Cuban migrants furious, disconcerted
PANAMA CITY/HAVANA: For Cubans trekking through Latin America to the United States, the sudden decision by President Barack Obama to end a longstanding policy giving them automatic entry has come as a cold, hard punch to the gut.
“Obama has screwed all Cubans,” Yadiel Cruz, a 33-year-old Cuban man in a Panama shelter, said bitterly.
The long route from South America, through Central America and into Mexico to the US border is a migration pipeline that can take years for Cubans to complete, with pit stops to earn money along the way.
“We feel sadness because we are all coming with a dream that comes from pain, hunger and a lot of work to get this far,” Lorena Pena, a woman four months pregnant who left Cuba with her husband and four-year-old daughter, said in the same shelter.
Obama, she said, “screwed up, because what he’s done is hurt us — so he really isn’t as good as everyone says.”
The president’s move to scrap the 1995 policy known as “wet foot, dry foot” means that Cubans without visas arriving in the United States by land or sea now risk being turned away, unless they claim asylum or humanitarian imperatives.
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The decision is part of Obama’s normalisation of ties with Cuba launched in 2015. Havana and Central American capitals had long criticised “wet foot, dry foot” for acting as a magnet for Cubans.
“It’s like someone has knocked the air out of you,” said Ivan Diaz, a Cuban health worker in a shelter in Tapachula, in southern Mexico on the Guatemalan border.
The 28 Cubans in the shelter were despondent. They were among a much bigger group of Cubans dispersed among government and charity shelters awaiting Mexican permits to go to the US border.
Luis Rey Villagran, an activist, said around 680 Cubans already registered with Mexican migration officials would likely get the permit. But many more “are in limbo.”
Some Cubans along the route said they would wait and see what Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, would do when he becomes America’s president in a week.
But their hopes could be misplaced, judging from Trump’s strong antiimmigration stance and criticism of transit the normalisation deal.
Whatever Trump decides to do in terms of Cuba will weigh on its citizens, many of whom are praying for the thaw with the United States to result in easier living conditions.
Nearly two million Cubans live in the United States, both native-born and migrants. They or their parents moved there over the past halfcentury, often to Florida, which is the closest state geographically to Cuba. Many used “wet foot, dry foot” to enter the country.