Cubanos migrantes en Costa Rica: Preguntas ausentes. Por Iroel Sánchez
Cuban Migrants in Costa Rica: Missing questions.
By Iroel Sánchez
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Reading the flood of publications on the Cuban migrants caught between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, trying to reach the United States to invoke the Cuban Adjustment Act, some questions are missing:
In the case of people who put themselves into the hands of human-trafficking mafias, pay thousands of dollars to be transferred from Ecuador through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico to finally cross the US border and benefit from the Cold War Act that automatically privileges as political refugees those who come from Cuba:
Is it by chance that what was a semi-clandestine process ,and often invisible, has been transformed into a column of hundreds of persons, right between two countries with a border conflict, just weeks before the president of one of the countries visits Cuba?
Is there a relationship between the fact that the same media that boycotts the process of normalization of relations between Cuba and the US and for decades has promoted the illegal emigration, has recently undertaken a campaign for the elimination of the Act that grants unique immigration privileges to the Cubans who –on becoming US citizens with the right to vote and increasingly aspiring to a normal relationship with their country of origin– undermine the electoral foundation that allows the handlers of such media to maintain political control in South Florida?
Is the solution to the crisis a boat that would move these people from Costa Rica to Honduras —as the Miami media suggests— encouraging permissiveness for the mafias who profit from human flesh to continue making money, encouraging drug trafficking, and taking innocent lives?
Isn’t it safer, more legal and organized –instead of continuing to risk the lives of these people and fueling human trafficking, and the gangs that thrive on it, in the countries that they must still travel through– that this boat transfer the victims of the crisis directly to the place they want to arrive at: the US?
Doesn’t the US –after more than five decades encouraging illegal emigration by Cubans as a propaganda weapon against the island— have any responsibility in this crisis? Shouldn’t Washington increase the number of visas granted in its embassy in Havana in a similar number to that of the Cubans they admit when they arrive illegally at US borders; and then end its policy of “wet feet, dry feet” which is the main incentive for a crisis like this?
Why, with the exception of the note from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has no media, including some who proclaim themselves “alternative” been challenging the US government on this issue?
