CUBA: Emigrants Lose Their Homes, Their Country - 'And We Lose Them'

By: Dalia Acosta (IPS)


HAVANA - Marlene Guzmán and her uncles, aunts, siblings and cousins used to meet every Sunday at her grandmother's house in Havana. But the reunions are much smaller now, because so much of her family has emigrated to Miami since 1990.

''It's not that we all supported the revolution, but we liked living in Cuba,'' the 41-year-old Guzmán, a researcher in a scientific institute, told IPS. ''I have four uncles and aunts, and 12 cousins on my father's side, and we used to get together every Sunday at grandmother's.''

After the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, only one of Guzmán's uncles and his wife, as well as two cousins, had decided to leave the country and settle in the United States by the late 1960s. The rest of Guzmán's family remained in Cuba until ''everything changed all of a sudden'' in 1990, she said.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and east European socialist bloc, with which Cuba had a special trade and aid relationship, spawned a devastating economic crisis in this Caribbean island nation.

''I think it was the economic crisis, but other things as well...people get tired of working so hard with no hopes of improving their living standards even slightly. In my family it was a craze -- everybody started thinking about leaving,'' said Guzmán.

The decision to try to leave Cuba arises from a multiplicity of factors, ranging from economic and political reasons to the natural need for a family to be reunited.

Each time the Cuban economy suffers a new slowdown, the peso takes a steep dive, incomes slump, or the government implements additional restrictions on private initiative and free enterprise, the spectre of a new exodus -- like the August 1994 rafters' crisis -- rears its head again in this socialist island nation of 11.2 million.

According to the Centre of Studies on International Migration at the University of Havana, between 490,000 and 700,000 people were interested in leaving Cuba in the late 1990s.

The Cuban population shrank by 30,000 people in 2000 and 33,000 the following year due to emigration, as indicated by the 2001 statistical yearbook, produced by the National Office of Statistics.

Alberto Guzmán, Marlene's uncle and the first member of the family to move to Miami, Florida, had to work wonders in order to find a way to help all of the relatives who, starting in 1990, began to turn to him with the idea of moving to that mecca of the Cuban exile community.

Thirteen years later, Guzmán's brother and eight of her cousins are living in the United States. Only one of them emigrated in a manner that could be considered legal, as he left Cuba with a residency permit for Venezuela, and from there ''took the big leap.''

''He got a scholarship for a U.S. university, and a year later he applied for residency,'' she explained.

Another cousin and her husband travelled to Germany on an invitation they were sent by friends. On the way back, they flew to the Dominican Republic instead of Cuba, where they boarded a boat carrying undocumented immigrants, which almost capsized on its way to the United States, said Guzmán.

Another cousin, after failing in several attempts to leave Cuba by boat, bought a plane ticket to Moscow but stayed in Madrid, where the flight had a layover. He spent five months in Spain before he was able to travel to Miami.

A third cousin paid 7,000 dollars to marry a woman who had won a visa in the lottery through which the United States grants visas to a certain number of Cubans every year. He was thus able to rejoin his real girlfriend, who had left Cuba for Florida two years earlier, also through a ''marriage of convenience.''

Three other cousins made it across the U.S. border from Mexico, and were detained for a few days, just long enough to pass the medical exams and prove that they were from Cuba.

Guzmán said ''it would be a different story if the United States treated Cuba like any other Latin American country.''

The U.S. Cuba Adjustment Act, which was passed in 1966, guarantees political asylum to anyone from Cuba who sets foot on U.S. territory, by sea or land, whether they have entered the country legally or illegally.

''In my family there are no criminals, but most of my cousins do not have much education. I don't think any of them would have received a permanent residency visa through the legal channels,'' Guzmán noted.

She added that ''it is lucky that we don't have to regret even a single death,'' although ''my brother gave us several frights, because he wouldn't stop talking about making a raft and setting out to sea'' to brave the risky 90-mile crossing between Cuba and Florida.

Experts have estimated that in the early 1990s, for every Cuban who made it to southern Florida on a raft or other precarious watercraft, another died in the attempt. However, there are no reliable statistics on the loss of human lives.

Havana holds Washington responsible for the deaths of rafters, complaining that the welcome mat and privileges it extends to Cubans encourage illegal departures.

But the U.S. government argues that the real problem does not lie in the continued existence of the Cuba Adjustment Act, but in the fact that internal conditions in Cuba drive people to leave.

The accusations are flung back and forth each time the two countries find themselves embroiled in a new upsurge of tensions, with the added dimension that Washington sees a massive exodus -- like the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans set out for the United States, or the 1994 rafters crisis, when more than 30,000 did so -- as a possible threat to U.S. national security.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque accused Washington this month of ''deliberately'' trying to provoke a migration crisis by slowing down the pace of granting visas to Cubans wishing to emigrate, during the current fiscal year.

Cuban President Fidel Castro blamed a spate of air and watercraft hijackings over the past two months, which culminated in the Apr. 11 execution of three ferryboat hijackers, on a ''conspiracy'' by Washington aimed at justifying an eventual military attack on Cuba.

The death penalty was applied to three of the eight people who commandeered a ferryboat on Apr. 2 and ordered it to sail to Florida. The hijackers held the passengers hostage, and threatened to kill them if their demands were not met.

A high-level U.S. State Department official said in Havana that the slow pace of processing visa applications was due to an ''anti- terrorism filter'' that his country was applying to nationals from Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Sudan.

But the slowdown does not mean the U.S. government is trying to cause an immigration crisis, he added, while confirming his country's agreement to issue a minimum of 20,000 visas a year to Cuban nationals.

U.S. border patrol sources say a total of 6,482 undocumented Cubans made it into the United States in the 1999 to 2001 fiscal years (October to September), and 1,335 in 2002.

A study carried out in September 2001 found that nearly 70 percent of Cubans under the age of 60 and 30 percent of those over 60 who legally visited the United States did not return to Cuba.

''I would have been able to go, but I like living here,'' said Guzmán. ''Unlike most of the people in my family, I have travelled, I have seen other countries, and I like mine.''

Perhaps the situation would have been different, she admitted, if she knew she could travel to the United States and live there with her family for a while, and return to Cuba whenever she wished. But the four-decade embargo and hostile relations between the two countries continue to guarantee that leaving Cuba is a one- way street.

Guzmán said the situation is heartbreaking -- for those who leave as well as those who stay. ''Even though they try to cling tightly to family and friends, they lose their country, their home, their customs. And we lose them.''