As holidaying Canadians return to Cuba, Cubans themselves are fleeing in record numbers

Canadian tourists are returning to Cuba in large numbers this winter after being virtually non-existent during the pandemic. Preliminary figures show that Canadians accounted for about 52 per cent of all foreign arrivals in Cuba in January.

Meanwhile, Cubans are fleeing the island nation in record numbers in response to unprecedented levels of poverty and political repression.

More than 220,000 Cubans – accounting for 2 percent of the island’s entire population – were detained after crossing the US-Mexico border last year. Others live in other countries in the Americas or travel as far as Russia and Serbia (two countries that allow Cubans to enter without a visa).

In the Cuban diaspora, there is a sense that the country is empty – almost everyone who has the means to leave is actively planning an escape or at least thinking about it.

An industry has grown up around the exodus, with airlines cashing in on Cubans’ desperation by charging exorbitant fares to destinations where Cubans are allowed to fly.

And there are indications that the Cuban Communist Party and its ally in Nicaragua, the Ortega-Murillo regime, are allowing and even encouraging the exodus to kill two birds with one stone by generating income while eliminating dissidents.

‘Everybody’s gone’

“This will be the largest single figure to leave the island, before or after the revolution,” said Jorge Duany, an expert on Cuban migration at Florida International University.

“It is more than (the Mariel ship) in 1980, the previous record, or the more recent upsurge in Cuban migration during the rafter crisis in 1994.”

Duany said the exodus was driven by a combination of factors, including political repression, a failing economy and “health problems, especially during the pandemic of the last few years.”

“And all these factors combined to create a perfect storm,” he said. “So people just want to leave, whether because they don’t have enough food on the table, or because they have participated in one of the peaceful demonstrations, not only on July 11 (2021), but also the smaller ones at the end. half a year, as well as the extreme response of the Cuban government to suppress the protests and put people in jail.

With its own economy collapsing, Cuba is heavily dependent on remittances sent by Cubans living in the U.S. The Trump administration imposed restrictions on how much can be sent and how, leading Western Union to close operations in Cuba.

Last May, the Biden administration relaxed the rules and this month, Western Union resumed normal shipping operations. But Duany said the combination of the pandemic – which has brought tourism to a near standstill – and difficulties with remittances is pushing many Cubans to despair.

Duany said the exodus cuts across all segments of Cuban society.

“I think they’re all gone,” he said. “We don’t have a good profile of the last wave … 2022, 225,000 people yet, but the previous data we have from Homeland Security shows that there is a cross-section that is mostly Cubans from all walks of life. They tend to be younger, of course.”

‘Family sells everything they own’

Kirenia Carbonell is a Canadian federal public servant who hails from the small town of La Canela in Cuba’s eastern Holguin province.

“Where I come from,” he told CBC News, “all the families sold everything they had and they went through Nicaragua. Some of them even went to Suriname. I had never heard of Suriname before. Some of them were by myself. The family lived in Suriname. They are looking for work and are able to sponsor other families from Cuba to Suriname.”

Carbonell said inflation has widened the gap between Cuban wages and the cost of the most basic needs to the point where many can no longer make ends meet.

“We have a ration card that every month you’re supposed to get from this local grocer and this is five kilograms of rice,” he said. “This month in my municipality, they bring one kilogram of rice per person for the whole month. But then the government has a special store where you can go and buy one pound for 150 pesos. They are paid 2,500 pesos on average and only food for a month of more than 30,000 pesos.”

A new escape route opens up

The stereotype of the Cuban migrant is the “balsero” or rafter floating in the strait that separates Cuba from Florida.

Such migration still exists. The US Coast Guard detained about 2,500 balseros during the month of January.

But today, only the poorest and most desperate Cubans take the dangerous sea route.

New air and land routes have been opened that are favored by migrants – and also more profitable for the Cuban government and its Nicaraguan ally.

Cuba has one of the weakest passports in the world in terms of visa-free travel due to Cubans’ notorious penchant for destruction when leaving the island. But in November 2021, Nicaragua lifted visa requirements for Cuban citizens, ostensibly to promote tourism.

“They are lovers of our volcanoes. They don’t have volcanoes,” said Ana Carolina Garcia of the Nicaraguan tourism bureau at the time.

In fact, the majority of Cubans who travel to Nicaragua then move north and attempt to cross the US-Mexico land border.

