By Alejandra Garcia on January 5, 2023 from Havana
US embassy in Havana, photo: Bill Hackwell
Yesterday the US embassy in Cuba resumed a limited immigrant visa process after nearly six years without consular services. The administration of the nefarious Donald Trump (2017-2021) closed the headquarters and reduced its employees under the pretext of alleged acoustic attacks against its diplomats, a theory almost taken out of a fiction book that was discarded by scientists and official reports.
The news comes amid a migratory wave in the US-Mexico southern border, in which there are not only Cubans; but also Central and South Americans, Haitians, Ukrainians, and many others of different nationalities. In the particular case of Cuba, migration has been encouraged in recent years by the very policies promoted by the White House against the island; such as the almost complete closure of its diplomatic headquarters, which forced people to travel to a third country to apply for a visa without any guarantee of receiving it.
Today, the yearnings for normalcy in the relations between the two countries are relieved, but not completely. Through its official website, the Washington representatives informed that it will only prioritize applicants in the IR-5 category, meaning fathers or mothers of U.S. citizens. People notified that their case was ready to be processed after April 1, 2022, will have their interview scheduled at the embassy in Havana, but those summoned before that date will still have to do so in Guyana.
All other immigrant visa categories, such as tourist visas, will be scheduled and decided upon in Guyana’s capital Georgetown and cannot be transferred to the Cuban capital. Many Cubans risk their lives to arrive irregularly in the United States because of the few guarantees they have to travel legally to the country to even visit their family. The money they must invest in consular fees, tickets to Guyana, and expenses for the time the interview process takes. It is almost the same as that which they can invest in reaching the northern country by irregular means.
In addition, there’s another reality, which is one of the strongest motives that encourages migration. Cubans have benefits that other irregular migrants do not enjoy at the Mexican border. Because of Washington’s political differences with Cuba, most Cubans pass through immigration controls much more easily than others who flee for more urgent reasons, such as extreme violence and poverty.
“Resuming the processing of IR-5 applicants is just the first step in expanding services,” they said. But there is no exact date for the beginning of the full range of immigrant and non-immigrant visas processing to meet the minimum of 20,000 annual visas that was agreed upon in 1994 during the Clinton years a number seldom met under subsequent administrations.
In recent years, the US has only issued about 4,000 visas annually, according to the Cuban Foreign Ministry.
Preparations for the reopening began on March 3, 2022, five years after the Republican Trump reduced its staff to a minimum in September 2017 with the argument of mysterious “sonic aggressions” against diplomats. They called it “Havana Syndrome,” “sonic attacks,” and “health incidents” in the name of alleged unexplained noises with diffuse causes and symptoms.
On that occasion, word spread that a score of diplomats reported symptoms as varied as dizziness, mental confusion, partial deafness, sleep disorders, and gaps in basic vocabulary, supposedly caused by exposure to persistent sounds of unknown origin in their homes or hotel rooms.
From the beginning, Cuba denied any attack, maintained a willingness to cooperate in the investigations, and denounced that the accusation was part of a political operation to reverse the advances in U.S.-Cuba relations made during the Barack Obama administration. As we said in January 2022, “A report released by the CIA on the events confirms what the scientific community in Cuba and the rest of the world has said to exhaustion, there is no evidence that an attack of such magnitude was planned by a government.”
Without a definitive weapon, motivation, or authors before the accusation, the embassy here the US used the lie as a justification to suspend the family reunification program and the visa granting, which directly affected citizens of both countries and not the Cuban government, as intended by the White House of Trump.
“The resumption of visa processing for Cuban migrants from the embassy in Havana is a necessary and correct step. But it still doesn’t include non-immigrant visas, which hinders family visits and cultural, sports, and scientific exchanges, for which Cuba remains open,” Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla stated.
As long as the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by Washington, along with all the maximum pressure measures, and the privileged treatment at the border continue, nothing will have changed at all.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – US