Cuba: A Country That Is Leaving
By Luis Carlos Battista (Joven Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – Cuba migrates, and it is no longer news. Migration has become an invisible thread linking the Giraldilla of Havana with Versailles in Miami, the Madrid Metro, and Mexico City’s Zocalo. Cuba sometimes migrates and sometimes goes into exile—two words that coexist naturally on other shores, though the government semantics still persist in omitting the latter.
Migration—or exile, depending on who says it—is the great paradox of a Revolution that claimed to be built in the name of the people. The millions who have left the Island, voting with their feet or with oars, are the same ones who now help sustain the economy of many households. A country that for decades exported sugar, tobacco, and doctors depends today to a large extent on remittances sent even by those who once heard the phrase: “we don’t want you; we don’t need you.”
Since 1959, there has been a divide between “those who left” and “those who stayed,” between “the ones over there” and “the ones over here,” but setting out toward a new destination—whether in search of opportunities or because of dissent with a government or political system—does not break a person’s bond with their homeland.
The Moral Debt to Those Abroad
The Cuban government’s relationship with its population on other shores remains one of its many unresolved issues. For decades, from officialdom, the emigrant has been viewed with a mix of suspicion and usefulness: an ideological suspect, yet an inexhaustible source of hard currency.
The Cuban emigrant must pay abusive consular fees, luxury-priced passports, and undergo slow, humiliatingly costly procedures. They send money, medicine, and food; but their opinion, in truth, is not welcome. Even outside national territory, the Cuban continues to be subject to a system that refuses to recognize them as a full citizen. Once a Cuban establishes residency abroad, their entry to the country becomes subject to the arbitrary decision of an anonymous official, and they lose the limited electoral rights retained by citizens residing on the Island. Yet it is not uncommon for an emigrant to discover in other lands that their vote does have consequences, and to learn to use it as something more than a formality as in Cuba.
It is fair to admit that, in recent years, the Government has made certain gestures toward its diaspora: some easier consular procedures, more conciliatory speeches, symbolic meetings. But these gestures, however amplified by official media, do not alter the substance.
The Mirage of Normalization
For years, Cuban diplomats have repeated the mantra of normalization with Washington. But that discourse overlooks a basic truth: there can be no real normalization while Cuban foreign policy refuses first to normalize its relationship with Cubans on other shores. The Republican Party proves this political formula in every election. Whether one likes it or not, Cubans in Miami, Kentucky, or Houston will invariably be reference points in US foreign policy toward the Island—whether out of deference or electoral interest.
Barack Obama’s bold decision in 2014 bore fruit for a limited time. For a few years, hundreds of exiles reconciled with those who once threw eggs at them while shouting “traitors.” But this policy required groundwork; let us not forget that, after announcing his decision, Obama traveled repeatedly to Miami to explain and persuade Cuban Americans—his voters, by the way—about his conciliatory approach.
This basic lesson in politics is not taught at the Nico Lopez Communist Party School, and so representatives of the Cuban state have never articulated a message capable of convincing emigrants of the need to support engagement. And when I speak of emigrants, I refer to a community far more diverse and complex than the one displayed at the Nation and Emigration meetings with Cuban officials. Likewise, it took a crisis like July 11, 2021, for the Palace of the Revolution to blame members of that community for “orchestrating” the protests from abroad, instead of analyzing the internal problems that fueled them.
On the other hand, one of the main mistakes of Miami’s “historical exile” has been its support for acts of terrorism carried out by the most radical elements of that community and their alliances with foreign intelligence services. I do not dispute the right of emigrants to influence the foreign policy of their new country, but supporting violent acts crosses a line that is hard to justify. Likewise, it is difficult to take seriously demands for democratic change in Cuba when, on the other shore, some support the dismantling of the rule of law and the wet dreams of would-be dictators.
For MINREX, the United States is not only a political adversary; it is also the epicenter of a powerful and politically organized diaspora. No Cuban foreign policy, however bold or innovative, can succeed if it continues to ignore that actor, whose muscle today influences presidential campaigns and largely shapes the world’s image of Cuba.
Furthermore, across the Atlantic, in that second capital of the diaspora—Madrid—the community is also learning to organize itself around the Spanish right of Ayuso, Feijóo, Monasterio, and Abascal, aspiring to shape Spain’s foreign policy toward Cuba once the fire of that Phoenix of Spanish politics, Pedro Sánchez, burns out.
Reconciliation with its overseas citizens does not guarantee a stable diplomatic relationship with Washington or Madrid, but it is a very important step toward achieving one. Yet this theory appears to make the Palace of the Revolution uncomfortable. The Political Bureau struggles to admit that the most important country for Cuba’s foreign policy is not the United States, but the Cuba that lives in the United States; and soon, at the current pace, it will struggle to admit the same regarding Spain.
