The images continue to be disconcerting: first one, now four thousand Cubans stalled—still, four weeks later—at an unfamiliar Central American crossing en route to the United States. Back on November 15, the Nicaraguan military fired tear gas on a crowd of northbound men, women, and children in order to push them off their country’s soil. Some had begun their overland journey as far south as Ecuador, home to another government allied with Cuba’s own. Thereafter, stymied travelers blocked the Pan-American Highway and refused to budge from the Costa Rican border outpost at Peñas Blancas until granted safe passage. With media attention growing ever since, officials in Washington, Havana, and the isthmus have struggled to avoid the impression of twiddling their thumbs.
In a year when old Cold War foes have embarked upon a historic diplomatic reset, a human traffic jam sits uneasily with the public-relations speak of hemispheric summitry and tourist bureaus. A slow motion crisis, though, is exactly what has been unfolding. Sadly, the interlocking factors generating this conundrum have eluded careful consideration. The reactions of contending stakeholders, meanwhile, have tended to reflect narrow agendas. With two thousand more Cubans at other points in Costa Rica, not to mention dozens entering the country every day, the saga may have only just begun. Permanent solutions, an analytical snapshot suggests, are no easier to envision.
How We Got Here
In late 2012, the Cuban government passed a landmark reform of its migration laws, eliminating onerous “exit permits” previously required of citizens traveling abroad. Authorities also granted Cubans an expanded period in which they could reside outside their country without losing residency, home-ownership, and small-business rights on the island. Permanent repatriation became easier too. These were risky gambles for an economy already suffering the effects of an aging population and brain drain. Yet the idea was to allow more, particularly young, people to go out into the world, while also providing them with incentives and a legal framework to bring their earnings and know-how back home. Emigration, in other words, no longer had to mean severing all links to the island (financial or otherwise), nor did it necessarily represent a permanent decision.
Not surprisingly, such rule changes have at once invigorated the transnational movement of resources across the Florida Straits—cash remittance flows alone have grown to some $2 billion annually—and accelerated the numbers of Cubans seeking to leave. Indeed, with the bulk of the embargo still in place, and Cuba’s own internal economic reforms yielding uneven results, emigration has persisted as a strategy for personal growth. As U.S. visas remained hard to come by, however, one country that required no visa emerged as a springboard: Ecuador. Soon, its capital, Quito, became a geographic node from which Cubans were plotting hazardous overland journeys to the United States, often using the same human trafficking routes Latin American migrants have depended on for decades.
At the U.S. border, though, Cuban exceptionality has continued to reassert its mighty prerogative. For unlike other undocumented Latin Americans with whom they now sometimes travel, Cubans can still openly present themselves to U.S. officials guarding against illegal admission. This is not, as many have misreported, because the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act automatically grants Cubans “refugee” status. To enter at places like Laredo, Texas, Cubans need to request asylum and only then may be “paroled” into the United States pending revision of their petitions. At that point, they are no more “refugees” in U.S. legal eyes than Central American undocumented minors fleeing drug violence. After a year and one day on U.S. soil, though, Cubans may begin the process of “adjusting” their status to permanent residency, making their asylum requests null and void. Therein lies the nature of their preferential treatment, an undeniable holdover from the Cold War.
The result of these dizzying forces—liberalized Cuban emigration laws, visa-free access into Ecuador, state retrenchment and social stratification on the island, and a unique carve-out for guaranteed permanent residency in the United States—has been a steady uptick in the number of Cubans crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. From October 2011 through September 2012, 8,273 did so. Over the following year, that figure jumped forty percent to 13,664, a number matched again only ten months later. Yet even such notable increases pale in comparison to the spike seen in 2015, fueled by fears that the mending of fences between Washington and Havana (announced in December 2014) will lead to an end of Cubans’ immigration benefits.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, from October 1, 2014 through August 31, 2015, at least 27,413 Cubans entered the United States via Mexico. By September 30, that number had ticked up to 30,966. Another 10,000, especially Cubans with dual nationality entering with Spanish passports (thanks to Spain’s “Law of Historical Memory), arrived at Miami International Airport during the same period without visas. Importantly, such figures do not include the number of Cubans arriving to the United States at other ports of entry, via sea, with temporary visas that can be overstayed, or bearing legal visas or advanced family parole status (per the bilateral migration accords signed by the Cuban and U.S. governments in 1994-1995). All told, the number of Cubans arriving this year already well exceeds the 45,000 that arrived during the rafter (or balsero) crisis of 1994. With somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 Cubans having entered Ecuador over the last six years (both in temporary transit and as residents who may soon be on the move), the rush to the United States is on.
