More Cubans Are Looking to South America over USA

“On the Southern Route, the coyotes, drivers & hostel owners are all Cubans”

Juliet, a 29-year-old nurse, said the trip to Uruguay cost less than $2,000 and without the mistreatment of the northern route to the USA.

By 14ymedio

HAVANA TIMES – Juliet has just arrived in Uruguay on a journey that took less than two weeks and cost her less than 2,000 dollars. A nurse by profession, the 29 year old woman – who prefers to use a pseudonym – is one of the thousands of Cuban nationals who, faced with the growing difficulties in emigrating to the United States and transatlantic countries such as Spain, are changing the “northern route” for a new “southern route,” towards Brazil, Chile or Uruguay.

In her case, she opted for South America after waiting for two years, since January 2023, to qualify for the humanitarian parole program to go to the US, where her sister lives, which never arrived. “As the months went by without any news, my sister and brother-in-law began to investigate, and friends who had emigrated by these routes recommended it to them.”

The price was certainly a determining factor. As an example, she mentions her acquaintances who emigrated to Miami via Nicaragua and spent more than 10,000 dollars. When one of her friends told her what he had paid to go to Montevideo, $1,150 for the plane ticket to Surinam and $750 for the rest of the land transfers, she said: “With what my journey through the volcano route would cost, I can do five of these routes and arrive in Uruguay with dollars.”

The conditions in Uruguay, which she had heard about, and the language, also affected her decision. “It wasn’t like coming to the United States, where I would have family, people to guide me, but I would have a better quality of life than in Cuba.”

At first, the journey south seemed to her to be free of the dangers of the sea route in the Florida Straits, or the organized crime in countries like Mexico or Guatemala, or the harsh Darien jungle. Even so, she admits that she had some misgivings – “that, after all, is human trafficking” – and so she was surprised by the safety and organization of the journey, through Surinam, French Guiana and Brazil, in a total of 13 days.

And her route, she says, was long. “There is a much faster way, all by plane, through Guyana, the English one, to Brazil, and then to Uruguay, but it was almost $3,000 in total, and my family couldn’t afford it.” Everything is through the same network. “They have something for everyone: for those who have money or for those who don’t have enough. Packages for all budgets.”

They also have “different forms of payment”: either from abroad, through relatives, by transfer and as they advance along the route, or in cash, all at once, upon arriving in Suriname, the first stop on the trip, which is reached from Havana by plane.

“I never thought that it would be so well coordinated as I experienced it,” says Juliet. “If there is one thing I can highlight, it is how they treat Cubans. From the moment I arrived in Suriname to Uruguay, the coyotes, the guides, the drivers, everyone, everyone, everyone, at least in the experience I had, gave us spectacular attention. You were the priority at all times.”

Juliet says the network even has a WhatsApp group through which the “organizers” communicate constantly with the relatives. “Every second they ask for a photo, to see what condition we are in, to see if it is us, to inform the families when we lose internet. And the family asks and immediately they answer: ‘look, they are going here, they are going there.’ That was something that really impressed me, to be honest, because I had the idea that it would be chaotic.”

Juliet does not know who these “organizers” are, nor does she want to go into too much detail, but she does know that all the “guides” who assisted them on the trip were compatriots, “from the coyotes to the drivers and the owners of the hostels, they are all Cuban.” And she continues: “It is a very large human trafficking network. Perhaps not like the one in Nicaragua, but it is getting bigger.” The recent figures revealed by Brazil – almost 20,000 Cubans settled in its territory between January and November of this year – confirm her assessment.

Another of her surprises was precisely “the number of Cubans” who had the same idea as she did: “According to what they told us, we were the largest group of Cubans that had ever crossed on this route: 180 adults and 49 children.” The entire group met in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, but normally traveled divided among vehicles of eight or nine people.

Juliet tells 14ymedio in detail the stops on her journey. First, from Havana to Suriname, with the Surinamese airline Fly All Ways, having purchased a round-trip ticket. In that Caribbean country, Cubans obtain a tourist visa valid for seven days.

The day after their arrival, they were taken from the capital, Paramaribo, to the border with French Guiana, a six-hour bus ride. “The road has two checkpoints where we have to hand in our passports. There is no problem as long as it is within the seven-day visa period,” Juliet explains. “We arrived at the border around six or seven in the morning. Everything happened very quickly, they give you bottles, they give you a snack and they put you in canoes. These canoes, in a matter of ten minutes perhaps, take you to the other side, and you are already in French Guiana.”

In French Guiana, the guides give the group several instructions: “These guides are in charge of explaining to you that you must not leave a casetica, a small piece of land where they tell you that you cannot move, because if you move you are illegal and you could be assaulted and such.” They spent a whole day there, until, at two in the afternoon, when the Attorney General’s Office opened where they gave them a paper “that allows you to be legal throughout the entire route of French Guiana.”

