Cuba is depopulated like never before

The exodus to the United States – the largest to date – threatens the country’s future.

(Baracoa, Cuba) Roger García Ordaz does not hide his numerous attempts to flee.

He tried to leave Cuba 11 times on boats made of wood, polystyrene foam and resin, and he has a tattoo for each failed attempt – including three boating accidents and eight times he was picked up at sea by the US Coast Guard and sent home.

Hundreds of rickety homemade boats left the shores of Baracoa, a fishing village west of Havana, where 34-year-old Roger García Ordaz lives this year.

“Of course, I’m going to keep throwing myself on the sea until I get there,” he said. “Or if the sea wants to take my life, so be it. »

Precarious living conditions

Living conditions in Cuba under communist rule have long been precarious, but now worsening poverty and desperation have sparked the largest exodus from the Caribbean island nation since the rise to power of Fidel Castro, more than half a century ago.

The country has been hit by a double whammy: tougher US sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic, which has eviscerated one of Cuba’s mainstays – the tourism industry. Food has become even scarcer and more expensive, queues in pharmacies with limited stocks start before dawn and millions of people suffer power cuts for hours on a daily basis.

Over the past year, nearly 250,000 Cubans, more than 2% of the island’s 11 million people, have migrated to the United States, most of them arriving at the southern border by overland, according to US government data.

Even for a nation known for its mass exoduses, the current wave is remarkable – larger than the Mariel exodus in 1980 and the Cuban raft crisis in 1994 combined, until recently the island’s two biggest migration events. .

But while these movements have peaked in the space of a year, experts believe that this migration, which they compare to a wartime exodus, has no end in sight and threatens the stability of a country whose population is already one of the oldest in the hemisphere.

A challenge for Washington

The avalanche of Cuban departures has also become a challenge for the United States. Now one of the largest sources of migrants after Mexico, Cuba has become a major contributor to the influx of migrants to the US-Mexico border, which has been a major political handicap for President Joe Biden and that the administration regards as a serious national security concern.

“The numbers for Cuba are historic, and everyone recognizes that,” said a senior US State Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. “That said, there have never been more people migrating in the world and this trend is certainly true in our hemisphere as well. »

Many experts say US policy toward the island is helping to fuel the very migration crisis the administration is now trying to address.

To woo Cuban-American voters in South Florida, the Trump administration brushed aside President Barack Obama’s policy of engagement, which included restoring diplomatic ties and increasing travel to the island. President Donald Trump replaced it with a “maximum pressure” campaign that tightened sanctions and severely limited the amount of cash Cubans could receive from their families in the United States, a key source of income.

” […] If you devastate a country 90 miles from your border with sanctions, people will come to your border looking for economic opportunities,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Obama and was the reference person for discussions with Cuba.

Some relaxations

Although a significant lifting of the sanctions is still not envisaged, the two governments are working to cope with the extraordinary wave of migration.

Washington recently announced that it will restore consular services in Havana in January and issue at least 20,000 visas to Cubans next year, in accordance with longstanding agreements between the two nations, which officials hope will deter some people from trying to make dangerous trips to the United States.

Havana has agreed to resume receiving flights from the United States for deported Cubans, another measure aimed at discouraging migration. The Biden government also removed the cap on how much Cuban-Americans are allowed to send to loved ones and authorized a US company to process wire transfers to Cuba.

Cuba’s freefall has been accelerated by the pandemic: Over the past three years, Cuba’s financial reserves have dwindled and the country has struggled to stock its store shelves. Imports – mainly food and fuel – have halved. The situation is so serious that the government’s electricity company boasted this month that electric service had been running non-stop that day for 13 hours and 13 minutes.

monster manifestations

Last year, weary of economic decline and a lack of freedom made worse by the COVID-19 lockdown, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets in the biggest anti-government protests in decades. A crackdown followed, and nearly 700 people are still imprisoned, according to a Cuban human rights group.

The less fortunate Cubans are trying to get away by building makeshift boats, and at least 100 have died at sea since 2020, according to the US Coast Guard. The latter have intercepted nearly 3,000 Cubans at sea in the past two months alone.

But these days, most Cuban migrants leave the island by air, with relatives abroad often paying for their ticket, a journey followed by a difficult overland journey. (A decade ago, Cuba removed the requirement for an exit visa to leave the island by air, but it’s still illegal to leave by sea.)

The floodgates opened last year when Nicaragua stopped requiring entry visas for Cubans. Tens of thousands of people sold their homes and belongings and flew to Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, paying smugglers to help them travel the more than 2,700 kilometers overland to the US border.

Dark demographic future

Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York, who is on sabbatical on the island, pointed out that the rising migration figures do not take into account the thousands of people who have left for other countries, especially Serbia and Russia.

The departure of many younger and working-age Cubans bodes a bleak demographic future for a country where the average life expectancy of 78 years is higher than in the rest of the region, experts say. The government can already barely afford the meager pensions on which the country’s elderly population depends.

The bleeding of Cubans out of their homeland is nothing short of “devastating,” said Elaine Acosta González, a research associate at Florida International University. “Cuba is depopulating. »

Just a few years ago, the country’s future looked quite different. As the Obama administration eased restrictions on travel to Cuba, American tourists injected dollars into the island’s nascent private sector.

Today, travel is once again severely restricted, and years of economic recession have extinguished the last glimmers of optimism for many Cubans.

Hope ?

Joan Cruz Méndez, a taxi driver who tried to leave three times, looks out to sea in Baracoa and explains why so many boats that once lined the city’s shores have disappeared, along with their owners.

“The last thing you can lose is hope, and I think a lot of the population has lost hope,” said Joan Cruz Méndez, recounting how he once succeeded to travel 48 km at sea only to be forced to turn back because too many people on board were seasick and vomiting.

In March, the 41-year-old bought a plane ticket for his wife to go to Panama and dipped into his savings to pay a smuggler $6,000 to smuggle her to the United States. United, where she requested political asylum. She works at an auto parts store in Houston.

In the woods just beyond the town, people are busy building more boats, dismantling car engines, electric generators and lawnmowers.

When the sea is calm, they wait for the local Cuban Coast Guard contingent to finish their shift, before carrying the makeshift boats on their shoulders through town and over steep rocks, before gently lowering them into the water. .

In May, Yoel Taureaux Duvergel, 32, and his wife, Yanari, five months pregnant with their only child, and four others left in the early morning. But their engine broke down. They started rowing, but were intercepted by the US Coast Guard a few miles from the United States and brought back to Cuba, where Yoel Taureaux Duvergel is trying to get by doing odd jobs.

When asked why he tried to leave, he laughed. “What do you mean, why did I want to leave?” ” he said. “You don’t live in the Cuban reality? »

This article was originally published in the New York Times.