Dissecting the Reactions
Obviously, Nicaragua and Costa Rica have now thrown a big, if belated, wrench in many Cubans’ plans. And with many migrants having sold homes and worldly possessions back on the island to finance their journeys, their frustration is both palpable and heartbreaking. Unfortunately, in authorities’ response to the standoff so far, there have been enough whiffs of insincerity to go around. Despite the human livelihoods at stake, politics, as ever, have never been far away.
Take the government of Costa Rica. Since Nicaraguan authorities impeded Cubans’ transit through their territory, officials in San José have devoted generous government resources to providing the migrants with refuge, all while leading a regional effort to negotiate a “humanitarian corridor” to the United States—around (by boat) or above (by plane). Recent refusals of Guatemala and Belize to serve as bridges now cast that plan in doubt. Yet even if Costa Rica has been working most earnestly to find a solution, the country also bears responsibility for setting the current crisis in motion.
It was Costa Rican police who, on November 10, first raided a human trafficking network on which Cubans had come to depend, thus disrupting an unimpeded, if often-treacherous migrant chain. After first denying the marooned Cubans transit visas, authorities reversed course, leading some (particularly Nicaragua’s government, led by Daniel Ortega) to conclude that the crisis was manufactured to foist a problem upon a rival neighbor. That accusation may be bunk. Still, given Costa Rica’s close ties to the United States, San José’s decision to stick the first finger in the migration dam does appear to offer a convenient way for Washington to staunch future flows without having to deal with its own role in their generation. Since then, a number of other regional governments (e.g. Panama) have followed suit, detaining Cubans rather than turning a blind eye to their presence.
Compared to Costa Rica’s responsiveness, U.S. statements have appeared repetitive, perfunctory, and short on solutions. Over and over again, U.S. officials have insisted that “no change” to the Cuban Adjustment Act and the complementary “Wet Foot/Dry Foot” policy is under contemplation. At a recent round of bilateral migration talks with Cuban counterparts, held in the midst of the current crisis, U.S. officials reiterated this position. This may be smart messaging; to suggest otherwise could make outflows from the island even worse. Nonetheless, such assertions misleadingly contradict the Obama’s administration’s diplomatic long game. Surely in the mid-term, enduring Cuban immigration privileges are incompatible with the spirit of rapprochement both the U.S. and Cuban governments seek. Should the embargo go one day, as White House officials hope it will, the Adjustment Act will have to as well. By taking a back seat (publicly) to Central American governments’ efforts to resolve the present impasse, the United States has also given the impression of ignoring a problem it has a hand in fueling.
In Cuban-American Miami, meanwhile, the whiplash has been equally galling. In the months leading up to the current conjuncture, news coverage on Cuban migration was characterized less by outpourings of solidarity than mounting skepticism over recent arrivals’ social values. True, rising numbers of immigrants provided a useful indictment of Raúl Castro’s reforms, while the obstacles overcome on their journeys inspired frequent admiration. Yet earlier this year, to give an example, the South Florida Sun Sentinel ran sensationalist stories denouncing Medicare, insurance, credit card, and welfare fraud networks flourishing under the cover of Cubans’ relative ease of movement back and forth to the island. Add in already simmering concerns about many recent arrivals’ supposed lack of work ethic and the stage was set for an intra-communal cultural clash framed increasingly in terms of “us” versus “them.”
Whereas the community’s founders had, according to myth, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, those arriving now were increasingly depicted as “takers,” dependent on and even professing entitlement to U.S. government largesse. For the first time, Cuban-American legislators began calling for repeal or modification of the Cuban Adjustment Act itself, ironically approximating the Cuban government’s own traditional opposition to the law. In the wake of the sudden Cuban migration crisis in Central America, however, the same local TV station (América TV) whose political talk shows provided occasional platforms for such divisive commentary also showed one of its major entertainment stars traveling to the Costa Rican/Nicaraguan border in broad sympathy with the migrant cause. The portraits of human aspiration have been undeniably moving, but the mark of opportunism among some old-guard voices jumping on the bandwagon (including specious comparisons to Syrian refugees fleeing a war zone for Europe) has also been unmistakable. Certainly many of these Cubans in transit, were they to settle in the United States, would quickly adopt the same transnational patterns of behavior—frequent visits to the island, sending remittances there, even plans to move back after securing a green card as an insurance policy—that have already so angered the Cuban-American right.
Finally, in Cuba itself, official commentary on the migrant dilemma has suffered from predictable silences and tunnel vision, whereby the migrants’ fate is still being used to settle bilateral scores. First was the matter of authorities’ avoidance of the subject. The first mention of the ongoing conflict in the state press appeared in an official note from the Ministry of Foreign Relations on November 17. Therein, officials revealed that they had been in active contact with authorities in the region all along, though to what end was unclear. Likewise, the editorial advanced the hardly novel thesis that the primary culprit was U.S. immigration policy, refusing to acknowledge that domestic economic (not to mention intertwined political) shortcomings might have anything to do with the outflow. Nor, conveniently, did government leaders lay the blame, as they might have, at Ecuador’s feet for having allowed Cubans a visa-free foothold in the American mainland in the first place.
