By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2024-12-06 02:46:55 | Updated at 2024-12-22 11:21:15
2 weeks ago
The Cuban communist regime on Wednesday downplayed President-elect Donald Trump’s promises to begin mass deportations, including deportations of Cuban nationals, calling the plan “unrealistic and unfair.”
Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío made the assertion in remarks given to reporters after a delegation of U.S. officials led by State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Eric Jacobstein met with Castro regime officials in Havana on Wednesday.
Fernández de Cossío criticized Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportation of migrants, deeming the proposal as “quite drastic” and “quite unfair.”
“Here it is important to remember that there are migration agreements between Cuba and the United States and any issue of this nature, including deportations that may occur, have to be done within the framework of what the agreements establish,” Fernández de Cossío said.
“In that context, it is not realistic to think that there are going to be massive deportations from the United States to Cuba,” he continued.
The communist official asserted that organizing mass deportations of Cubans would not be consistent with “what has been U.S. policy in recent decades toward the island, which has been to grant a privileged position to migrants from Cuba.”
“There has been historically, for decades, an ostensible U.S. government policy of privileging the migrant from Cuba,” Fernández de Cossío said.
“Intending to deport hundreds of thousands of Cubans to Cuba, which are the figures that are sometimes bandied about, would be uprooting people who have already made their lives in the United States, work there, many have families there,” he continued:
According to the Castro regime, the Cuban and American representatives “reviewed the status of compliance” with bilateral migration agreements, asserting that “both sides recognized the strategic value of cooperation on migration issues and the contributions of these rounds of talks to the national security of both countries.”
“The Cuban delegation emphasized the importance of complying with the established agreements in a comprehensive and non-selective manner, while reiterating its concern over the policies and measures to encourage irregular migration applied by the U.S. government,” the Cuban Foreign Ministry announced in a statement.
The Castro regime also “emphatically denounced” the U.S. “embargo” on Cuba, which, according to the Cuban officials, has “tightened extremely” since 2019 and which allegedly is “a factor that has constituted an important incentive to migration.”
“The Cuban delegation reiterated the importance of fully restoring the processing of non-immigrant visas at the U.S. Embassy in Havana and expressed its concern and rejection,” the Ministry said, “due to the growing number of incidents in which U.S. immigration authorities have offered discriminatory and hostile treatment against Cubans and Americans who legally enter the U.S. through its airports when they return from their visits to Cuba.”
Cuba, after more than six decades of disastrous communist policies under the authoritarian Castro regime, is presently undergoing a dramatic humanitarian crisis leading to more than 850,000 Cubans fleeing to the United States in 2022 — in addition to the 111,000 Cubans that entered the United States through the Biden administration’s “Humanitarian Parole” program.
The Cuban diaspora in the United States repeatedly denounced this year that well-known communist repressors, officials — including individuals linked to the death of four American citizens in the 1990s — and their relatives availed themselves of the Biden-Harris administration’s programs to enter the United States, where they now reside.
The U.S. Embassy in Havana stated on Wednesday that both delegations addressed “key issues regarding collaboration on immigration procedures and highlighted challenges to achieving the objectives” of the U.S.-Cuba Migration Accords.
“During the talks the U.S. raised with the Cuban government important U.S. interests, including facilitating family reunification, discouraging irregular migration, and improving respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in Cuba,” the U.S. embassy said.
Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols referred to the meet in a social media post in which he stated that the U.S. representatives “highlighted our success curbing irregular Cuban maritime and land-based migration.”
Hours before President-elect Donald Trump’s victory at the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, affirmed that that the communist regime would continue being a “thorn on the side” of the United States regardless of the election’s outcome.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