Exile as a Mirror
Cuban migration is not homogeneous. Some left seeking freedom, others seeking powdered milk. Some build businesses in Florida, while others wipe tables in a restaurant in Houston. Both paths are equally dignified. But nearly all citizens abroad share the feeling that leaving was their path to personal fulfillment.
In that context, the absence of a policy to protect Cuban emigrants—especially those in transit—is striking. There is no publicly known network of assistance, no information system, no protocols for consular support. Thus, in times of deportations and migrant crises, citizens are left in a kind of limbo. On one hand, their country of origin barely recognizes them—or does so begrudgingly, except to collect consular fees. On the other, their transit or destination country does not receive them. And so the Cuban becomes a pawn in a diplomatic ping-pong match among Havana, Panama, the Bahamas, Managua, Tapachula, or Laredo.
In fact, too often many Cubans have been turned into de facto stateless people. There are cases of Cuban citizens who cannot return to their country, even if they wish to, due to the arbitrary decision of an official in Havana. In the United States, even though many of our citizens face deportation campaigns or lack valid documents, the Cuban consulate has no network of honorary consular representatives across the country, nor even a regularly updated website with information on protecting its citizens. It is not so difficult to follow the example of Mexico or Colombia, to name just two.
As a proposal, MINREX could at least publish on its website useful information for Cubans who are victims of human trafficking or violence abroad, especially sexual violence. The Cuban government, so proud of its humanitarian actions, needs more humanitarian policies toward its own people.
The Country That Stays Behind
Meanwhile, Cuba is emptying out. Each flight to Managua, each makeshift raft, each asylum application in Mexico, Moscow or Madrid—however disguised as a family trip—really hides, in the vast majority of cases, a vote of disappointment with the country project that never arrived. My generation, born in the late 1980s, grew up in an economic crisis that—after more than three decades—still has the same causes, and little has been done to resolve them definitively; and in that generation that once attempted a Revolution, many today survive thanks to the help of the children and grandchildren who one day rejected, in practical terms, the failed project.
In today’s Cuba there are more experts in migration procedures than in electoral law or agricultural engineering. The passport—that expensive blue little book—has become a source of hope more valuable than a university degree; and in every family there is someone who left, someone planning to leave, or someone dreaming of being able to leave. Cuban emigration, with its various waves, is a collective and sustained exodus. The response of Cuban officials is, as always, to reach for its familiar reasoning; but a Cuban cares little about why some other Latin American emigrates. Their hopes and dreams are not found in the land that saw them born, and they are willing to cross a bridge they know will be burned from the other side because they will not be able to return.
Yet the saddest thing is that the Revolution in power, as far as we know, does not care—or does not make the effort to know—how many of its people lie in the Florida Straits or the Darién Gap. It is only fair, for those mothers who mourn their children without a grave, to create mechanisms that allow them to know what happened to them.
The Road Ahead
The Cuban government has before it several avenues to resolve—or at least lessen—the standoff it maintains with its emigrants. The first, and perhaps the most symbolic, involves transforming its consular service into something more than a bureaucratic window.
Formal courtesy is not enough, a virtue many officials do practice. What is needed is a clear political mandate, a will, a discourse emanating from the highest levels of the State, capable of understanding that every procedure is also a gesture of reconciliation with its siblings on other shores.
The second avenue, more practical and less sentimental, points to the economy. The Government must recognize, without hesitation or ideological pretexts, the right of Cubans residing abroad to invest in their country—beyond using front men, or the mere importation and resale of food and consumer goods. Regardless of the date or reasons for departure, the government must offer legal and financial guarantees that meet international standards; make the embargo or blockade (call it as one wishes) carry such a high opportunity cost that its existence becomes impossible to justify.
The diaspora is human, financial, and moral capital that the leaders of the Palace cannot continue to disdain out of pride, distrust, or jealousy of power. There is no better investor than their compatriots on other shores. They know the reality, preserve the language, and retain cultural and emotional ties with the entire Island from Cape San Antonio to Punta de Maisí. At a time when foreign interest in investing in Cuba is scarce, opening that door could be a lifeline for a people already hungry for food and hope; and if for that, the Communist Party Political Bureau must cede some power, better to do so now, while there is still something left to manage.
Finally, the third avenue—perhaps the deepest—is moral and legal: to recognize the automatic, universal, inalienable right of every Cuban to return to their country. No reconciliation will be possible as long as the return depends on the permission of a bureaucrat or security agent. No nation can consider itself whole if it bars entry to its own children.
Epilogue
Perhaps someday, when the country dares to speak without restraint, it will acknowledge that the Revolution’s greatest historical error was not losing communication with Washington or possibly Madrid, but with its own sons and daughters. Because no government that depends on its diaspora to survive can continue to treat it as hostile. And no people that is forced to leave can call itself, without irony, sovereign.
First published in Spanish by Joven Cuba and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.