By Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on October 26, 2022
This is a thorough analysis of the current Cuban migratory crisis and the history of the constant failure of the US to comply with the immigration agreements between the two countries. – Editorial
It is true that in Cuba emigration is high, although it is never as high as in Central America. Every young person who abandons his studies and work to emigrate, which hurts, I feel it as a defeat of our society that did not know how to engage him, attract him and keep him in the country; but I also believe that the character of our emigration is overestimated and decontextualized. It is intentionally ignored that we are the only country in the world for which a law was written, called the Cuban Adjustment Act, which guarantees the automatic entry into the United States of anyone who declares himself politically persecuted; this psychologically conditions an attitude of denial of the real causes for emigration, fundamentally economic and conditioned by the iron blockade of the same country that forces the emigrant to declare himself persecuted.
Honestly, I would like to know which other Latin American country enjoys this unworthy privilege; however, what makes headlines in the media corporations that dictate the logic of the single thought is that everyone is leaving Cuba because the Revolution is a failure. The formula is very simple: maximum pressure and closure of all the emergency channels of the Cuban economy, plus a huge media campaign with the theory of failure, plus the Cuban Adjustment Act. Result: increased emigration.
Who are the main emigrants in a society? Of course, young people, who in the Cuban case have a very attractive singularity for the receiving countries: almost all of them have high school or higher education of high quality. Many myths have been built over the years about the success of Cuban emigrants, but it is almost always overlooked with what studies, with what preparation, with what scholastic or professional level they left a system that facilitated their human development.
The same can be said of artists and athletes who reach the top of the best in the world. If they are hired by their country, no one speaks of exporting services, they immediately set up a campaign of human trafficking and other aberrations that only fit in the mentality of societies that put a price on everything and buy and sell athletes and artists as if they were objects, and force artists to testify against their country of origin if they want to have a contract.
In order to analyze the issues of emigration, we must look at its background. Before the Revolution, very few visas were granted by the US embassy to Cuban citizens to emigrate to the United States, which was an economic aspiration of hundreds of millions of people around the world, based on the famous “American dream” that they have propagandized throughout the world. The procedures at that time were lengthy and absolutely rigorous, those who entered the country illegally in violation of the laws of the United States faced prison or expulsion; however, with the triumph of the Revolution, the first to initiate illegal exits from the country were the assassins, the henchmen and the henchwomen, who were they? The murderers, henchmen, torturers, embezzlers and thieves of the overthrown tyranny, who found refuge there. The unimpeded entry of any person who left Cuba illegally under any pretext became the norm.
With the first revolutionary laws, the mass exodus of the high bourgeoisie began. The visa ceased to be a necessary procedure to be received in the United States. In 1962 the United States Government abruptly suppressed normal flights and legal departures from the country, hundreds of thousands of people lost the link with relatives living in the United States, among them parents who had sent their children by the perverse campaign of the Peter Pan, and many of them never again managed to meet. I was a child when in my classroom, on several occasions, from one day to the next I stopped seeing my little friends because, quite simply, their parents had been influenced by that campaign of the Peter Pan and sent them to the United States.
So, with that background, we have to take these considerations into account. Illegal emigration has been promoted by the United States Government. The governments of that country have always encouraged illegal departures and not safe, legal emigration.
The Revolution never prevented legal departures from the country, and the United States policy gave rise to successive migratory crises. There we have the crisis of the sixties, which in 1965 was called the exit through Boca de Camarioca. The Kennedy administration, at that time, had previously announced, in 1963, that Cubans arriving directly from the island would be received as refugees, everyone would be given refugee status; while those entering from third countries would be considered foreigners and would be subject to all U.S. immigration restrictions. That was the beginning of the trap of encouraging illegal departure.
The Revolution, faced with such a harmful and arbitrary policy, enabled on September 28, 1965 the port of Camarioca, in Matanzas, so that any maritime means could pick up families, by previous permission of the Cuban authorities. One thousand boats from the United States gathered in that small port.
On November 2, 1966, in addition to Kennedy’s provision, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, meeting in Congress, passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, signed by Johnson on November 2, 1966, which established special and exclusive status for any foreigner, native of Cuba or Cuban citizen who had been inspected and admitted, or paroled into the United States after January 1, 1959.
Negotiations were held between the two countries and on December 6, 1965, a memorandum of agreement was reached that established an air bridge from Varadero to the United States, which operated from January 1966 to April 1973; in an orderly and safe manner at that time, 260,000 people emigrated and tens of thousands of families were reunited. In any case, the United States maintained a strong incentive to illegal departures, because a visa was required to leave through the bridge and not everyone received one. It was inevitable that after the conclusion of the air bridge, a new migratory crisis would occur. And then came the 1980 crisis or what is known as the Mariel Crisis; a situation similar to that of Camarioca was produced by the port of Mariel.
On December 14, 1984, the Second Migratory Agreement was signed during the Reagan administration, which concluded with the adoption of agreements for the normalization of migratory procedures between both countries and to put an end to the abnormal situation that had existed since 1980.
