Advertisement

Coast Guard stops another 12 Cubans off Key Largo as risky migration attempts continue

The U.S. Coast Guard and other law enforcement agencies on Wednesday morning stopped a vessel off the Florida Keys with a dozen migrants from Cuba on board.

This was at least the fourth migration attempt into the Keys since last week. Between last Friday and Saturday, two separate groups, totaling 19 people, landed in the Middle Keys city of Marathon.

“What we’re seeing is a slow-motion exodus that is increasing by the day,” said Ramon Saul Sanchez, a prominent member of the Cuban exile community in Miami and leader of the civil rights group Democracy Movement.

Sanchez said these landings and interdictions at sea represent only a glimpse of what is happening. Many more are leaving, but some die on the way, and the ones who make it undetected go into hiding, he said.

On Saturday, the Coast Guard stopped a boat carrying 14 migrants about 35 miles northwest of Key West.

The 12 people stopped Wednesday were found off Key Largo, said Officer Bobby Dube, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which was also involved in the interdiction.

According to Monroe County Sheriff’s Office dispatch records, the boat was about three miles offshore when it was stopped around 7:30 a.m.

U.S. officials say there has been a sharp increase in the number of people from Cuba willing to make the risky journey across the Florida Straits — often in makeshift, unseaworthy boats.

The federal government tracks migration attempts and landings by the fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. So far this year, the Coast Guard has stopped nearly 180 migrants at sea, compared with 49 in all of fiscal year 2020.

The number had been steadily declining since the Obama administration, in one of its last foreign policy moves, ended the so-called “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy in early 2017. Under that rule, those stopped at sea were sent back to Cuba. Those who set foot on U.S. soil above the high-water mark were allowed to stay and apply for permanent residency after a year.

All migrants, whether they reach land or are stopped at sea, are returned to Cuba unless they can prove to U.S. immigration officials that they have a well-founded fear of political persecution.

In the months prior to the rule ending, there was a spike in migration attempts. In fiscal year 2017, the Coast Guard reported it stopped 5,396 people at sea between Cuba and Florida.

Despite this latest increase not coming close to those numbers, there is a trend, and immigration experts theorize it’s because of deteriorating political and economic conditions in the island nation.

Jorge Duany, head of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, said the country is experiencing its worst economic crisis since the 1990s.

“Living conditions are decreasing significantly, especially since the COVID crisis, but you can argue it started happening before,” Duany said Wednesday.

People in Cuba are experiencing crippling inflation, resulting in long lines for basic supplies, including food and medicine.

Contributing to the dire situation, Duany said, are back-to-back sanctions placed on Cuba by the Trump administration during his final months in office, starting with a prohibition in September on U.S. travelers taking home Cuban rum and cigars and from staying in government-owned hotels.

The move dealt a severe blow to the country’s tourism industry since the communist government owns all of the hotels on the island. Thousands of Cuban Americans visiting the country usually stayed at these lodgings.

Trump’s administration also placed Cuba back on to the government’s state sponsor of terrorism list in January. The Obama administration removed Cuba from the list when it restored full diplomatic relations in 2015.

Also a possible factor in a growing number of people choosing to risk coming to the United States illegally is a backlog of around 100,000 visa applications because the U.S. government withdrew most of its diplomatic staff from Havana in 2017. This was after many stationed there became ill from a mysterious ailment that some within the Trump administration said was a sonic attack from a foreign adversary.

“Nobody can get a visa to travel to the U.S. from Havana,” Duany said.

On the political front, Duany says there has also been a crackdown on dissidents in Cuba ahead of Friday’s convention of the Communist Party’s Eighth Congress, when Raul Castro is expected to step down as the country’s leader.

The sea route to Florida is not the only path Cubans are seeking to leave their country. Many have also recently gone to Central America, and to South American countries like Uruguay and Brazil, Duany said. There are also many stranded along with the nearly 170,000 migrants from Central America detained along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Among them are a few hundred, or perhaps even 1,000, Cubans trying to come into the United States through Mexico,” Duany said.

Sanchez, with Democracy Movement, places the blame squarely on the Castro regime. The government has put into place more restrictions over the past year in the name of protecting citizens from COVID-19. But he said officials have also employed the pandemic as cover to silence critics of the regime, who have become increasingly more vocal.

“I think they are using the pandemic to repress the people who are out more and more, coming out and expressing themselves against the regime,” Sanchez said.

If, as is expected, Raul Castro retires as the first secretary general of Cuba’s Communist Party during the Congress this week, President Miguel Diaz-Canel will take his place. Observers are waiting to see if Diaz-Canel, 60, will run the party with less influence from the old guard and the Castros.

But, regime critics, including Sanchez, don’t believe the younger bureaucrat and party loyalist will implement enough, if any, reforms to make life better for Cubans.

“There’s not one soul in Cuba that believes any good for the Cuban people is going to come from that,” he said.