Desperate to leave Cuba and start over in the United States, people are making the perilous journey in greater numbers across the Florida Straits. South Florida authorities say the steady stream of arrivals has put stress on local law enforcement and rescuers, who are often dispatched when migrant boaters are stopped.
For the people arriving, the stress involves a dangerous trip that often ends with them being sent back to Cuba on a Coast Guard cutter if they don’t make it to shore — or taken into custody by the U.S. for processing if they manage to make it to land.
Already dealing with the largest escalation of Cuban migration in nearly a decade, Border Patrol and Coast Guard crews patrolling South Florida and the Keys report that the number of people leaving Cuba for a trip across the Straits so far in October is higher than average.
Since the beginning of October, the Border Patrol says it’s taken into custody almost 500 people from Cuba who’ve arrived in the Florida Keys, mostly aboard homemade, unseaworthy, boats. The U.S. Coast Guard said it’s intercepted 748 Cuban migrants along the Florida Straits.
That’s almost as many people as the agency stopped at sea between Cuba and South Florida during an entire 12-month period between September 2020 and October 2021.
The steady arrival of migrants to the Florida Keys is draining federal resources, state and local law enforcement, and even paramedics, who are often the first to get to a landing.
“We are seeing migrant landings almost everyday and some days multiple landings,” Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay said. The sheriff’s office “is so busy doing our job, but yet we are responding to almost every landing to ensure public safety. On scene takes up a lot of time and resources from my agency. Many times landings require multiple deputies to respond, taking us away from directive patrols.”
For state wildlife police, the weekly arrival of migrant boats has made its already tedious job of taking inventory of derelict vessels for removal even more difficult.
“It’s a multi-agency process when one of these things comes to shore,” said Officer Jason Rafter of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
On land, federal Border Patrol agents have been steadily busy responding to arrivals up and down the Keys — from the Marquesas to Key Largo — over the past two weeks.
“Agents have responded to 10 migrant landings in the past 24 hours,” Adam Hoffner, division chief for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Miami operations, said Tuesday.
Sheriff Ramsay said the federal government is not staffing the Keys with enough Border Patrol agents, “thus putting the burden on local and state resources with no reimbursement.”
“These continued redirections of MCSO resources delay response to other calls for service and delay backup for other officers on priority calls,” Ramsay told the Miami Herald/FLKeysnews.com. “The government does not have an appropriate plan or response to immigration.”
The Border Patrol reported Wednesday night that another 80 Cubans on four boats arrived in the Marquesas, a group of uninhabited islands about 20 miles west of Key West.
What’s behind the increase?
Sebastián Arcos, associate director of Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute, cites many reasons for the exodus, but all rooted in what he surmises is a totalitarian regime in its waning days.
“Deepening economic misery, lack of hope, and widening repression has pushed many more Cubans to flee,” Arcos said.
Ramón Saúl Sánchez, leader of the Cuban exile group Democracy Movement, agrees.
“The system is at the end of its rope. The infrastructure is so bad, they can’t provide the basic services for the people. The exodus is only going to increase, unfortunately,” Saúl Sánchez said.
He said “unfortunately” because the journey across the Straits is dangerous, and at times, deadly.
Seven Cubans died after their vessel sank just off Key West late in late September as the ocean raged from Hurricane Ian. From September 2021 and this month, the Coast Guard confirmed 65 people have died at sea migrating to South Florida, said spokeswoman Petty Officer Nicole Groll.
“The rafter issue is so difficult and so complex,” Saúl Sánchez said. “People try again and try again until they die.”
Cuba is going through the worst crisis since Fidel Castro took power in 1959, Arcos said, contending it’s “not just another economic slump, but the alignment of several storms hitting simultaneously.”
And leaders have become more hard line, Arcos said.
“There are no new or bold ideas, only more repression. ... Other totalitarian regimes that reached this stage, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania, collapsed, some peacefully, others violently,” he said.