Such one-sidedness aside, readers would have had a tough time figuring out to what events the article was referring. After all, no reporters from state papers had been sent to cover the border snag in the preceding days. Symptomatically, Granma’s young international affairs editor penned a series of thoughtful editorials outlining possible outcomes to the crisis. Evidently unable to publish them in his hometown rag, they appeared in rapid succession on medium.com.
But there is also the bigger problem of the Cuban government’s seeming desire to have its cake and eat it too on the migrant question. Of course the Adjustment Act is nigh impossible to justify. Of course it politicizes Cuban migration, providing an incentive for those who might be thinking about jumping ship anyway. Yet such realities are not mutually exclusive from either the real deficiencies of Raúl Castro’s economic reforms thus far, let alone the ways transnational flows facilitated by the Adjustment Act’s very existence are providing an important engine for what modest grassroots economic growth there is back home.
To the extent that Cuba’s small business sector has been able to expand under Raúl Castro, it has counted on enormous remittance flows from the diaspora as a primary source of capital. Loans, for example, offered by Cuba’s Central Bank to the self-employed are pitiful by comparison. Black and grey markets, too, on which citizens and small businesses rely, thrive when movement in and out of the island is eased. There is an argument, therefore, that Cuba’s migration reform—specifically the provision allowing island residents to be outside the country for two years, enough time to get a U.S. green card and then return—was designed implicitly to grease the wheels of a transnational economy increasingly important to an island under continued conditions of U.S. embargo and clinging to central planning. This may be the government making the best of a bad situation. Still, to not acknowledge this dynamic openly is politically disingenuous and avoids a more serious analysis of the corollary financial dividends recent migration (or better yet, circulation) has also sowed.
Uncertain Options
Whatever the combination of half-truths and evasions on all sides, the jig appears to be up. Cubans already stuck in Costa Rica may eventually get to the United States. But more and more Central American governments (Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Belize) are prohibiting island-born migrants from using their territories as underground highways. In the most momentous decision of all, Ecuador announced on November 26 that it would begin requiring visas for Cubans traveling to the country. Not surprisingly, this quickly prompted an outcry and even visible protest, particularly among islanders who had already purchased tickets for future travel. Ecuador replied by promising to issue visas to all who had bought airfares before the new policy was announced. Nonetheless, moving forward the country’s role as trampoline will wind to an end. The effects on Cuba’s black market—Quito being a major supplier for all manner of inputs and cheap consumer goods sold on Havana’s streets—are also bound to be significant.
The Andean nation, however, is only one piece of the puzzle. At a gathering under the auspices of the Central American Integration System on November 24, about the only thing regional foreign ministers could agree upon was criticizing the United States’ preferential immigration policies toward Cubans. Ironically, though, within Latin America, Cubans get the short end of the stick, facing steeper visa requirements than any other nationality (with the exception of Haitians).
Proposals to amend U.S. policy face similar contradictions. Writing in The New York Times, William LeoGrande recently argued that the White House should pair an elimination of the “dry foot” provision allowing Cubans entry to U.S. territory in the first place—leaving the Adjustment Act itself technically on the books—with a revised migration accord granting more Cubans the opportunity to emigrate legally. This is a sensible suggestion echoed by many voices on the Cuban side. The difficulty, however, is that it would effectively replace one kind of exceptionalism with another. Already the 20,000 legal travel documents that the United States pledges to provide annually to Cubans are far out of proportion to the size of the island. Over the last ten years, for example, Mexicans have received an average of 69,000 legal visas a year, and their country has more than eleven times Cuba’s population. More to the point, with no other country in the world does the United States maintain a bilateral migration accord in the style of the U.S.-Cuban agreements dating to 1994 and 1995.
A visit to Havana this week by Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solís may provide clues as to what will happen next. Indeed, Solís has pledged to ask Cuba’s leaders to intercede for the rights of Cuban migrants in his country to continue to U.S. territory. Yet even in the unlikely event Raúl Castro responds to such entreaties, or if the United States does act to change implementation of the Adjustment Act, the only things that seem capable of sating the migration outflow over the long term are sustained investment, economic growth, and rising opportunities of all kinds on the island. Eight years into the Raúl Castro era, and a year into a reformed relationship with the United States, such goals are now marginally closer. But the day when all Cubans see more prospects at home rather than abroad, regrettably, still seems a ways off.