In an end-of-year video message for social media, Cuba’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, recently acknowledged that 2022 was “one of the most challenging of Cuba’s revolutionary history.” He then admitted that 2023 “could be even more difficult,” but that, he added, would be “an attractive challenge for all who feel revolutionary.”
Nowadays, not many Cubans appear to. Instead, they keep leaving the island for the United States, risking their lives and, at times, overwhelming local authorities who, like this weekend in South Florida, had to respond to more than 500 Cuban migrants reaching the Florida Keys.
“I would prefer to die to reach my dream and help my family. The situation in Cuba is not very good,” said Jeiler del Toro Diaz, a 36-year-old fisherman who left Cuba on Dec. 30 from Cardenas, a city in the province of Matanzas, along with a dozen other Cubans.
On Tuesday afternoon, the group stood on the edge of Garden Cove road in Key Largo, waiting for Customs and Border Protection to pick them up. The migrants spoke of the desperate economic conditions that drove them to take to the sea and leave their parents and children behind. One woman cried from relief and exhaustion after the long, perilous journey.
The U.S. Coast Guard said Tuesday that it continues to patrol the Florida Straits around the clock and that authorities were still working on getting everyone off Dry Tortugas Island, where several Cubans landed during the weekend. The agency has yet to say why or how hundreds of Cubans had been able to land on the shores of the Florida Keys undetected within the span of a few days, even after a multi-agency task force was activated last September to deal with the situation.
In a statement, Chief Patrol Agent Walter N. Slosar said “the Miami sector has experienced over a 400% increase in migrant encounters” since Oct. 1, a figure driven mainly by Cuban and Haitian migrants.
A Coast Guard spokesperson highlighted the danger of crossing the Florida Straits, which “could lead to loss of life.”
Even so, the Cubans keep coming.
Del Toro and others said the group had spent about three months planning the journey and building their vessel. They used metal boards, tree nails, and 55-gallon tanks to make the boat float.
“It was little by little. There is no money over there and everything is expensive,” said Del Toro, who added that he had to sell his house to pitch in.
Del Toro said that the boat he arrived on, named “Happy Boy,” left from Cardenas at about 6 p.m. on Dec. 30. They had hopes of landing in the United States by the new year. As one of two fishermen on the journey, he said he and the others were able to evade the Cuban Coast Guard in part because of their knowledge of the local waterways.
But after 12 hours the boat broke down. They waved at cruise ships sailing by and a plane flying above, but no one came to their rescue.
“We thought at one point that we were all going to die,” said Del Toro. “That we were going to disappear.”
They threw their batteries, fuel and other cargo overboard. Then, using a navigation phone app and the stars at night, they decided to row all the way to the United States.
“There was a moment where I thought we weren’t going to make it,” said Madelain Espinosa, 34, who left her 16-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son with family in Cuba.
One of the passengers, 32-year-old Eiquer Eliezer, encouraged the others during the journey not to lose hope.
“Each stroke, I would give them all strength, saying that each stroke I gave was for my children,” said Eliezer.
Early on Tuesday morning, they saw their first signs of land. They swam, waded, and walked through thick mud until they reached the U.S. coast.
After several days at sea, the group from Cardenas had no idea they were among hundreds of Cubans who had shown up on the shores of the Florida Keys in recent days. But they weren’t surprised.
“And many more are going to try it,” said one of the migrants.
The situation, said Miami immigration lawyer Willy Allen, speaks of “the desperation that exists among Cubans to leave, who have no hope that the economy or the Cuban government will improve in a way that helps them.”
The scale of the landings also suggests the Cuban Coast Guard may be turning a blind eye to the departures or that some of the trips might have involved speedboats that picked up the migrants, Allen said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not say if it was investigating some of the landings as human trafficking, nor if the Cuban Coast Guard had alerted them about the departing boats.
But Cubans are also reaching the U.S.-Mexico border in the tens of thousands. In November, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had 35,849 encounters with Cuban nationals nationwide, mainly at the border with Mexico, a figure higher than in any month in fiscal year 2022.
According to official data, almost 225,000 Cubans arrived in the United States in 2022, among the largest numbers since Fidel Castro took power in 1959, and one that has no end in sight, as few Cubans on the island believe their lives will improve under the current government.
“The economy is getting worse; there are many who argue that it is worse than the Special Period” — the economic crisis that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union — said Sebastián Arcos, associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. “The collapse of the national electrical system reinforces the feeling that this crisis has no bottom and will continue to get worse.”
Cuban authorities struggled to articulate solutions to the country’s pressing issues during recent year-end meetings of the Communist Party and the National Assembly.
Scattered in the officials’ long speeches were some depressing figures showing the real extent of the economic debacle in 2022: a meager 2 percent economic growth after the economy lost 11 percent of its gross domestic product in 2020; soaring inflation, 40 percent higher than the previous year; 939,000 acres of uncultivated farmland; 480 state enterprises declaring losses; $3.9 billion less in exports than in 2019; and the arrival of only 1.7 million tourists, compared with 4 million before the pandemic.
The holidays were particularly tough, with Cubans standing in long lines to buy a piece of chicken or a beer if they got lucky. Pork, a basic staple in holiday dishes, was so difficult to find that, mocking Díaz-Canel’s coined phrase “creative resistance,” Cubans on Twitter posted photos pretending to eat a pig sketched on a piece of paper.
Armando Sardiñas, 22, who was imprisoned for participating in the anti-government July 11 protests in 2021, posted one such meme. He, too, wants to leave the island and changed his Twitter handle to “Armandito el Balsero” — Little Armando, the rafter. He and other young Cubans now openly discuss their travel plans on social media and their belief that they have no choice but to flee.
“Everything comes downs to politics,” Sardiñas said. “Some emigrate for the economy; others are forced to flee for opposing the government since they are harassed, fined and even imprisoned as I was.”
He thinks the migration wave is so significant that it will eventually bring change to the country.
“The current exodus will lead the Cuban government to accept its failure as a government and of its communist ideology, and there will be a change,” he said before noting he doesn’t believe the political change would necessarily lead to a return of democracy in Cuba. “The people are already desperate; many fear for their future here in Cuba if the current government continues to rule this country.”
Díaz-Canel’s government’s lack of legitimacy is another factor in the current crisis, Arcos from FIU said.
“He has no charisma, and the population simply perceives him as a person who is incompetent, who is weak and who is also a puppet of others, specifically Raúl Castro,” Arcos said. “Without political legitimacy, there is no hope for the population. There is no chance that people will believe that the government is capable of fixing anything.”
That lack of hope for what Cuba has to offer drives many to risk their lives on a journey that could end in tragedy or a new life.
On Monday afternoon, another group of Cuban migrants in the Keys was waiting for U.S. immigration authorities to pick them up.
Asked if they had felt fear at sea, a woman in the group, Susana Gonzalez, replied: ”The desire to make it was stronger than the fear.”
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(El Nuevo Herald photojournalist Pedro Portal contributed to this story.)
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