The issuance of up to 20,000 preferential immigrant visas to Cuban citizens residing in Cuba, especially to family members of Americans and of Cubans permanently residing in the United States, was proposed.
The United States spectacularly failed to comply with the agreements, unscrupulously flouted its commitments and Cuba was deceived. Cuba fulfilled its obligations under the Agreement, facilitated departures and did not fail to receive a single one of the people on the “excludable” lists who were sent to our country.
The Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations maintained the Cuban Adjustment Act.
Cuba managed to prevent the illegal departure of three emigrants for every four who tried to do so. In spite of this effort, in the first semester of 1994, 7.5 times more emigrants arrived illegally in the United States than the 544 visas granted out of the 20,000 per year that the United States was supposed to grant.
Note that there is a regularity in all this history, and that is that the United States has constantly failed to comply with the immigration agreements.
The Clinton administration tightened the blockade after the collapse of the socialist camp – Congress had already passed the Torricelli Act in 1992 – and signed the brutal Helms-Burton Act on March 12, 1996.
The enormous accumulated potential of more than 240,000 people who had been waiting for 10 years for the visas promised in the agreements signed on December 14, 1984, together with the Cuban Adjustment Act and the tightening of the blockade, caused a new migratory crisis, and then came the other crisis, the crisis of the nineties, 1994.
Bill Clinton announced on August 19, 1994 that the US Coast Guard would intercept Cubans at sea and transfer them to the US naval base in the illegally occupied territory of Guantanamo Bay. Those who tried to leave by inadequate means were persuaded to accompany them with patrol boats, to assist them if necessary while the US Coast Guard approached.
Once again, communications were established between the governments of both countries through different channels. Through negotiations between delegations of both countries in New York, certain formulas were reached, such as the granting of no less than 20,000 visas per year and the commitment of the Coast Guard to intercept at sea those who tried to do so illegally, return them to Cuba and commit to relocate them without any sanction whatsoever.
Cuba fulfilled its commitment to stop mass migration by persuasive methods without the use of force.
Between January and June 1999 Radio Martí openly broadcast information inciting illegal departures and the rest of the subversive radio stations in Miami joined in.
In recent times we have seen how since 2017 the United States Government has unilaterally and unjustifiably failed to comply with the obligation signed in 1994 to ensure the legal migration to that country of a minimum of 20,000 Cubans per year. You know that until very recently the processing of immigration procedures at the US embassy was closed, since October 2017. Those who had been admitted have been forced to travel to Guyana for such procedures, with no guarantee of being granted, with the burden and expenses that this entails.
The blockade was intensified at the most critical moments of the pandemic.
The Law privileges Cubans exclusively, accompanied by a demagogic and prejudiced policy that assumes that every Cuban who enters U.S. territory is a politically persecuted person, and these are factors that also stimulate irregular migration, when legal avenues are closed.
There is a high legal and irregular migratory flow of Cubans through countries in the region, which implies a burden for those nations.
There are efforts now by the U.S. Government to get transit countries to take measures against Cuban emigrants, to demand transit visas that were not previously required. You have seen all the crises that have sometimes arisen in recent times in some embassies due to this problem.
The United States is trying to hinder the processing of new visas in the embassies accredited in Havana, in order to increase the discomfort of the affected Cubans. Now this is beginning to be dealt with in a different way as a result of the totally insufficient measures that have been proposed in recent times.
Therefore, if we analyze with this historical rigor the migratory problem of Cubans to the United States, we can say that Cuba has accurately fulfilled this commitment and with the help of the people we will continue to comply and avoid illegal, unsafe and disorderly emigration as much as possible.
But we will not allow anything that could alter the internal order of the country. The fundamental obstacle to the fight against illegal emigration lies in the absolute tolerance and the granting of exceptional privileges to Cuban citizens who arrive illegally in the United States.
The Cuban-American mafia always acts in concert with its allies in Congress and the media at its disposal to create migratory crises that can have incalculable consequences. The United States applies a destabilizing policy against Cuba with the purpose of using the Cuban population as hostage of a hegemonic and hostile ambition against Cuba.
It is a very perverse policy of our adversaries to punish Cuba for trying to build a truly independent nation and a project of social justice. And therein lies the truth of the migration issue, which is not the truth told by the U.S. media; it is the wolf in disguise, not the sheep, because it does not consider any other nation its equal, it is the wolf disguised as a shepherd, master of the lives and destinies of the rest, to whom obedience is owed and who is followed everywhere in expectation of a reward for good behavior, but who insists on hunting down and punishing with the worst and most prolonged of punishments those who leave the fold.
Cuba is the goat that pulls the mountain, the one that will never give up its freedom, the freedom conquered by its ancestors; but we are also the proof of the wickedness of those who persecute us and of their inability to defeat us; we are the evidence that an alternative is possible.
(Excerpt from the speech of Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, at the Extraordinary Plenary Session of the Union of Young Communists, full text in Juventud Rebelde)
Source: La Pupilia Insomne translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US