Holy Moly! Dear God, Deliver Us!
Holy Moly!
On Friday, July 19, the head of Cuba’s national statistics office told the island nation’s National Assembly that more than a million people left their homeland between 2022 and 2023.
He revealed for the first time that Cuba’s population went from 11,181,595 on December 21, 2021 to 10,055,968 two years later – a population figure similar to what it was in 1985. High mortality and low birth rates, as well as legal and surreptitious immigration – fleeing the island by whatever means possible – also figured into the ongoing population decline.
The independent, for-profit World Population Review doesn’t engage in polemics or fearmongering, but these numbers should have some folks shaking in their boots:
“Providing real-time statistics for diverse topics, the reference website Worldometer put the population of Cuba at 11,173,678 on July 16.”
The island nation’s population growth stopped in 2016, when it peaked at 11.34 million. If the decline continues, Cuba’s population will be 6.73 million at the end of the century – nearly half of what it was in 2020.
On October 24, 2023, Eric Bazail-Eimil, writing on Politico.com, reported:
“A record-breaking number of Cubans have arrived in the US. over the last two years, according to updated release by the U.S. Customs and Broder Patrol Agency.
“Slightly fewer than 425,000 Cubans were encountered at U.S. ports of entry in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, according to CBP, and 200,287 of those arrived in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September…
“Those figures have smashed records. More Cubans have come to the U.S. in the last two years than during the Freedom Flights, which saw 270,000 Cubans leave the island over a roughly eight-year period between 1965 and 1973. They are also greater than the combined numbers of Cubans who left during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 Balsero crisis. [Two Freedom Flights a day left Varadero, Cuba between December 1, 1965 and April 1973 – a total of 3048 flights bringing 297,318 refuge-migrants to the United States. Balseros were men, women and children who fled the island in (often homemade) primitive crafts or just anything that might float, hoping to reach Florida shores.]
The 1980 Mariel Boatlift became – and still is – a cauldron of misinformation, rumors and panic verging on terror that finds its echo in Republican denunciations of refugees gathering at the U.S. southern border in 2024 as criminals, just released from prisons and mental institutions. In a February 9, 2023 National Public Radio broadcast of “The Rumors,” Chip Brantley, a co-host and producer of the podcast White Lies, questioned Mark Hamm, a former prison warden from Arizona and currently Professor of Criminology at Indiana State University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Terrorism Center of John Jay College of Criminal Justice about the 1980 boatlift:
HAMM: “There were movements at the time to make the suggestion that Fidel Castro had opened up his prisons and filled those boats with his nation's hardened criminals and sent them to the United States as sort of a, here you go. Here's a present from Fidel to Jimmy Carter. So what I did was to take on that myth of the dangerous Mariel. I focused on the criminal backgrounds of these people, and here is what I found. I guess I ask for some indulgence because I'm going to go through some numbers here. I found that of that number, 120,000-plus [Marielitos, the Spanish descriptor ascribed by Miami-based Cubans and media to those who arrived in the boatlift], only 350 were found by the INS to have serious criminal backgrounds. That's fewer than one half of 1% of the total number of Cubans who came to the United States via the port of Mariel.”
BRANTLEY: “Hamm's research led him to conclude that only 350 of the Mariel refugees had a serious criminal background. In June of 1980, the director of the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement estimated that the number of Mariel Cubans who posed a, quote, ‘security risk’ was between 700 and 800. And he went on, calling the perception that the boatlift was filled with the worst of the worst, quote, ‘the big lie.’ A decade later, the U.S. State Department coordinator for Cuban affairs wrote in an internal memo that the boatlift brought, quote, ‘hundreds of criminals’ - not thousands, not 10,000, not 25,000, certainly not 40,000. Even the highest number we've heard from someone who seriously studied the data suggested that 3% of the boatlift population could have had a serious criminal background. That's around 3,500 people.”
HAMM: “Now, just to give some comparison, in the same year, 1980, approximately 6,000 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents committed a major index crime, according to uniform crime reports. So I look at this as a way to empirically debunk, destroy, eliminate, dispense with this notion of the dangerous Marielitos. Fidel Castro did not empty his prisons of the worst of the worst. That's apocryphal. You know, these were - by and large, these were working-class people. These were laborers and seamstresses. These were construction workers, welders, health care people. They weren't those vagrants, murderers. They weren't that. They weren't scum. But nonetheless, that is the image that has persevered. Thank you, Al Pacino. Thank you, Oliver Stone. Thank you, ‘Scarface.’"
NPR host Brantley offered further history-based not hysteria-based perspective:
“On May 1, 1980, just a couple of weeks into the boatlift, Fidel Castro delivered a May Day speech in Havana's Revolution Square before a crowd estimated at more than a million people. It's that same speech, actually, that appears at the beginning of ‘Scarface.’ The official title of the speech was ‘Our Criminals Are Leaving To Their Allies In The U.S.,’ but in the speech, Castro made no reference to anyone actually leaving from prison.
“Instead, he labeled the entire group of Mariel Cubans as lumpen, scum who lacked revolutionary blood who, quote, ‘do not have the heart to adapt to the effort of heroism required by revolution.’ Castro says, we do not want them. We do not need them. Later on in the speech, Castro does mention that the boatlift has attracted thugs and delinquents but, again, no reference to emptying out his prisons and sending convicted criminals on the boats. And for years, whenever he was asked about it, Castro denied that Cuba sent convicts directly from prisons to the U.S.”
