On the morning of July 11, 2021, a group of a few dozen people began marching through the streets of San Antonio de los Baños, a small city south of Havana. As they made their way toward the city center, more and more people joined the parade, some shouting anti-government slogans such as “We are not afraid!” “Freedom!” and “Down with the dictatorship!”
By the time 27-year-old Yoan de la Cruz joined the march, grabbed his cellphone, and turned on Facebook Live, the crowd had swelled to hundreds and then thousands.
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De la Cruz’s video was soon uploaded to YouTube. It shows hundreds of masked residents clapping and chanting anti-government slogans. Their demands ranged from the practical, such as better access to medicine and food and an end to power outages and COVID-19 restrictions, to the political, such as greater civil liberties and an end to the Castro regime.
One chant, “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and Life”), an inversion of the Cuban Revolution motto “Patria o Muerte” (“Homeland or Death”), was the name of a hit reggaeton song that had been released a few months earlier. It would become an anthem of the protests, which soon became known simply as 11J.
What’s most striking about de la Cruz’s video is how unorganized the protest looks. Chants and car and moped horns can be heard. But for the most part, people are just milling around looking like they don’t know quite what to do.
That’s understandable. In America, political protests are a daily occurrence and constitutionally protected. But Cubans almost never demonstrate against their government. Typically, the only authorized gatherings are Communist Party events. Merely participating in an anti-government protest can invite job loss, arrest, and a lengthy prison sentence.
Soon, more protests erupted and spread throughout Cuba. By week’s end, thousands of Cubans had demonstrated in more than 60 cities and towns across the island. It was the largest anti-government protest since the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
Most strikingly, few of the participants were political activists. The vast majority were everyday citizens fed up with their lives and finally willing to denounce the government. In response, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel appeared on state TV and told Cuban citizens to “defend” the revolution by doing “battle” with the protesters.
“We call on all revolutionaries across the country, all communists, to take to the streets,” he said. “The order for combat has been given.”
Mobile internet service was cut off across the island, and neighborhoods were swarmed with heavily armed, black-clad troops from the Ministry of the Interior in what to many looked more like a military fighting back an insurgency than a police force trying to maintain order.
The streets were packed when Ariadna Mena Rubio joined the protests in Havana on July 11.
“The first thing I saw was agents, state security, with cameras,” she said, adding that she knew they were state security because their cameras looked expensive — well beyond the means of most Cuban citizens. “There were many, many cameras of different sizes and of different models, and they were focusing on getting shots of people’s faces.”
People were shouting, “Homeland and life!” “Freedom!” and “Medicine!” She saw police beating protesters, mostly young men.
Mena observed three buses arriving and unloading young men carrying sticks and bricks. They’d been sent by the government, she realized, answering Diaz-Canel’s call to do battle with the protesters. They shouted “I am Fidel!” and “Canel, my friend, the people are with you!”
Mena had to be careful. In the past, her pro-democracy activism had gotten her arrested and fired from her job, and one of her daughters had been forced out of ballet school without explanation.
Across the island, some 1,700 people were jailed for participating in the 11J protests. About half of them were still in prison a year later. A small number of protesters had been violent, hurling rocks at state police or, in a couple of cases, overturning cars. But the vast majority were arrested on charges of nebulous crimes such as “defamation,” “illicit protest,” “disobedience,” or “propagation of an epidemic” and given prison sentences of up to 30 years.
De la Cruz received a six-year sentence merely for livestreaming the protests. (He was released after less than a year.)
The government’s brutal 11J crackdown was the moment Mena realized she had to leave Cuba. It was both an obvious decision and an agonizingly difficult one.
“It was the darkest day of my life,” she later recounted about the day she left her daughters in Havana. “When the plane was taking off, I felt as if my soul was being emptied, as if they were removing my womb by hand.”
