BARACOA, Cuba — Roger García Ordaz does not hide his multiple escape attempts.
He has attempted to leave Cuba 11 times by boat and has a tattoo for each failed attempt.
Hundreds of flimsy homemade boats have left this year from the shores of Baracoa, a fishing village west of Havana where Garcia, 34, lives — so many that locals call the town “Terminal Three.”
“I am going to continue throwing myself into the sea until it arrives,” he said. “Or if the sea wants to take my life, so be it.”
Living conditions in Cuba under communist rule have long been precarious, but today, deepening poverty has sparked the largest exodus since Fidel Castro came to power more than half a century ago.
El País has been hit by a double whammy of stricter US sanctions and the Covid-19 pandemic, which decimated one of Cuba’s vital resources: tourism. Food has become scarcer and more expensive, lines at pharmacies start before dawn, and millions of people experience blackouts for hours each day.
In the last year, almost 250,000 Cubans, more than 2 percent of the island’s 11 million inhabitants, have immigrated to the United States, most reaching the southern border by land.
Even for a nation known for mass exodus, the current surge is remarkable, bigger than the 1980 Mariel bridge and the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis combined.
But while those events have peaked in a year, experts say the migration has no end in sight and threatens the stability of a country with one of the oldest populations in the hemisphere.
The flood of Cubans leaving has also become a challenge for the United States. Now a major source of migrants after Mexico, Cuba has become a major contributor to the migrant crush on the US-Mexico border, which has been a political drag on President Joseph R. Biden. Jr. and that the Administration considers a national security issue.
“Cuba’s figures are historic and everyone recognizes it,” said a senior US official not authorized to speak publicly. “That being said, more people are migrating globally today than ever before, and that trend is definitely confirmed in our hemisphere as well.”
President Donald J. Trump imposed 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 opportunity,” said Ben Rhodes, former security adviser to President Barack Obama.
Although President Biden has distanced himself from some of Trump’s policies, he has been slow to act for fear of angering the Cuban diaspora and incurring the wrath of Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat and powerful Cuban-American who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. said William M. LeoGrande, a professor at American University, in Washington, and an expert on US-Cuba relations.
While any rollback of sanctions remains out of the question, the two governments are trying to address the extraordinary increase in migration. Washington recently announced it will restart consular services in Havana in January and will issue at least 20,000 visas to Cubans next year in line with longstanding agreements between the two nations, which officials hope will discourage people from attempting the trip.
The bleeding of Cubans from their homeland is nothing short of “devastating,” said Elaine Acosta González, a researcher at Florida International University. “Cuba is depopulating.”
By: ED AUGUSTIN and FRANCES ROBLES
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6494469, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-12-14 23:20:09
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