys north, or navigate the Florida Straits in rickety vessels.
More than 500 Cuban immigrants have come ashore in the Florida Keys since last weekend. It is a dangerous 160-kilometre trip in often rickety boats, but more Cubans are taking the risk amid deepening and compounding political and economic crises at home.
“I would prefer to die to reach my dream and help my family. The situation in Cuba is not very good,” Jeiler del Toro Diaz told The Miami Herald shortly after coming ashore on Tuesday in Key Largo.
The Coast Guard tries to interdict Cuban migrants at sea and return them. Since the U.S. government’s new fiscal year began on Oct. 1, about 4,200 have been stopped at sea — or about 43 a day. That was up from 17 per day in the previous fiscal year and just two per day during the 2020-21 fiscal year at the height of the pandemic.
But an unknown number have made it to land and will likely get to stay.
Dry Tortugas National Park, a group of seven islands 110 kilometres west of Key West, remained closed to visitors Wednesday as the U.S. evacuated migrants who came ashore there earlier in the week. Officials did not know when it would reopen.
In Marathon, some 72 kilometres northeast of Key West, about two-dozen migrants were being held in a fenced-in area outside a Customs and Border Protection station where tents had been erected to provide shade.
Ramon Raul Sanchez with the Cuban-American group Movimiento Democracia went to the Keys to check on the situation. He told the AP that he met a group of 22 Cubans who had just arrived. They were standing along the main road, waiting for U.S. authorities to pick them up. Sanchez and Keys officials said the Joe Biden administration needs a more co-ordinated response.
“There is a migration and humanitarian crisis, and it is necessary for the president to respond by helping local authorities,” Sanchez said.
Cubans also among those trying to enter at southern border
Grappling with the biggest flood of Cuban migrants in decades, the U.S. reopened its long-closed legal pathway on Wednesday by resuming all visa services at its Embassy in Havana.
In addition to economic struggles exacerbated by the pandemic, Cubans also took note of their government’s harsh response to rare protests on the island in 2021, which included hefty prison sentences doled out to minors.
Some also arrive by land, flying to Nicaragua, then travelling north through Honduras and Guatemala into Mexico. In the 2021-22 fiscal year, 220,000 Cubans were stopped at the U.S.-Mexican border, almost six times as many as the previous year.
In late December, U.S. authorities reported stopping Cubans 34,675 times along the Mexico border in November, up from 28,848 times in October.
Callan Garcia, a Florida immigration attorney, said most Cubans who reach U.S. soil tell Border Patrol agents they can’t find adequate work at home. They are then flagged “expedited for removal” as having entered the country illegally. But that does not mean they actually will be removed quickly, or ever
source: cbc