**
Imagine if the entire population of Virginia, all 8.6 million residents, suddenly decamped for Mexico. Better yet, imagine if half the students enrolled in America’s 4,000 colleges and universities suddenly fled the country for better opportunities elsewhere. It would be a huge deal and a huge problem.
That, proportionally, is what happened in Cuba last year. More than 300,000 Cubans, or 2.6% of the nation’s population of more than 11 million, fled in 2022 alone, most arriving at the U.S. border.
But the real problem for Cuba isn’t the number of people leaving but the type. Those escaping that communist paradise are the young, the healthy, the enterprising — the ones with the wherewithal, the smarts, and the ambition to make better lives for themselves and their families in a country that rewards those qualities rather than stifles them.
Cuba has the Western Hemisphere’s oldest population. But the elderly aren’t climbing into inner tubes or rafts made of pipes, wood, and Styrofoam to spend several perilous hours braving the shark-infested Florida Straits. The indolent aren’t selling all they own to fly to Managua to embark on a weekslong, 1,000-mile odyssey through one of the world’s most dangerous migration corridors while risking assault or worse from coyotes or the Mexican drug cartels that employ them.
No, the Cubans who are coming are the ones who have always come, those who will start businesses, become medical professionals, or run for political office in the United States.
Sometimes referred to as “model minorities,” Cuban Americans tend to do quite well in America. They succeed not because they are inherently smarter or harder working than others but because the ones with the connections, money, ambition, and grittiness to get here will do whatever it takes to succeed once they arrive.
“This is the biggest quantitative and qualitative brain drain [Cuba] has ever had since the revolution,” one expert told the New York Times in December. “It’s the best and the brightest and the ones with the most energy.”
This outflow of ambitious Cubans seems to be just fine for the communists who run the island nation. They prefer their subjects to be helpless and hopeless — all the easier to control them. When Fidel Castro was alive and running things, he would sometimes encourage the malcontents to leave, labeling them “gusanos” (worms), degenerates, and counterrevolutionaries.
Ariadna Mena Rubio has been called a counterrevolutionary. So has Oscar Biscet, by Fidel Castro himself. Biscet is a former physician who was relieved of his duties for protesting the regime’s late-term abortion practices.
In 2011, after a seven-year prison term for advocating democracy in Cuba, he was released at the behest of the Catholic Church, along with some other 50 political prisoners. But he refused to be exiled to Spain or the U.S.
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Visiting the Washington Examiner offices in 2016 during his first trip abroad, Biscet was anxious to get back to Cuba. “I have a moral and ethical commitment to return,” he explained. “I can’t leave my people enslaved.”
Biscet remains in Havana, with his wife, Elsa, teaching Cubans about the concepts of human rights and freedom of speech and living under the constant eye of the state police and, periodically, in its custody.
In refusing to leave Cuba, Biscet and his wife are exceptional. Most other Cubans have either left, are in the process of leaving, or dream of doing so.
It’s hard to blame them. Cubans are so agonizingly close to the greatest capitalist and consumerist paradise that history has ever produced. Key West is a mere 90 miles from Havana, Miami’s South Beach is only 250 miles away, and Disney World, “where dreams come true,” is only another three-hour drive from there. It’s all so tantalizingly close.
When Cuba’s spotty and painfully slow internet is working, Cubans can glimpse the possibilities of life in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
With a vessel made of a bit of tin and a few stray branches, and if the wind’s blowing just right and they can evade the U.S. Coast Guard, the brave can make it to land and a shot at a decent life.
Well, they could have before January, when the Biden administration introduced new rules blocking Cuban migrants at the U.S. border. Until then, most Cubans who made it to the U.S. were given a fast track to U.S. residency. But the influx of migrants being intercepted along the U.S. southern border meant changes were inevitable.
In January, the Biden administration instituted a new policy stipulating that citizens of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who entered the U.S. illegally would be expelled back to Mexico and no longer eligible for asylum.
“My message is this,” President Joe Biden said in announcing the policy change. “If you’re trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua, or Haiti or have agreed to begin a journey to America, do not, do not just show up at the border. Stay where you are and apply legally from there.”
