Refusing to leave Cuba until her opportunities were eliminated, Elsa decided to join the exodus of Cubans in 2023, which reached record levels in two years. An unprecedented bloodshed since the beginning of the revolution in 1959, triggered by the severe economic crisis on the island.
Amid rampant inflation, a collapse in agricultural production and a slow recovery in tourism in her country, the 30-year-old left in August, disillusioned by the rapidly deteriorating economic situation.
“It was very difficult to meet and satisfy basic needs, there was nothing, the problem of power outages was unbearable and the problem of food, the price of the dollar,” tells this independent merchant from Miami, where she lives, the AFP came in November on.
Like many of her compatriots, Elsa flew to Managua and from there covered a risky journey of around 3,000 km until she reached the border with the United States.
The United States Customs and Border Protection announced on Saturday that it recorded more than 153,000 irregular entries of Cubans into its country in 2023. Another 67,000 flew directly to US territory thanks to the program called Parole, which was introduced a year ago by the Joe Biden administration.
Together with the more than 313,000 who entered undocumented in 2022, this represents “the largest number of Cuban migrants ever registered in two consecutive years since the post-revolutionary Cuban exodus began in 1959,” says Jorge Duany, director of the Florida International University Cuban Research Institute.
In two years, at least 533,000 Cubans came to the United States, accounting for 4.8% of the 11.1 million population. This does not include entries with other types of visas for which there are no official figures.
This wave of migration is preceded only by that of Mariel in the 1980s, when 130,000 Cubans left the country, followed by the “Rafters” in 1994 with 35,000 and the flight for political reasons between 1960 and 1963 of 300,000 at the beginning of the revolution.
In these two years, “many young people with high educational and professional levels” have left, which “represents a significant loss of human resources” for Cuba, which has one of the oldest populations in the region, Duany adds.
Latin America and Europe are also travel destinations for tens of thousands of Cubans, although there is no official global figure.
For example, between 2022 and 2023, 36,574 Cubans requested refuge in Mexico, while at least 22,000 entered Uruguay and hundreds arrived in Chile, according to official figures from these three countries consulted by AFP.
Radibel Peña, a 28-year-old carpenter, flew in April from Havana to Georgetown, Guyana, where a visa is not required for Cubans. He then traveled to Brazil and went to Bolivia, from where he entered Chile illegally in May.
“There is everything here. If you work with dignity, you live well,” he tells AFP in Valparaíso in central Chile, where he also works in construction without immigration documents.
The mass departure began in November 2021 when Nicaragua, an ally of Cuba, abolished visa requirements for Cubans. An outlet for the island, which is mired in the worst economic crisis in three decades.
Unusual traffic of subleased flights carrying Cuban migrants to Managua also surged in 2023, a phenomenon that prompted Washington to sanction those airlines in November.
In Europe, Spain is one of the most popular destinations for islanders, especially after the adoption in 2022 of the so-called grandchildren law, which allows descendants of Spaniards to obtain citizenship.
Marco Antonio Nápoles Álvarez, a 24-year-old waiter from Holguín province, hopes to travel to Madrid with his sister in March after receiving his Spanish passport.
“We want to settle there to see if everything goes well,” he said as he left the embassy with his Spanish passport in hand.
Meanwhile, Raúl Bonachea, a 35-year-old playwright, stayed in Madrid on an artistic residency visa in September.
“It was the opportunity that I had to leave,” he tells AFP, complaining that he had to work up to six jobs on the island to cover basic costs and disappointed by the “intolerance” in his homeroom Cuban Communist Party ruled the country (PCC). , only).
He says his work “Iphigenia,” a classic he reinterpreted with the theme of migration, was censored.
bur-lp/mel