Related: Obama's Illegal Immigrant Army
At least we now know where they are coming from, with the added benefit that they have worked with US intelligence for decades.
"Sharp rise in Cuban migration stirs worries of a mass exodus" by Frances Robles | New York Times October 10, 2014
MIAMI — Leonardo Heredia, a 24-year-old Cuban baker, tried and failed to reach the shores of Florida eight times.
Last week, he and 21 friends from his Havana neighborhood gathered the combined know-how from their respective botched migrations and made a boat using a Toyota motor, scrap stainless steel, and Styrofoam. Guided by a pocket-size Garmin GPS, they finally made it to Florida on Heredia’s ninth attempt.
“Things that were bad in Cuba are now worse,” Heredia said. “If there was more money in Cuba to pay for the trips, everyone would go.”
Heredia is one of about 25,000 Cubans who arrived by land and sea in the United States without travel visas in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. He, like many others, is also an unexpected throwback to a time that experts thought had long passed: the era when Cubans boarded rickety vessels built from old car parts and inner tubes, hoping for calm seas and favorable winds. As the number of Cubans attempting the voyage nearly doubled in the past two years, the number of vessels unfit for the dangerous 90-mile crossing also climbed.
Not since the rafter crisis of 1994 has the United States received so many Cuban migrants. The increase highlights the consequences of United States immigration policy that gives preferential treatment to Cubans and recent reforms on the island that loosened travel restrictions, and it puts a harsh spotlight on the growing frustration of a post-Fidel Cuba.
More Cubans took to the sea last year than any year since 2008, when Raúl Castro officially took power and the nation hummed with anticipation. Some experts fear that the recent spike in migration could be a harbinger of a mass exodus, and they caution that the unseaworthy vessels have already left a trail of deaths.
“I believe there is a silent massive exodus,” said Ramón Saúl Sánchez, an exile leader in Miami who has helped families of those who died at sea. “We are back to those times, like in 1994, when people built little floating devices and took to the ocean, whether they had relatives here or not.”
Although the number migrating by sea hardly compares to the summer of 1994, Sánchez said the number of illegal and legal Cuban immigrants combined has now surpassed the number of those who arrived during the crisis 20 years ago.
The US Coast Guard spotted 3,722 Cubans in the past year, almost double the number of Cubans who were intercepted in 2012. Under the migration accord signed after the 1994 crisis, those captured at sea are sent back to Cuba. Those who reach land get to stay, which the Cuban government has long argued draws many people into making the dangerous voyage.
For the past 10 years, sophisticated smuggling networks were responsible for the vast majority of Cuban migration. A crackdown by the American authorities and a lack of financing available to Cubans on the island have shifted the migration method back to what it was two decades ago, when images of desperate people aboard floating wooden planks gave Cuban migrants the “rafters” moniker.
I thought AmeriKan policy was easing, at least, that was what I have been told.
“We have seen vessels made out of Styrofoam and some made out of inner tubes,” said Commander Timothy Cronin, deputy chief of enforcement for the Coast Guard’s Miami District. “These vessels have no navigation equipment, no lifesaving equipment. They rarely have life jackets with them. They are really unsafe.”
About 20 percent of the vessels used in 2008 were homemade, but this past year, 87 percent of the migrants spotted at sea were riding rustic boats, Coast Guard statistics show.
Julio Sánchez, 38, a welder from Havana who traveled with Heredia, said most Cubans do not have the money to pay smugglers, and spend months gathering supplies for their journey.
“In our group, some people gave ideas, some gave money, and some gave labor,” Sánchez said. The trip from a port east of Havana to an obscure Florida key cost them $5,000, a fraction of the $200,000 or more that smugglers would have charged such a large group.
Experts said the recession cut the flow of financing for such journeys from relatives in Miami.
--more--"
