by DNA Cuba Desk
Johana Tablada, deputy director general for the United States of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in an interview for OnCuba that the United States will begin the deportation of the Cubans it has detained and who have not passed the credible fear interview, whom she calls “inadmissible.”
These deportations come after an unprecedented wave of Cuban immigrants in history, in which hundreds of thousands of Cubans have left the island and made long and dangerous journeys from South and Central America to reach the United States through the border with Mexico.
OnCuba assures that the Cubans who have left the country are “around 200 thousand” and all due to the “severe economic crisis”, although reliable data assures that in fiscal year 2022 (from October 1, 2021 to December 30, September 2022), the figure is a record : 224,607 Cubans reached the US through the border with Mexico in 12 months, and more than 10,000 others tried to do so through the sea.
Taboada said that the change in immigration policy “comes from the significant increase in the migratory flow of Cubans to the United States, of people who, for the most part, arrive in US territory irregularly, but who leave Cuba with a passport, with a visa, or without a visa if they go to a country that admits them that way; and in addition to the increase in those who leave for Florida using the extremely dangerous sea route. This increase in the migratory flow harms the interest of the United States. If not, we probably wouldn’t even be talking.”
Taboada evades the denunciations that the exodus, especially after the massive demonstrations of July 11, 2021, has been carried out with the complicity between the regime of Havana and that of Nicaragua, after the government of Daniel Ortega , an ally of Castroism, will eliminate the visa for Cubans, making it easier for thousands to travel to the Central American country to undertake the journey to the US.
A US State Department report said it “draws attention to those countries that not only fail to reduce human trafficking, but sponsor it.” Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela just appeared on the list.
Taboada, as is common among regime officials, said that “the neuralgic point in bilateral relations, the one that has triggered this migratory flow, is the blockade.”
The official announced that they are asking the Joe Biden government to “restore non-immigrant visas,” and assured that in “2018 there were more than a million Cuban trips between the two countries, most of them roundtrip . If a person who has his life in Cuba, who has a business, who has a job, wants to go to the United States to visit a relative and then come back here, we don’t see why he can’t do it. It seems to us that granting these visas can also contribute to discouraging illegal emigration”.
The record number of Cubans arriving in the United States surpassed the combined records of the Mariel exodus and the rafters crisis, the two largest previous waves of migration from Cuba.
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Photo “Cubans on Raft” by DukeUnivLibraries. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
