Cuba detente creates migrant crisis in Mexico

Cuba detente creates migrant crisis in Mexico
Amy Stillman in Tapachula, southern Mexico

"They have to move faster, there are a lot of people waiting here
without adequate living conditions," said Lionel Hernández, 28, huddling
with other Cuban migrants in the doorway of the Tapachula migration
office in southern Mexico to escape the pounding rain.
A young woman from Havana looked in dismay at a soggy stack of papers.
She had scrawled down the names of hundreds of fellow Cubans gathered
outside the Tapachula facility to help Mexican migration authorities
process their requests for transit visas. "There are more than 170
Cubans here now, but more keep arriving," she said, sighing. "It is
impossible to count them all."
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As Cuban president Raúl Castro met Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto
on Friday to strengthen trade ties and smooth over past tensions, a new
political problem was mounting in the south with the huge influx of
Cubans flowing across Mexico's border.
Almost 6,500 Cubans arrived in Mexico en route to the US in the first
nine months of the year, more than five times as many as a year earlier,
according to official statistics. And the numbers have continued to
surge. Mexico's national migration institute, INM, said that more than
8,000 Cubans have been processed in Mexico so far this year. The
national human rights commission, CNDH, noted that over a thousand
Cubans turned up at the Tapachula migratory station in the space of one
week in October, overwhelming migration officials' capacity to attend them.
Many Cubans have spent days sleeping rough outside the Tapachula station
awaiting processing. Local human rights groups have begun to open their
doors to them amid the growing humanitarian crisis.
The Cubans are responding to rumours on the island that the US will soon
remove their right to automatic asylum upon reaching American soil. The
1966 Cuban Adjustment Act deems Cubans fleeing the island to be
political refugees, a product of the Cold War that sits uncomfortably
with the recent restoration of diplomatic ties between Havana and
Washington. The law has already been amended once before, when the US
implemented the "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy in 1995, enabling Cuban
migrants caught at sea to be repatriated.
The Cubans, meanwhile, are sceptical that the gradual lifting of
economic restrictions will improve their lives. Political freedom and
economic opportunity, they say, are still lacking on the island.
"The [trade] opening is good, but it is not enough to change the culture
in Cuba," said López, 50, who had arrived at the Tapachula migration
office with his wife and two grown children after a gruelling,
month-long slog through South and Central America.
López, who asked to be identified with a pseudonym, had earned the
equivalent of $25 a month working for the government in Havana. Fearing
that the US law might change, in September he and his family made plans
to join their relatives in North Dakota, selling their car and
scrounging all of their savings to afford the trip, which cost $2,500
per person. Like so many Cubans, López hopes to find better-paid work in
the US. "America is a different democracy, it is a different
opportunity," he said.

While trade barriers in Cuba are slowly being chipped away, the US has
yet to lift its 53-year old economic embargo on the Communist-run
country, and political reform will take time. Moreover, few people
expect Cuba to become a market economy without going through some
economic turbulence.
"Cubans understand that there is a good chance things will get worse
before they get better," said Duncan Wood of the Woodrow Wilson Center
in Washington. "Changing the economic culture of the country is going to
be enormously disruptive, so I am not surprised that the number of Cuban
migrants in Mexico is up."
The lifting of travel restrictions in Cuba in 2013 has facilitated this
process, with many countries along the route now providing Cubans with
transit visas. Also, increasing numbers of Cubans are choosing the
circuitous trek across eight borders because it is less risky and
cheaper than sailing directly to Miami. Cubans in Mexico told the
Financial Times that the journey overland is half the price of the
perilous sea voyage along the Florida Straits, which reaches $10,000.
Mexican immigration officials warn that the numbers arriving across the
border continue to climb. Mario Madrazo Ubach, director-general of
immigration control at the INM, said: "If 300 people show up in the same
moment at the same station, what can we do, build a bigger station?"

Source: Cuba detente creates migrant crisis in Mexico - FT.com -
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/77580a0c-84b3-11e5-8e80-1574112844fd.html#slide0