“now you got to USA and you don’t remember anyone?“, a mother reproaches her son’s friend in one of the brief and scathing interventions on social networks by Amed Rodríguez, a young Cuban who is known as ‘Bee Memes’. Even migration is the reason for his mockery. But the numbers do not invite laughter.According to data from the North American authorities, Until the month of November, more than 250,000 inhabitants of Cuba they left for the USA by all possible means: through Central America, especially Nicaragua, Mexico and, also, crossing the sea. They have risked their lives and, in many cases, paid exorbitant sums to traffickers.
The year that is ending will remain in Cuban history as that of and unprecedented migration flow. 2% of the men and women of the largest of the Antilles decided to leave for a combination of reasons, including the economic crisis, with its saga of blackouts, general shortages and lack of medicines. The repressive hardening and the absence of personal and collective horizons have been other reasons for the exodus. Those who left did not always reach their destination: the United States Coast Guard has intercepted 6,182 citizens who had launched into the so-called Gulf Stream.
The sharpened crisis since the beginning of the pandemic, the shipwreck of an economic program -baptized as “monetary reordering”-, which has caused higher inflation and social inequality, as well as the effects of Washington’s sanctions, are no strangers to the exponential jump in the statistics. In 2020, some 14,000 Cubans illegally entered US territory through the Mexican border. A year later, there were 39,300. The 2022 thing surpasses all comparison. In 1980 some 125,000 Cubans left through the port of Mariel. That figure had never been exceeded. What happened also has a strong generational component: young people or people of working age, as well as professionals. The games in turn have a share of courage and desperation, as has happened with the group of people who managed to reach the US on a raft powered by the engine of a Russian truck.
Weeks ago, US officials landed in Havana to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts a reopening of the consular service, paralyzed since 2017 by then-President Donald Trump. His successor, the democrat Joe Bidendid not substantially modify the policy towards the island.
The official website ‘Razones de Cuba’ attributes the unprecedented situation to white house harassment: “If, on the one hand, you suffocate an entire town, you deprive them in different ways of access to basic resources for their normal subsistence, if you literally persecute, harass, blackmail those who have an interest in helping us, if at the same time you unleash a media campaign that presents the disastrous consequences of this commercial, financial, diplomatic siege as a result of the inefficiency and inability of the socialist political and social system, presenting the capitalist countries, in particular the US, as the ‘earthly paradise’, then there is no doubt that for not a few, emigrating is presented as the only solution to their problems.”
tragic facts
The flow has also had its tragic chapters, such as the collision between a boat and a Cuban coast guard ship in Bahía Honda that caused seven deaths, including a girl, on October 29. Sectors of exile spoke of a slaughter”. The Cuban Ministry of the Interior assured that it was all about “a human trafficking operation organized from the United States.
The Cuban population has not only decreased systematically since 2017. This decrease, according to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is greater than that of Japan (-0.24%), South Korea (-0.19% ), Albania (-0.17%) or Russia (-0.41%), and only surpassed by Taiwan (-0.85%). The National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) provides other relevant information on the consequences of the massive abandonment of young people: the aging of the inhabitants. According to ONEI itself, by 2035 those over 60 years of age will constitute 32.5% of the population, those under 15 would be 15.2% and Cubans between 15 and 59 would represent only 52.3% of the total. of residents.
disenchantment
Mauricio De Miranda Parrondo, a columnist for the website ‘La Joven Cuba’, considered that the collapse of “really existing” socialism, called a few days ago by President Miguel Díaz-Canel as a “possible prosperity”, has not changed the outlook of the Cuban leadership , which “has opted for persist in proven ineffective policies, which deepened the structural deformation of our economy and, consequently, underdevelopment“. The authorities “are characterized by a political autism that is resistant to criticism”, which “has deteriorated their credibility”. to it, or emigrate”.