The Cuban Adjustment Act Is Not The Main Cause Of The Exodus

The Cuban Adjustment Act Is Not The Main Cause Of The Exodus / 14ymedio,
Pedro Campos

14ymedio, Pedro Campos, Havana, 4 July 2016 — The Colombian government
labels the Cuban Adjustment Act "perverse" and calls on other Latin
American governments affected by the flow of migrants from the island to
pressure Washington to repeal it.

Without a doubt, the countries closest to Cuba are recipients and
"victims" of the vast wave of Cuban emigrants trying to get to the
United States, and have been forced to confront complex situations in
which thousands of people's lives have been in danger. They have had to
offer them shelter, medical care and other services, and all this
without the slightest help from the Cuban government, always quick to
display its solidarity with humanitarian crises anywhere else in the world.

However, the Cuban Adjustment Act is not the main cause of this wave.
The main culprit is the populist-authoritarian system, the Statist-wage
model, which has exhausted all its possibilities and is advancing
irretrievably to its final phase, impoverishing its population more and
more and shutting down every prospect of development and prosperity for
the majority, given its refusal to democratize the political system and
the economy.

The Cuban Adjustment Act, although it does provide a certain stimulus to
the exodus, is designed to provide assistance to Cubans who leave,
fleeing the regime, and even if it is true that many of those who come
to the United States, didn't dare utter a peep when they were in Cuba,
it is not false that everyone leaves in search of the freedom and
possibilities that they cannot find in Cuba.

The Cuban people are tired of dealing with so many absurd regulations
over their lives and their way of organizing their subsistence and
reproduction, always mediated by an all-powerful state, one that makes
all decisions, abrogating all the rights of citizens, expropriating all
their businesses and factories, large, medium and small, and paying them
nothing for the value of their labor, curtailing all their chances for
development and imposing on them who they must work for and what their
income will be.

The repression against the opposition movement is abusive, because they
systematically violate all the freedoms and civil and political rights
of citizens. The people cannot choose other leaders. As democratic
socialists we have taken a position of not seeking confrontation but
rather seeking understanding, and also have been repressed in various ways.

Certainly the Cuban Adjustment Act gives some privileges to Cubans who
reach the United States, but if it were repealed, if such privileges did
not exist, most likely Cubans would continue coming to the coasts and
borders of the United States and would be willing to live there
illegally, as hundreds of thousands of other Latinos do, until they can
legalize their situation, as long as in Cuba nothing is fixed and we
cannot achieve a democratic system of government and a prosperous
economic model.

The privileges currently enjoyed by Cubans, through the Cuban Adjustment
Act, are given precisely because of the kind of government that exists
on the island, which, despite the rapprochement and changes in US
policy, continues to have its blinkers on and shows no willingness to
change its authoritarian model.

Latin American governments concerned and affected by this situation,
willing to pressure the US to change its laws, should also show the same
willingness to pressure the Cuban government to change its laws, which
prevent the democratization of the system and hinder the economic
development of the country.

If the established government in Cuba decided, for the sake of its
people and its own history, to initiate a process of democratization of
the politics of the country and to take real steps to begin
denationalizing the economy, turning it over to society, workers,
employers and entrepreneurs, surely most Cubans who are planning to go,
would remain, and many of those who have left would be willing to return
and invest in their country, directly or indirectly, the capital they
have accumulated outside the country.

Source: The Cuban Adjustment Act Is Not The Main Cause Of The Exodus /
14ymedio, Pedro Campos – Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/the-cuban-adjustment-act-is-not-the-main-cause-of-the-exodus-14ymedio-pedro-campos/