Even before the CoV crisis, Cuba was struggling with its own economic, social and political situation and structural problems. But the pandemic and the current global economic downturn, as well as the tightening US embargo, have accelerated the island nation’s free fall.
The state is increasingly lacking the financial means to import goods and food, for example. Among other things, the population has to contend with power outages, food shortages, meager salaries, shortages of medicine and deteriorating health care.
In 2021, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets because of the fatal economic situation and the restrictions related to the pandemic, and the government responded with crackdowns. More and more people, especially those without means, are trying to leave Cuba – often with makeshift boats. At least 100 people have died at sea since 2020, according to the US Coast Guard.
demographic dilemma
Even for a country known for mass exodus, the current surge is remarkable. According to the US Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP), in October 2019 almost 2,000 people migrated from Cuba to the United States. Last year, that number was just under 30,000. Around 2 percent of Cuba’s entire population migrated to the United States from October 2021 to September 2022, which is more than 4 percent of the working-age population. By the end of the year, the number of migrants continued to rise.
This means that the island state is also faced with a demographic problem. In 2021, the population shrank for the fifth year in a row. The birth rate is steadily declining, the country is ageing. Around a fifth of Cubans are over 60 years old. According to official forecasts, which do not yet take into account the most recent wave of emigration, by 2030 the proportion will increase to almost a third.
Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at City University in New York, told the New York Times (“NYT”) that it was the country’s largest quantitative and qualitative “brain drain” since the revolution. The emigration of many younger working-age Cubans bodes a bleak demographic future for a country where the average life expectancy, at 78, is higher than the rest of the region. The government is already struggling to pay for the meager pensions that the country’s elderly depend on.
Stress test for Biden
Alongside Mexico, Cuba is one of the most important countries of origin for migrants and is therefore one of the main causes of the influx of migrants at the American-Mexican border. The situation is a political burden for US President Joe Biden. Many experts believe that US policy towards the island is contributing to the migration crisis that the government is now trying to combat, writes the “NYT”.
While the Cuban government sees the long-standing US embargo as the main reason for the country’s misery, the US sees the Cuban government as having a duty to provide for its citizens. Under President Donald Trump, the US government again tightened sanctions against Cuba and severely restricted cash payments by Cubans to their families in the United States. The Biden administration gradually lifted some of the sanctions.
This year, for the first time since 2017, US consular services in Havana and immigrant visa processing have resumed. The US has announced that 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela will be allowed into the country every month.
In return, 30,000 people who entered illegally from these countries are to be deported to Mexico every month. At the same time, immigration judges have a backlog of around 1.7 million cases, US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said earlier this year.