The communist nation’s economy is in tatters because of lack of real reform, “chronic disinvestment” in the country’s infrastructure, the COVID-19 pandemic and now the collapse of the electrical system, Arcos said.
“This affects most Cubans everywhere more directly than anything else,” he said. “People are in the streets every day now demanding electricity and freedom, despite the brutal repression.”
Economic reforms started by Raul Castro in 2010 “were timid and shallow” and paused when the Obama administration began its initiative to thaw diplomatic relations with the Cuban government in 2015, according to Arcos.
No faith in the government
Cuban people more than ever are losing faith in their government’s ability to improve their lives, Arcos said.
Symptoms of national discontent became impossible to ignore when thousands of people took to the streets nationwide on July 11, 2021, to protest the Cuban government. Arcos said that throughout most of the regime’s history, its repression “touched a relatively small sector of society, those who dared to openly confront the regime politically.”
“For the rest, the catastrophic costs of political opposition vastly surpassed the miseries of daily life, so they kept quiet,” Arcos said.
With a larger segment of society taking a stand, the government has been less selective lately with its punitive measures, he said.
“Because the demonstrations were openly anti-regime and extended over the entire island, the repression this time touched many who had never experienced it directly before,” Arcos said.
Is ‘wet-foot’ back?
During past Cuban migrant escalations like the Mariel boat lift in 1980 and the 1994 “rafter’s crisis,” the government released people it considered trouble and force concessions from the United States.
It did so again last November when the Ortega administration began allowing Cubans to enter Nicaragua without a visa, providing them a shorter and safer land passage to the U.S. southern border — a decision critics of Cuba’s government said was done as an act of cooperation with President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Because of the Biden administration’s more relaxed policy on the southern border compared to the Trump administration’s, most of the Cubans arriving there have been able to stay. Meanwhile, until recently, most encountered on land by the Border Patrol in South Florida have been sent back.
Over the last year and a half, more than 200,000 Cubans have entered the U.S., mostly through the southern border, but also thousands by sea across the Florida Straits. Since the Obama administration ended the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy in early 2017, all Cubans attempting to reach South Florida without a visa are supposed to be sent back — whether they make it to land or are stopped by the Coast Guard in the water on the way.
The wet-foot policy allowed those who touched land above the high-water mark to stay and apply for residency after a year, and mandated those intercepted at sea be returned to Cuba.
But Arcos said as a way to deal with the overwhelming volume of people arriving to the U.S. from the island, “Mr. Biden has in fact, very quietly, re-established the parole at the border and the (wet-foot, dry-foot) policy in the Florida Straits.”
Options running out
Federal officials did not respond to requests for comment on the state of wet-foot, dry-foot policy. But between the pandemic, the constant arrivals of migrants and the Cuban government’s refusal to accept flights from the U.S. returning migrants, only a fraction of those who make it to land are immediately repatriated — compared to the thousands returned so far this year who were caught at sea, according to a federal law immigration official.
Most interdicted at sea are soon put onboard a Coast Guard cutter and taken back to Cuba. The agency returned almost all of the 6,182 people it stopped along the Straits last fiscal year — September 2021 to this October.
The majority who reach land are placed in the official removal process in which they are released, usually to family, and must report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. It’s similar to parole, and years go by before someone is actually taken back to Cuba, Arcos said.
Department of Homeland Security “is not providing clear data, so the information we have is based on news feeds and anecdotal information,” he said. “So far it looks like those intersected at sea are being returned, while those making landfall stay.”
With the political unrest within Cuba showing no signs of abatement and the economic conditions forecast only to become grimmer, Arcos said he doesn’t see how the U.S. will slow the flow of so many of its people — increasingly desperate to find better lives — with the tools it’s used up to now.
“Granting visas in Havana will only slow it down some, but there are many more Cubans who want to flee now than before,” Arcos said. “Lifting all sanctions will not work, because Cubans now understand the source of the problem is in Havana, not in Washington. A different approach is necessary.”