Not long after visa requirements were lifted, a group of little-known charter airlines began offering flights at exorbitant prices from Havana or Camaguey, Cuba to Managua, Nicaragua. Carriers such as Air Century, Aruba Airlines and Venezuela’s state-owned Conviasa have charged up to $6,000 for a seat on a two-hour flight.

Usually, Cubans can only pay these rates by borrowing money from relatives who have left the island.

Regimes cashing in migrants

The air migration is a bonanza for the Nicaraguan and Cuban regimes, which earn huge profits from taxes, airport fees, landing fees and other expenses.

If the migrants succeed in reaching the US, Cubans can expect to send money to family members back home – while the regime makes a double profit by paying remittances. (For Nicaragua too, remittances are important)

Cuba’s Communist authorities took a third cut when family members in Cuba had to spend those dollars at Cuban government monopoly stores, which sold goods at an average markup of more than 200 percent.

(CBC News contacted the Cuban embassy for this article but did not receive a response.)

In addition, dissidents say the Cuban and Nicaraguan regimes see migration as achieving a dual political goal: expelling dissidents and frustrated citizens while ravaging the United States with waves of illegal immigration.

“This is the modus operandi, whenever tensions in Cuba rise,” said Carbonell, who linked the wave of protests that hit Cuba in the summer of 2021 directly to the decision to open Nicaragua’s escape valve in the fall of that year.

“It eases the pressure by opening its borders, like in the Mariel situation (in 1980),” he said. “And in this case, he found an accomplice in Nicaragua who was then able to receive Cuba without a visa.

“Everyone knows where the Cubans will end up, whether in the United States or on the way to Quebec. They know that they will not stay in Nicaragua.”

Export people

“There seems to be some kind of agreement between the Nicaraguan government and the Cuban government to facilitate this migration,” Duany said. “Although again, it’s not in the documents I’ve seen.

“But it is clear that the Cuban government benefits from exporting many people, especially those who disagree, but also those who cannot find work in Cuba. If you look at the numbers, Cuba has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world, but many people who cannot work productively and earn low wages.

Remittances, he said, “have become the second or third main source of currency after tourism and the export of professional services (such as Cuban doctors).

“This is one of the ways that the Cuban government can find a lifeline through this flow of money that eventually goes back to Cuba.”

Another way the Cuban regime hopes to get out of the current economic crisis is by increasing tourism.

“There are many efforts to rebuild Russian tourism,” Duany said, adding that the war in Ukraine may make it difficult to restore the Russian tourist traffic that Cuba enjoyed before the pandemic.

Cubans are more dependent than Canadians

Before the pandemic, the biggest source of tourist money for the Cuban regime was Canadians.

About 1.3 million Canadians will enter and leave Cuba in a typical year – more than the citizens of any other country, including Cubans themselves.

The Cuban government and the Cuban military, which owns many of the resorts, have focused their spending in recent years on building new hotels.

But even though Canadians are now returning – Swoop, the low-cost airline, announced three new weekly flights to Varadero in January – tourism numbers have not recovered as quickly as the Communist Party had hoped. January 2023 is only about 63 percent of the bookings reported in January 2020, although for Canadian tourists, the number is closer to 80 percent.

Cuba will have to halve its GDP growth forecast for 2023 from 6 percent to 3 percent as it struggles to recover from the 11 percent drop it experienced in 2020.

Cuban pro-democracy activists continue to plead with Canadians not to travel to Cuba.

“I believe there is a lack of awareness that this is happening in Cuba,” Carbonell said. “I have many friends who now want to go because in their minds, when they go, they are helping the Cuban population.

“And it’s true, he brought a suitcase full of medicine, full of essentials, nylons for the women who work at the resort and so on, because he knew there was nothing. But maybe he didn’t know that you can donate everything you want . for our friends in Cuba, but you still contribute to the regime.”

Carbonell said the Cuban regime and armed forces money from tourism is usually reinvested in building new hotels, while Cuban workers are paid a fraction of what hotel workers in neighboring countries are paid. The money also financed the repression apparatus of the Cuban Communist Party.

“Nobody who goes to the resort can imagine that beyond those walls, people are suffering so much,” he said.

Although the new route out of Cuba may seem safer than venturing to sea in a rickety raft, hundreds of Cubans have died or disappeared in the new wave of departures. Some died in accidents or assassinations on the overland route, or drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande.

“People have lost their lives in the river, people have died in the ocean,” Carbonell said.

“So how desperate can it be? And the government takes advantage of that, just takes advantage of everyone who has someone abroad who can send money to do it, everyone who sells every little thing that has to be able to collect money and do the road .”