On November 23, 2021, Reuters reported:
“Nicaragua announced on Monday that it is lifting the visa requirement for Cuban nationals in a move which could make it easier for Cubans to migrate north toward the United States.”
Less than six months later, on May 3, 2022, The New York Times’ Maria Abi-Habib and Eileen Sullivan reported:
“Cuban migrants are arriving to the United States in the highest numbers seen in four decades, with about 150,000 expected to arrive this year, according to senior American officials, as the economic and political situation on the island grows more desperate.
“For decades, Cubans trying to flee repression, food insecurity and economic devastation boarded rickety boats, risking their lives to get to American shores.
“Now they are coming in record numbers, but this time on foot, their flight aided by Nicaragua, which dropped visa requirements late last year for Cubans, giving them a toehold in Central America to journey overland through Mexico to the United States.”
In June-July 2024, the United States and Panama agreed to a program that will close the deathtrap Darien Gap between Columbia and Panama, described by Panama’s new president Jose Raul Mulino as a “humanitarian and environmental crisis.” In 2023, a record 520,000 migrants risked their lives, often at the hands of smugglers, to traverse this dense jungle border. Under this agreement, the US will “cover” the cost of repatriating migrants who enter Panama illegally on their way to the U.S.
With the Darien Gap closed, Nicaragua becomes the primary waystation for Cubans and others attempting to reach the United States. Writing on the Freedomhouse.org website on March 14, 2024, Research Associate Grady Vaughan reported there were “more than 200,000 Nicaraguan asylum seekers and refugees” in Costa Rica. In late November 2021, Nicaragua announced that it was lifting the visa requirement for Cuban nationals in a move that could make it easier for Cubans to migrate north toward the U.S.
Scholars and others who follow the politics of Cuba suspect this might be a move by the two regimes to decompress the unrest that finally exploded on July 11, 2021, when thousands of Cubans spontaneously took to the streets in dozens of cities to demand a change in living conditions – including food shortages, constant blackouts and lack of electricity and the restrictive measures taken by the government to “control” COVID-19.
Nicaragua is the only Central American country that does not require visas from citizens of a number of troubled nations in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia – including Haiti, Senegal, Mauritania and former Soviet republics. “Nicaragua has a pivotal role in how to engage in regional routes through Central America,” Ariel Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, told The World in January 2024.
On October 20, 2023, former Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell told CBS News Miami,
“We have more than 450,000 Nicaraguans now that are living in the United States that are in limbo, that cannot go back to a country that its civil society cannot speak up without the fear of being jailed."
It is impossible to determine how many of those Nicaraguans are undocumented and living in the shadows. It is impossible to determine how long they have been in the U.S., whether they have families, including kids playing on the same football and baseball teams as their classmates but still living in fear that they or their parents might be caught and expelled to a country they do not know and in which their parents would be imprisoned.
Finally, let’s address the old saw, the cliché about undocumented immigrant crime rates. Northwestern University economist Elisa Jacome provides the first historical comparison of incarceration rates of immigrants to U.S.-born citizens. Using incarceration rates as a proxy for crime, the Northwestern team analyzed 150 years of U.S. Census data and found immigrants consistently less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S.
Moreover, the Northwestern researchers found, beginning in 1960, the incarceration gap widened such that immigrants today are less likely to be incarcerated than those born in the U.S. “Our study shows that since 1870, it has never been the case that immigrants as a group have been more incarcerated than the U.S.-born,” noted Jacome, an assistant professor of economics and a faculty fellow with the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern.
It's simple: Figures don’t lie but liars will site unverified and unverifiable figures to dress up their prejudices and unfounded political arguments. (news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/03/immigrants-are-significantly-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-than-the-us-born)
To our Cuban (including Marietitos and balseros), Nicaraguan and Venezuelan friends and neighbors who now celebrate Thanksgiving with deep fried turkeys and lechon, whose children are graduates of our community colleges and topnotch universities and serve their new homeland in our nation’s military services and as teachers, doctors, nurses, and in so many other ways:
Don’t be fooled by the man who asks for your votes in November and then says your aunts and uncles, cousins and children desperate to breath the free air of the United State are murders and rapists and “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
Consider what he said in a Fox News interview broadcast on March 17, 2024 [Ironically, St. Patrick’s Day – a big celebration by the descendants of Irish immigrants.]:
“[O]ur country is being poisoned…
“We can be nice about it, we can talk about, ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct… But we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers, people with sentences that the rest of their lives they’re going to spend in some jail in some country that many people have never even heard of. They’re all being released into our country.
“These are people at the highest level of crime, and then you have mental institutions and insane asylums — I always say the difference is one is ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ you know, it’s a mental institution on steroids, OK? — and those mental institutions and insane asylums are being emptied out into the United States, and then you have terrorists pouring in at levels we have never seen before.”
Holy Moly!
Like Frankenstein’s Monster, the hatred and ignorance of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift era “is alive” and spewing vitriol and fear of “the Other” to get votes.
Holy Moly!
Dear God, deliver us!