The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Over 1 Million People Flee Cuba in Just Two Years
That amounts to some 10% of the nation's total population. The surge highlights flaws in both right and left-wing positions on Cuba.
The Miami Herald reports that, in 2022-23, a staggering 1 million people fled Cuba's communist regime, some 10% of the total population:
A stunning 10% of Cuba's population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country's national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.
The data confirmed reporting by the Miami Herald and Cuban independent media that sounded the alarm over the mass migration of Cubans amid a severe economic downturn and a government crackdown on dissent in recent years.
According to the official figures made public for the first time, Cuba's population went from 11,181,595 on Dec. 31, 2021, to 10,055,968 on December 2023.
The emigration of 1,011,269 Cubans was the main factor contributing to a massive fall in Cuba's population by the end of 2023, when the population stood at a number similar to what it was in 1985, said Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, the head of the National Statistics and Information Office.
This is but the latest and largest of multiple surges of emigration from Cuba since the communist dictatorship was established in 1959. Cubans have long fled the horrific poverty and oppression created by the government's policies. The situation highlights flaws in both left and right-wing views on Cuba and migration.
There is a long history of Western leftists praising Cuba's communist government. But if the regime is as wonderful as they claim, why are so many people fleeing it? The regime's Western apologists have no good answer to that obvious question. The government's much-vaunted supposed achievements on improving health care are, in fact, largely a combination of repression and data manipulation.
US conservatives rightly condemn the communist government. But, in recent years, all too many of them have also advocated preventing Cubans fleeing it from coming to the US. For example, twenty red states filed a dubious lawsuit seeking to shut down a program allowing Americans to sponsor migrants fleeing Cuba and two other socialist dictatorships (Venezuela and Nicaragua); the case was eventually dismissed on procedural grounds by a conservative federal judge, and is now on appeal. If Cuban communism is as awful as conservatives (rightly) claim, it is unjust to use force to deny refuge to its victims, thereby consigning them to lives of poverty and oppression.
For its part, the Biden Administration was right to create the CNVH program, allowing Cubans (as well as citizens of three other Latin American nations wracked by violence and oppression) to come to the US if they can get American sponsors. But it should lift the arbitrary caps and other limitations that have limited the program's effectiveness.
In addition to saving people from oppression and poverty, letting more Cubans come to the US can also benefit our economy. Past waves of Cuban immigration have been crucial to the economic development of Florida. Today's Cuban refugees can do the same—if only we let them.
In sum, much of the left would do well to rethink its views of Cuba's communist government. And much of the right should reconsider its approach to Cuban immigration. Communism is a great evil, and for that very reason it is also evil to close the door on those fleeing it.
