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The USA Should Not Close the Legal Door to Cubans

By Richard T. Herman*

HAVANA TIMES – Cuba has become a country of divided families. Children live an ocean away from parents. Brothers and sisters build separate lives in Havana and Miami, Madrid or Mexico City. Grandparents watch grandchildren grow through telephone screens. In almost every Cuban family, someone has left, someone is preparing to leave, or someone is trying to figure out how.

The scale of the exodus is extraordinary. As Havana Times recently reported in examining Cuba’s continuing population loss, the island is experiencing the largest migration in its history. The departure of so many people is reshaping families, communities, the labor force and Cuba’s demographic future.

The Cuban government bears enormous responsibility for this national unraveling. Economic collapse, political repression, shortages, blackouts, low wages and the loss of confidence in a better future have pushed Cubans toward the exits. United States immigration policy did not create those conditions.

But Washington still has to decide what kind of exit it wants Cubans to take.

For years, the United States has urged Cubans to use lawful, orderly migration channels rather than smugglers, dangerous sea crossings or irregular journeys through Latin America. That is sensible immigration policy. Legal migration can be screened. Families can plan around it. Governments can control it.

Yet during the past 19 months, Washington has been moving in the opposite direction, narrowing one lawful avenue after another.

The sequence matters.

On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump ordered a government-wide review of whether foreign governments were providing enough information for the United States to screen and vet their nationals. That order did not itself bar Cubans from traveling. It directed federal agencies to identify countries whose screening, information-sharing or other deficiencies might justify restrictions.

Cuba soon became one of them.

On June 4, 2025, Trump issued Proclamation 10949, imposing partial travel restrictions on Cuba effective June 9. For covered Cuban nationals, entry as immigrants and as B-1/B-2 visitors, F and M students, and J exchange visitors was generally suspended.

Washington gave several reasons, including Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, inadequate sharing of law-enforcement information, difficulties involving the return of removable nationals and visa-overstay rates.

Whatever one thinks of those justifications, the June proclamation contained an important recognition of the human reality between Cuba and the United States: immediate families were treated differently.

Spouses, minor children and parents of US citizens........

© Havana Times