US, Cuba take step toward thawing frosty relations with migration talks
WASHINGTON — Cuba and the United States took a tentative step toward thawing relations and resuming joint efforts to address irregular migration, a senior Cuban official said following the highest-level talks between the two countries in four years.
There were no major breakthroughs, but the fact that the U.S. was holding substantive talks was a sign relations might be looking better under President Joe Biden after going into deep freeze under his predecessor, said Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio.
“They seem committed. They ratified that they are committed to the agreements in place,” Fernandez de Cossio said Friday. “So we have no reason to mistrust what they’re saying, but time will tell.”
The talks did not focus on broader U.S.-Cuba relations but more narrowly on restoring adherence to previous agreements that were intended to curtail the often-dangerous irregular migration from the island to the United States.
U.S. officials want Cuba to resume taking back flights of deported migrants, which it stopped doing at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cuban authorities, meanwhile, want to see the U.S. follow through on its plan to restore consular services in Havana, so people can once again get visas to legally come to the United States, as well as change other policies that it believes encourage irregular migration from the island.
The talks take place against the backdrop of relations that sharply deteriorated under President Donald Trump and amid a sharp increase in the number of Cubans seeking to enter the U.S. along the Southwest border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped Cubans more than 79,800 times from October through March — more than double all of 2021 and five times more than all of 2020. Overall, the Border Patrol stopped migrants of all nationalities more than 209,000 times in March, the highest monthly mark in 22 years.
Cubans who cross the U.S. border illegally face little risk of being deported or expelled under a public health law that has been used to deny asylum to thousands of migrants of other nationalities on the grounds of slowing the spread of COVID-19.
Cuba wants the U.S. to stop granting asylum, end the economic embargo and take other measures that it says encourage migration and to restore consular activities so people can legally travel back and forth.