It’s an open question whether the new policy will succeed, given how desperate many Cubans are to leave. “I would prefer to die to reach my dream and help my family,” one Cuban told the Miami Herald after coming ashore in the Florida Keys in January.
And though most Cuban refugees are showing up at the U.S. southern border, the shorter, more perilous route over the Florida Straits has also seen an increase in traffic. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) was forced to call up the National Guard in January after more than 700 Cuban immigrants arrived in the Florida Keys over just one weekend.
The new process instituted by Washington included a temporary humanitarian parole program that will admit up to 30,000 new immigrants a month from those troubled countries. The program allows prospective immigrants to apply for parole from their home county, fly directly to the U.S., and stay for two years if they download an app, pass health and safety screenings, and secure a financial sponsor.
The process can be quick. The American relatives of Havana-based engineer Marcos Marzo applied for the program one day, had their sponsorship confirmed the next day, and were approved the day after that. Within a week, Marzo was in Hialeah, Florida — “shaken,” a news story said, “by the speed of it all.”
The humanitarian parole program may be a more orderly way to process asylum claims, but it was of no help to Mena, who had already left her home country.
Her plan was to get close enough to the U.S. border to use CBP One, a cellphone app that noncitizens in northern Mexico who wish to travel to the U.S. must use to schedule an asylum appointment at certain southwestern border ports of entry. She would then request a “credible fear” interview with an asylum officer. If the asylum officer found that Mena had a credible fear of persecution or harm if she returned to Cuba, she would be allowed to stay in the U.S. and referred to an immigration judge for a full hearing on her claim.
**
Deteriorating economic conditions and the Cuban government’s brutal response to 11J partly explain why so many people are leaving Cuba. But the proximate cause was the consequence of a geopolitical tit for tat between the U.S. and Nicaragua.
Before November 2021, most Cubans hoping to get to the U.S. had to take the dangerous sea route across the Florida Straits or fly to South America and then walk through the Darien Gap, a mountainous and swampy no man’s land that separates Colombia and Panama. But another option opened up in November 2021. Nicaragua’s Interior Ministry announced the lifting of visa requirements for Cuban citizens in retaliation for sanctions the U.S. had imposed on the regime of Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega.
Ortega, a close ally of Cuba’s leadership, no doubt knew his move would open the floodgates of Cubans who would fly to his country and then make their way north, fueling the U.S. border crisis.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have made the journey, which can cost as much as $15,000 for a flight to Managua and a nearly 2,000-mile trek. It’s prohibitively expensive for most Cubans. And most who do go must sell everything they own and rely on money from American relatives to finance the trip.
Along the way, they are threatened, extorted, and pushed to their physical and psychological limits. Hundreds have died or gone missing trying the make the journey, but hundreds of thousands more have successfully completed it — from an elderly Cuban man with one leg to an elite Afghan soldier.
Consider the experience of Jatniel Perez, a Cuban pastor now living in Arizona, who made the journey with his wife and two young children in the spring of 2022. After using WhatsApp to contact coyotes in Havana, Perez and his family flew to Managua, Nicaragua.
The Managua airport was “a disaster,” he told us. Nicaragua’s immigration authorities initially refused to let them in, accusing Perez of being part of a CIA plot. After several hours of wrangling with security, he and his family were finally allowed to enter but given just 24 hours to exit the country.
At the arrivals terminal, Perez met up with the coyote he had texted in Havana. He and his family joined a group of other migrants, mostly Cubans, Ecuadorians, and Nicaraguans, who took taxis to Honduras, walking the final 15 kilometers across the border.
They relied on public buses and taxis to get through Honduras and Guatemala, with occasional stops by police for bribes. They got little sleep and only what food they could scrounge. At one point, they were summoned to walk to the next safe house, five miles away, in the dead of the night. “The kids were crying,” Perez said. “The coyotes had big guns. It was scary.”
