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Friday, October 10, 2014

History Repeats Itself With Cuba’s Migrants

History Repeats Itself With Cuba's Migrants
By FRANCES ROBLES OCTOBER 9, 2014 3:00 PMOctober 9, 2014 3:00 pm

Frances Robles is a correspondent in Miami. Her article today, about the
influx of Cubans making their way to Miami on makeshift boats, is a
replay of something she saw two decades earlier.

I have been a journalist in Miami long enough that I have seen trends go
full circle.

I will never forget the Cuban rafter crisis of 1994, when thousands of
Cubans showed up on Florida's shore every day. I remember meeting
disheveled migrants, shirtless and shoeless, who gave me worthless Cuban
pesos as gifts. And I recall the pall that fell over a packed refugee
shelter near Key West when President Bill Clinton announced that from
then on, rafters were going to be turned back to Cuba.

Maybe that's why I was particularly sensitive to the recent spate of
news reports in South Florida about Cuban migrants arriving at the shore
or lost at sea. I kept noticing that the crafts they arrived on were
rickety old things made of car parts, something we have not seen here in
Miami in at least a decade. Smugglers using go-fast boats had long
cornered the market on Cuban immigration.

I found out that's no longer the case. The Coast Guard says the number
of Cubans trying to make it to the United States has doubled in the past
two years, and the number of homemade vessels they use has soared as well.

To find recent migrants, I went to the Church World Service, an
organization that helps Cuban arrivals with their transition. I met with
a group of seven Cubans who had just come to Florida a few days earlier.

They told me about how they spent months hoarding supplies for their
trip. One person would be in charge of finding fiberglass, another of
obtaining an old Toyota motor. I was startled to see that none of them
had family in Miami, which experts say is a growing trend in Cuban
migration.

The spike in immigration is reflective of a couple of things. For some
people, because of relaxed travel restrictions, it's just easier to
leave Cuba right now, which is why we are seeing so many more Cubans
showing up at the Texas border.

People like Osmany Batista, a 31-year-old X-ray technician I met at
Church World Service, said he and his friends came because they had
given up on new reforms enacted by Raúl Castro, which they felt only
benefited the elite.

People were pretty hopeful back in 2008 when he took office, which is
one reason there was a dip in immigration after he officially was named
president and announced reforms such as relaxed travel requirements and
the ability to speak more openly.

But Mr. Batista said some of the reforms actually wound up hurting. It
used to be illegal to sell your house, but people did it under the table
anyway. So many houses flooded the market when real estate sales became
legal that the home in which he lived, once worth $20,000, can now only
fetch $6,000.

"Why are so many people selling? To raise money for the trip to the
United States," he said.

He wants to start working right away.

"You will not find me on the corner playing dominoes," Mr. Batista said.

Something that surprised me was how the survivors of shipwrecks are not
cautioning others against making the treacherous trip. Yannio La O, a
wrestling coach from Manzanillo, in southern Cuba, saw 17 friends die
when they were lost at sea for 24 days last month.

He still thinks the voyage was a good idea.

"I didn't come here to own helicopters or 10 yachts or to have Marc
Anthony's fortune, but in Cuba, I had nothing," he told me. "With the
money I was making, I could not live. I am not saying I could not buy
clothes. I am saying I could not live."

Source: History Repeats Itself With Cuba's Migrants - NYTimes.com -
http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/10/09/history-repeats-itself-with-cubas-migrants/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

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