The next stop is the capital, where the Cubans are asking for asylum. “That day in Cayenne was extremely tiring. We arrived around seven in the morning and we spent the whole morning lying there waiting,” she says. “Of course, they gave us a good explanation the whole time, and they gave us snacks, water, lunch.” In the queue, she says, they tried to keep quiet as they were asked to, “but well, Cubans are always a bit undisciplined, and sometimes they scolded us for that.”

Once they had obtained the papers in Cayenne, they were taken to the border with Brazil, a journey that was particularly difficult. “It’s an eight-hour journey, most of it with lots of curves, and those buses go too fast. You open and close your eyes and it’s one curve, another curve, and it’s quite stressful.” The contingent left French Guiana across the Oyapoque River, the natural border with Brazil, again in groups of eight and nine, in canoes.

Juliet’s account of the legal procedure they undergo in Brazil provides one of the keys to why so many Cubans choose the South American giant as their destination. Before the Federal Police, they all ask for asylum. “With this refugee paper, you can stay in Brazil and you will have the same rights as a Brazilian,” says the young woman, who took the paper to travel legally to the next border, because she was sure that she would end up in Uruguay.

“In my group, half of us stayed in Brazil and half of us came to Uruguay,” she says. “There was a certain disagreement there, because everything has its pros and cons. In Brazil, things are very cheap, but many people didn’t stay because of the language issue and because they fear that salaries are also cheap.”

To get to Rivera, already in Uruguay, is a journey of thousands of kilometers passed through Macapá, Belem, Florianópolis and Porto Alegre, sometimes by bus, sometimes by ferry. Before leaving Brazil, Cubans must “give up the refuge” that they have been granted, and go to Uruguay to request it. “They are next to each other: Brazilian Immigration and Uruguayan Immigration,” Juliet says. That is the extent of the “package” originally purchased. “From Rivera you leave on a bus or pay out of your own pocket for a taxi to the very door of your house where you are going to live, in my case, Montevideo, but you pay for that.”

Throughout the trip, she kept noticing that even in the “most extremely poor” places, such as villages in the Amazon, “there was no shortage of water, electricity or food.” And she added bitterly: “You realize that these serious problems in Cuba do not exist outside, that basic needs are covered.”

Despite her good spirit in telling her story, Juliet first confesses that she still finds it difficult to talk about the fact of migrating: “It makes my chest tighten, I feel a deep sadness that only those who emigrate, leaving everything behind, understand.”

The young woman had left her job as a nurse at the Eusebio Hernández hospital, known as Maternidad Obrera, in Havana, before the pandemic, “because I couldn’t make a living from it, I couldn’t get ahead.” In addition, the disorganization irritated her and the lack of hygiene made her sick. “The ones who cleaned the hospital rooms were the inmates, who were brought from El Guatao, and many times due to lack of fuel they didn’t bring them and we ourselves had to clean. No matter how many protective measures one took in the face of that cleaning, there came a time when I caught a bacteria, then a staphylococcus…” she details.

For the past two years, she has worked in a private institution. “I was not one of those who lived badly in Cuba, if I told you otherwise I would be lying, but I lived depending on the help I received from abroad,” she confesses. “Maybe other people like to live like that, but I don’t.”

Her dream, now in Montevideo, is to be able to support herself and help her family. “The ultimate goal would be to go to the United States, but at the moment that is not possible, because I don’t have the money and also because of the current situation. At the moment the idea is to establish a life here, work, move forward, start a business here.”

In addition to her partner, with whom she will reunite at some point, she left on the island her father, her aunt, her cousins, her grandmother… All of them originally from Pinar del Río, “where the situation is extreme, worse than in Havana.”

Arriving in the South American country gives her a bittersweet feeling. “Getting on a plane and leaving Cuba is not as easy as you might think. It hurts a lot to leave your family, to leave everything behind. Even if Cuba is in bad shape, even if it is broken into tiny pieces, it is the land where you were born. It is heartbreaking,” she admits.

“Here you have everything with money. You see very nice things, enormous development, a kindness that nobody in your country offered you, because in Cuba any process is cumbersome. And when you leave, you realize that in every place you arrive, which is neither your country nor your land nor your acquaintances nor your anything, they treat you super well… Everything is so, but so, so different, and at the same time you feel a longing, because you say: if my country had these opportunities, if in my country we could live this…”

It hurts her, in a certain sense, to be privileged: “because there are many people who live in Cuba and will never really know how the world moves, how things move.”

Translated by Translating Cuba.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.