14ymedio, Madrid, 19 April 2022 — The Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, which brings together several opposition organizations from inside and outside the island, expressed this Tuesday its rejection of the start of talks on the migration crisis between the United States government and the “communist tyranny.”
The assembly recalled that “the Castro regime is a human rights violator that has committed and continues to commit crimes against humanity” and therefore “these negotiations send a message of weakness and not of support to the Cuban people, at a time when the struggle for freedom is progressively growing in the country.”
The group of opposition organizations noted that after the protests in Cuba on July 11, 2021, and the series of trials and mass convictions of the protesters that they have provoked, the exchange between officials from both countries “constitutes a true gift to a dictatorship which should be punished for its oppression of the Cuban people.”
The Assembly of the Cuban Resistance also pointed out that the increase in the arrival of Cubans in the United States “is not at all surprising,” since it is the result of “migratory pressure that the regime has exerted against the American government in recent months,” as an “escape valve” against the “rebelliousness of the Cuban people.”
“Migration to the United States, particularly under Democratic administrations, has been used so many times by the Castro dictatorship as a political weapon that the maneuver is sadly predictable,” the group said in a statement.
The reaction of the Cuban exile occurs after the meeting between high-level officials from the United States and Cuba was confirmed this Thursday in Washington to discuss the migration crisis. As reported on Monday by Reuters, citing sources familiar with the matter, the Cuban delegation will be headed by the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, and is expected to meet with representatives of the US State Department as well as other administrative agencies.
The British agency assures that Washington wants Havana to accept more deportees, something that the Díaz-Canel government stopped doing last October, as reported this April by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE).
“Cubans currently occupy the second largest group arriving at the southwestern border of the United States,” a State Department spokesman told Reuters, saying they have seen “a significant increase in irregular Cuban immigrants to the United States, both by land and by sea”.
At the end of November, the island’s regime agreed with President Daniel Ortega on a “free visa” for Cubans traveling to Nicaragua, which from that very moment became the springboard for a river of emigrants seeking to reach the United States. by land route.
Until the end of February, and since the beginning of the US fiscal year –which begins on October 1 – more than 46,000 Cubans entered the US , a figure that exceeded the 35,000 of the so-called “Rafter Crisis” of 1994.
Some estimates predict that by September 30, 2022, around 150,000 citizens of the island will have entered the Unted States, more than the 125,000 who entered this territory by sea during the exodus of the Mariel Boatlift, between April and October 1980. The number of Cubans detained on the border between the United States and Mexico soared to 16,531 in February, the highest total recorded in a single month, according to data from the United States Customs and Border Protection Office, the British agency notes.
Several US politicians have not hesitated to hold Havana responsible for the current migratory exodus and some of them, such as Republican Congressman Marco Rubio, have even branded it an “act of war.”
Thursday’s meeting will be the first meeting at the highest level since Joe Biden was inaugurated as president last year. Bilateral relations have been marked by the Cuban regime’s repression of the protests on July 11, which caused Washington to establish sanctions against officials and repressors on the island.
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