Wed | Apr 24, 2024

Cuba: US migration policy ‘incoherent’ and ‘differentiated’

Published:Wednesday | April 20, 2022 | 9:41 AM
An American flag flies at the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, on March 18, 2019 days after the US State Department announced it was eliminating a five-year tourist visa for Cubans. Cuban authorities confirmed on April 19, 2022, that migration talks with the US will take place, the first in four years since the hardening of relations between both countries and amid an increase in arrivals of Cuban citizens to the southern border of the US (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)

HAVANA (AP) — Two days before the opening of migration talks between Cuba and the United States, which have been paralysed for four years, a high-ranking Cuban official lamented Washington's “incoherent” and “differentiated” migration policies, and exhorted Washington to comply with current agreements.

The migration meeting will take place amid a dramatic increase in arrivals of Cubans at the southern border of the United States.

“We are noticing, and now much more these days, that there is a differentiated and incoherent approach by the United States toward the migratory issue,” Deputy Foreign Minister Josefina Vidal told a small group of journalists on Tuesday.

The US is financially helping “many countries in the region in order to reactivate their economies, to help them create jobs,” including supporting health and education projects, said Vidal.

Washington's policy is exactly the opposite with Cuba, where it is applying “maximum pressure to the economic order and through coercive measures.”

Cuba's Foreign Ministry said on Twitter that the meeting will be held in Washington Thursday and its delegation will be headed by deputy minister Carlos Fernández de Cossio.

The last of these meetings — which according to agreements between both countries must be held twice a year — took place in July 2018, under the administration of then President Donald Trump.

Trump ended the policy of rapprochement between both nations that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had begun.

According to US Customs and Border Protection, in the last six months, Cubans were stopped 79,800 times at the southern U.S. border, a little more than double that number seen in the entire 2021 fiscal year and five times more than in 2020.

On Tuesday, Vidal presented a gloomy picture. Cuban authorities have said that in the last five years Washington has failed to comply with the part of a bilateral agreement that establishes the delivery of 20,000 visas per year.

Sea crossings have also increased, either in rustic boats or at the hands of traffickers. From October to date, the US Coast Guard intercepted 1,257 Cubans, compared with 838 in 2021.

As the figures stand, the number of departures is higher than during the so-called “rafter crisis” of 1994 when some 30,000 people arrived through the Straits of Florida and half of those who did so in the Mariel exodus in 1980, when some 124,000 Cubans left.

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