Cuba Scraps Exit Visa for Citizens
On October 16, the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cuban government announced it will no longer require citizens to obtain an exit visa before leaving the island. Starting in January 2013, Cubans will be able to travel abroad as they please with a passport and foreign visa in hand.
Photo by flippinyank (Flickr)
As an IRP Fellow in 2004, Eric Sabo reported on health in Cuba from Castro's health optimism to a coma conference that 100 U.S. physicians were not permitted to attend. Last week, Sabo and Adam Williams wrote for Bloomberg, “In a bid to prevent an exodus of the nation’s best and brightest, certain professionals won’t benefit from the change in rules.” Tracey Eaton of The Daily Beast clarified that those who play a role in the country’s “economic, social and technical or scientific development” or “security and the protection of official information” will continue to face restrictions.
Prominent blogger and Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez, who claims to have been denied an exit visa 20 times over a period of five years, wondered whether or not the same hurdles that plagued the exit visa will simply be transferred to passports. “[N]ow in the issuance and validation of passports they will define those who can cross the national frontiers and those who cannot,” writes Sánchez. “Although the costs of the paperwork will be less and I imagine the time required shortened, this is not the new travel and immigration law we were waiting for.”
Damien Cave of The New York Times proposed a rationale for the new policy: “[R]emittances to the island have grown to an estimated $2.3 billion a year, from $1 billion in 2004.” With more Cubans traveling abroad, the government may hope to see a rise in remittances that could bolster a sluggish domestic economy.
In 2009, Martha Brannigan of The Miami Herald described the potential economic implications of President Obama’s decision to relax restrictions on sending remittances as well as family visits. Brannigan accurately predicted that loosened laws would precipitate increased economic exchanges between the two nations. “Even with all major portions of the embargo still in place, such commercial ties between the United States and Cuba could easily exceed $2 billion a year,” Brannigan estimated.
Photo by thangeo (Flickr)
Since Obama’s rollbacks, there has been a growing number of new Cuban policies aimed at further opening the island to the outside world and transitioning more toward a market-based economy. In 2010, as detailed for The Christian Science Monitor by Sara Miller Llana, Cuba’s government announced its intention to shift 500,000 government workers (10 percent of all workers) to the private sector. And in 2011, Cubans were granted the right to buy and sell property for the first time in more than 50 years, “the most significant loosening of the state's dominance of Cubans' lives since the revolution,” wrote Andrew Hamilton of The Guardian.
Perhaps new economic opportunities at home combined with new travel rules will reduce the number of Cuban defections, which range from dangerous boat-rides across the Florida Straights to simply disappearing in a foreign country. USA Today's Douglas Stanglin, who traveled to Saudi Arabia with IRP earlier this year, recently chronicled the high-profile defection of the 24-year-old daughter of one of Cuba’s vice presidents to the U.S. Last January, the AP reported that two players of the Cuban women’s national soccer team had disappeared in Vancouver; in early October, three members of the men’s team went missing in Toronto.
In 2011, a 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks detailed a comment made by President Raul Castro to Brazilian diplomats suggesting that without the exit visa, Cubans would “depart the island en masse.” But David Adams of Reuters now observes that, rather than a mass exodus, the most significant aspect of the relaxed law will be a reevaluation of how the U.S. treats Cuban immigrants. As Nick Miroff writes for GlobalPost, “[T]he reform measure is a bet that if Cubans are given greater freedom to come and go, more will choose to leave but more will also choose to return.”
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Ethan Katz is a communications assistant at the International Reporting Project (IRP).
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