We Gave Up Everything to Escape Cuba, and It Wasn’t Enough

By Osmel Almaguer

HAVANA TIMES – In mid-2022, my wife and I decided to leave the country. We knew that organizing such a trip wasn’t something that could be done in a matter of weeks, so we planned our departure for the end of that same year.

The first step was to find a destination country, and it wasn’t easy.

In the midst of desperation, I considered possibilities I wouldn’t dare confess here. I was also tempted to stay in the next country I traveled to for work. But we eventually discarded that option, because it wasn’t fair, and also because we risked waiting two years, three, or even longer before being reunited.

A friend, who was trying to leave through a study scholarship, recommended that option to us. We tried, but it didn’t work for us, though it did for him. We searched on Google: “visa-free countries for Cubans,” and what we found didn’t seem viable either.

Caribbean islands with high unemployment rates, where Spanish isn’t spoken; Russia, a cold and distant destination from which we heard quite grim stories; Serbia, which had complicated the entry requirements immensely due to so much immigration; and Nicaragua, the only one where our language is spoken, but it has another dictatorship.

When we felt there was nothing left to do, just about ready to give up, a young man —now a family friend— came forward with all the information we needed. “There’s a journey to Brazil that is safe and relatively cheap,” he told us.

So, we began to make a plan. We needed three tickets to Guyana (English-speaking), to find a coyote to help us cross to Brazil, and to choose a destination city within the vast South American country.

After making all the calculations, we realized that we wouldn’t have enough money, even if we sold all our belongings. Fortunately, one of my wife’s cousins agreed to lend us the money for the tickets, which she bought herself.

Our new friend helped us join a WhatsApp group, where we got all the details about the journey and life in Brazil once we arrived. We also found a coyote in that group.

Countless early mornings were spent in lines for paperwork, with a lot of physical, emotional, and financial strain to obtain passports, marriage and birth certificates, travel authorization for our daughter, the MINREX certification of our academic degrees, and other documents.

When we finally had almost everything ready, about five months had passed. Then we informed our families about our intentions. There were tears, and both sides felt the pain. Amid that mix of sadness and hope, we began to sell everything.

The house sold at a very low price because prices were dropping due to the migration wave affecting the country. The rest of our belongings (refrigerator, oven, bed, bicycle, etc.) sold quickly because there was a high demand and not everyone had foreign currency to buy from government stores.

The sale of our assets, including the house, totaled about $2,500. That, plus about $1,000 we had managed to save over time by enduring hunger and other hardships, was just enough to make the journey and, maybe, survive for a couple of months in Brazil until we found work.

We left Cuba on December 27, 2022, thank God, because our chances of doing so had been really slim, with a house that was nearly impossible to sell and a sick father with no one to care for him. I will never forget his look of “I know I will never hug you again,” nor the shadow on the faces of my family.

Read more from the diary of Osmel Almaguer here.