Cuba demands end to hostile U.S. immigration policies

BY SETH GALINSKY

The Cuban government is rallying broad support for its policies on the right of its citizens to travel abroad, against Washington’s “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy that encourages illegal immigration from the island, and in solidarity with opposition to U.S. imperialism’s discriminatory treatment of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington’s policies, aimed at undermining the revolution, have left several thousand Cubans stranded in Costa Rica with the hope of emigrating illegally to the United States.

“These citizens are victims of the politicization of the migration issue on the part of the United States government,” Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Relations said Nov. 18.

Washington’s policy — “the only one of its kind in the world,” the ministry notes — admits Cubans “immediately and automatically, regardless of the route or means used, even if they arrive in an illegal manner to U.S. territory.” This is rationalized by the lie that Cubans are fleeing a dictatorship that bars them from leaving the island.

In fact, in January 2013 the Cuban government made it easier for the island’s citizens to travel abroad. Since then almost a half million Cubans have visited the U.S., Mexico, Panama, Spain, Ecuador and elsewhere to visit family or work.

Despite the recent re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba, the daily Granma said Nov. 19, “The United States keeps alive the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966; the wet-foot, dry-foot policies established by the government of Bill Clinton in 1995; and the so-called ‘Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program,’ put in place by George W. Bush in 2006” that “complement the economic, financial and commercial blockade” of the island.

The ‘American dream’

The number of Cubans “entering the United States started to take off since Dec. 17 last year, when Washington and Havana announced their intention of re-establishing bilateral relations,” Granma said Nov. 20. Some Cubans worried that the change in relations could mean the end of the special treatment of Cubans and that the “door to the ‘American dream’ might be closed.”

As a result, some 27,000 Cubans have crossed the Mexican border into the U.S. in the first nine months of this year, 78 percent more than the same period in 2014. The number arriving in the U.S. by sea doubled to 7,000.

More than 1,000 Cuban emigrants arrived in Costa Rica at the beginning of November, after using legal travel papers to visit other Latin American countries. Many passed through Ecuador, which at the time didn’t require visas. The Ecuadorean government began requiring Cubans to apply for 90-day visas Dec. 1.

The Costa Rican government granted transit visas to Cubans arriving from Ecuador and other countries and proposed a “humanitarian corridor” from Nicaragua through Mexico to the U.S. border. In mid-November the Nicaraguan government refused entry to some 2,000 Cubans.

They are sleeping in churches, sports fields, and improvised shelters and receiving food and aid from local residents and aid organizations. According to the Costa Rican daily La Nación, the Cubans are chefs, bricklayers, engineers and many other professionals, including a handful of doctors. Many paid smugglers more than $15,000 to make the trip. There are now nearly 4,000 Cubans at the border with Nicaragua.

Member nations of the Central American Integration System invited representatives of Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico to attend their Nov. 24 meeting in El Salvador to discuss a solution to the problem.

Delegates agreed that Washington’s policies discriminate against immigrants from throughout Latin American and the Caribbean while offering special inducements to get Cubans to leave. Rosario Murillo, coordinator of Nicaragua’s Council of Communication and Citizenship, said that Central American governments should demand “humanitarian treatment of our migrants, who they keep labeling as second and third class.”

The meeting decided unanimously to call on Washington to end its damaging policies toward Cuba and underlined each government’s right to decide its own immigration policies and whether or not it would grant visas to the Cuban emigrants.

Cuban medical personnel

U.S. policy toward Cuban health workers aims to entice as many as possible to abandon the island or desert its internationalist health missions, dangling the possibility of getting rich from the skills they learned in Cuba.

In the first years after workers and farmers led by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959, half of Cuban doctors, encouraged by Washington, left for the U.S, decimating the island’s inadequate health system. The revolution responded by building medical schools and training thousands of new doctors.

Cuba has sent health care workers to aid people around the world, including to help lead the fight against Ebola in Africa last year, and provides scholarships for thousands of students from other countries to be trained as doctors in Cuba.

“The Cuban health system is universal, free and accessible to the entire population in spite of the economic limitations that we face, that are aggravated” by the U.S. embargo, a Dec. 1 Cuban government statement points out.

While the overwhelming majority of doctors reject the U.S. bribery attempt — even though Cuban doctors earn less than $100 a month, far less than they could make in the U.S. — enough have answered the siren call to impact Cuba’s health care system. The Cuban government revised the travel regulations for doctors and other health workers starting Dec. 7.

“This does not mean that medical specialists can’t travel or live abroad,” the statement said. “But that their departure date from the country will be analyzed” to “allow for organization of the workforce to guarantee the accessibility, quality, continuity and stability of the functioning of health services.”

The Cuban government said all those on the Nicaraguan border are welcome to return. In addition, health workers, including those who have abandoned internationalist missions, would be welcomed back to their former job or an equivalent one.

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