Curitiba, Brazil: Residence Permits Now More Complicated
HAVANA TIMES – Curitiba, the trendy city for Cuban emigrants.
Trump closed the doors to the north, and the previously overlooked route to southern Brazil began to be viewed favorably by those needing to flee the island.
It’s not the American dream; the climate is quite challenging, but if you work, you’ll have what you need to survive. A friend who has lived in São Paulo for 16 years summed up what life is like for us in this country: “it’s like El Cerro in Havana, but with a credit card.”
That explains the current explosion of Cubans here, and with that influx, the paperwork at the Federal Police offices—already slow—has practically come to a halt.
If before the wait for a Cuban to obtain permanent residency was four to five years, now it can be said to be highly uncertain.
I don’t know—maybe the Paraná government is thinking of some strategy to fix things, but for the moment, the process seems collapsed.
Social media is full of testimonies from Cubans who, after years in this country, have had to restart the process, losing the accumulated time, which is an important factor when granting residency.
In this country, you can do almost everything without being a resident. That “almost” is good for newcomers so they can settle down, work, rent a place to live, have access to healthcare, etc.
For those of us who have been here longer, there comes a point when you need to advance your legal status.
I want to buy a car, I want to finance a house, I need to help my wife bring her mother over—she’s literally starving in Cuba—and for all of that, I need permanent residency.
I’m not even talking about crossing borders to visit other countries because our current economic and professional situation wouldn’t allow it, but for that too, in the future, we need it.
And we work. We bury ourselves in work with the expectation of growing, of taking big steps to achieve what we want, but it doesn’t always depend on us.
Recently, another Cuban friend who worked for a small family business quit because, as he said, he couldn’t stand the humiliation and exploitation anymore. And when he went to look for another job, he found out he couldn’t be hired under the CLT system (Consolidation of Labor Laws) because his asylum protocol was outdated due to system delays.
If you’re neither a legal entity nor work under CLT, then you work exposed to any kind of irregularity because the employer-employee relationship is not subject to any legal framework.
My friend will have to remain in this situation until he manages to update his asylum protocol.
Brazil remains one of the few countries in the world that continues to provide legal documents to immigrants—at least as a glimmer of hope—even though the process has become more complicated.
With US borders closed, at least for a few more years, if the Brazilian option were to disappear, Cuban migration could become even more irregular and hindered.