It was called Yoan Marlon Diaz EscalonaHe was from Santos Suárez on October 10 (Havana) and died this Monday at the age of 23 in Mexico, where he had been waiting since last September for the CBP One appointment, which allows vulnerable migrants to request an early interview to gain access to the United States. Joined. His dream was to be able to help his family. In Cuba, his mother, wife and two-year-old son received news of his hospitalization on February 22. He began to feel unwell and was taken to the general emergency room in Pachuca, Hidalgo.
Hours after being taken to the hospital, he lost consciousness and mobility. According to his wife, Lisandra Breto, a CT scan carried out the next day revealed that he had an infection in his brain. Twenty-four hours later, doctors prepared for surgery but needed consent from a family member.
And there is an additional problem, because leaving Cuba is neither easy nor cheap and cannot be done overnight. The prognosis of Yoan Marlon Díaz Escalona's illness was so serious that doctors predicted that he could remain in a coma or vegetative state even after the procedure, since his brain was severely damaged, explained on social networks his wife and his mother only son and the Woman with whom he had a romantic relationship for seven years.
Yoan Marlon Díaz was born on March 10, 2000 and died shortly before his 24th birthday. In Mexico he earned his living working in construction. They didn't operate on him because the doctors even needed permission to intubate him. I was alone in the hospital. They gave him a prescription for the medication to take for the frontoparietal brain abscess he had been diagnosed with.
The news of Yoan Marlon Díaz's death leaves his family devastated, they don't know how they will get the money to repatriate the body and need help. The young man died alone at the Pachuca General Hospital, which did not even pay for the medicine he needed.
His death also has an impact on the entire Cuban community, which attributes deaths like this, far from family and completely alone, to the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel, which is pushing young people to emigrate due to the lack of a future on the island. But no. Everyone manages to reach their destination and there are many mothers who mourn their children who died during the journey.
More than half a million Cubans have emigrated to the United States in the past two years. This number represents 4.8% of the island's population. In 2023, more than 153,000 people from Cuba entered the United States irregularly. Thanks to the Parole program, another 67,000 emigrated legally. Added to this data are the 313,000 who arrived in the United States in 2022.
These figures break all historical records, considering that 300,000 people emigrated in the 1960s, 130,000 in the 1980s and 35,000 in the 1990s.
Added to this is emigration to Europe, especially to Spain, whose consulate in Havana registered 15,000 applications for Spanish citizenship under the Grandchildren Law in the first six months of last year. Between 2022 and 2023, 36,574 Cubans also applied for refuge in Mexico and at least 22,000 entered Uruguay.