After crossing into Mexico, they stayed on the floor of a safe house that was little more than a wooden shack. Then they and some three dozen others were herded onto a 14-passenger van to Mexico City, where they were put in a semitrailer with little air and no bathroom for 14 hours.
“They never tell you anything,” Perez said of the coyotes. “Never said, ‘It’s going to be 14 hours.’ You never know what’s coming next.”
From there, it was on to Monterrey and then a public bus trip to the border city of Reynosa, before crossing the Rio Grande by boat to McAllen, Texas, where they were processed by U.S. Border Patrol agents. The entire trip took 22 days and cost about $50,000 for the family of four.
For Mena and her husband, Enrique Gonzalez Acosta, the journey was longer still. They left Havana last June and flew to Suriname, one of the few Latin American countries that don’t require a tourist visa. Over the next six months, they would set foot in 13 countries in an odyssey that included treks through the Amazon jungle and Andes Mountains, cramped buses and cars, long waits in sketchy safe houses, and innumerable checkpoints and bribes — all done amid the constant threat of violence and in a haze of confusion, hunger, and exhaustion.
Mena periodically sent us short video journals, happy as she entered Panama from Colombia by foot, frightened as rumors spread of machete-wielding assailants on Nicaragua’s streets, angry after being robbed by Guatemalan police, hungry and tired while hiding out at a Mexican hostel.
The adage about war, that it consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, also applies to life on the refugee trail. Mena and Gonzalez spent a lot of time waiting, but they also experienced many moments of terror, including when their van nearly careened into the abyss while making their way up and down the slippery roads of the Andes Mountains.
But what terrorized Mena most was the prospect of losing her credible fear case. She felt she had a strong argument. She’d written anti-Castro op-eds, been beaten for her political work, and was arrested and detained for counterrevolutionary activities such as proposing a new Cuban constitution.
Even so, Mena said her “nerves” were “on edge.” If her credible fear plea were denied, she might be forced to stay in Mexico. Even worse, in April, Cuba had resumed accepting deportation flights from the U.S. after a two-year pause, which meant that it was possible she’d be deported back to Cuba.
“If I’m deported to Cuba, I’m going to go straight to prison,” she said. “When I get off the plane in Cuba, they will put me in jail. They are going to give me seven to eight years in jail” for participating in the 11J protests.
**
For most of May, Mena and Gonzalez waited in a safe house in Monterrey, under the watchful eye of their coyote. When they learned that their credible fear interview had been scheduled for May 29, they flew to Hermosillo, in northwestern Mexico, where we met them on May 28.
From Hermosillo, we made the three-hour drive north to Nogales and booked a room at a Marriott just inside the Mexican border. With time to spare that evening, we decided to try to locate the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum office.
It was a good thing we did. Three weeks earlier, Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that quickly sent migrants back to Mexico, had expired. Biden said the border would be “chaotic for a while,” and he was right. The Mexican side of Nogales was dirty and overrun, with migrants sleeping in makeshift tents and under tarps and people lying on the side of the road.
Mena did a lot of praying during the daylong interview as children’s cartoons played on a loop on a television in the background. Mena and Gonzalez were asked about every aspect of their lives and, four hours into their interview, were told that their credible fear claim had been approved. The two embraced in stunned silence. Mena called her daughters in Havana to share the news.
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Later that evening, we took Mena and Gonzalez for their first American meal — a late-night breakfast at IHOP. The following day, they flew to Miami, where they planned to visit the Our Lady of Charity shrine, a popular beacon for Cuban exiles, to give thanks.
There will be more asylum interviews, and if all goes well, Mena and Gonzalez will be eligible to apply for permanent resident status in about a year. But for the first time in Mena’s life, the prospect of more waiting didn’t feel like a burden. “Already this feels like home,” she texted from Miami.
Daniel Allott is the Hill’s opinion editor and author of On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Country. Jordan Allott is the executive producer of In Altum Productions.
