Roger García Ordaz is 34 years old and lives in Baracoa, a fishing village west of Havana. He says without problems that he has tried to leave the country eleven times and that he has a tattoo for every failed attempt: three shipwrecks and eight times in which he was rescued by the US coast guard and taken back to Cuba.
“Obviously I will continue to attempt the crossing all my life until I succeed. And if the sea takes my life, it doesn’t matter,” Ordaz tells the New York Times. In 2022, hundreds of boats built with makeshift materials, wood or resin, left the coast of Baracoa, to the point that the locals renamed the town “Terminal 3”.
Living conditions in Cuba have drastically worsened in recent years, due to the heavy economic sanctions imposed by the United States during the Trump administration and the consequences of the covid-19 pandemic, which has hit a vital sector for the economy of the island: the tourism industry. Today food is much scarcer and more expensive than in the past, medicines are difficult to find, Cubans face hours of queuing in front of pharmacies to get them, and in many areas of the country there are frequent and long-lasting power outages. Furthermore, after the anti-government demonstrations of July 11, 2021, Havana reacted with a very harsh repression, arresting hundreds of people and condemning them in summary trials and behind closed doors to very long sentences. Many artists and journalists have chosen exile. Those who remained received heavy sentences, with artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and rapper Maykel ‘Osorbo’ Castillo sentenced to five and nine years in prison, respectively.
Back off
In the last year almost 250 thousand Cubans, more than about 2 percent of the eleven million inhabitants of the island, have emigrated to the United States. Most arrive at the southern border by land, according to US government data. This is the largest exodus since the triumph of Castro’s revolution in 1959, more than the exodus of Mariel in 1980 and the so-called crisis of rafters in 1994, the two largest mass migration episodes in recent Cuban history so far. The situation is likely to worsen in the coming months.
According to many experts, the United States is promoting the same migration crisis with its policies that it would like to fight. To lure Cuban-American voters to South Florida, the Trump administration scrapped President Obama’s opening policy, which called for restoring diplomatic ties with Havana and increasing travel to the island. Trump had replaced it with a campaign of “maximum pressure” by tightening sanctions and severely limiting the amount of money Cubans could receive from their families in the United States, a key source of income.
“If you devastate a country less than 200 kilometers from your border by imposing heavy sanctions, people will come to your border looking for opportunities,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration and he was also the contact person for diplomatic talks with Cuba.
President Biden has begun to backtrack on his predecessor’s policies, but he is moving very slowly. The lifting of the sanctions does not seem imminent, however the two governments are taking joint measures to deal with the extraordinary wave of migration. Washington has announced that in January it will restart consular services in Havana and will issue at least twenty thousand visas to Cubans next year, as foreseen by the agreements in force between the two countries even though during the Trump administration the visas issued had averaged four thousand each ‘year. The move, officials say, could discourage some people from attempting dangerous journeys to the United States.
Havana will also again accept flights from the United States by Cubans who are being expelled as the Biden administration, for its part, lifted the upper limit of money Cuban-Americans can send to relatives in Cuba. Despite these efforts , concludes the New York Times, the future for the Caribbean island remains worrying: mostly young people and people of working age are leaving, a worrying fact for a country that can barely afford to pay the meager pensions on which the population relies older.
Cuba is depopulating.