'Cuba Is Depopulating' Amid Economic, Pandemic Woes

Amid record levels of migration worldwide, the island nation of "Cuba is depopulating," experts note, pointing to sanctions, American policy, and the COVID-19 pandemic causing economic decimation.

Republicans and Cuban Americans would note the latter is a function of the failed model of communism, but the Biden administration says global migration coming out of the pandemic knows no border.

"The numbers for Cuba are historic, and everybody recognizes that," a senior State Department official told The New York Times. "That said, more people are migrating globally now than they ever have been and that trend is certainly bearing out in our hemisphere, too."

The Biden administration has sought to unwind former President Donald Trump's policies toward Cuba, and the changes should continue to come, according to advocates.

"This is not rocket science: If you devastate a country 90 miles from your border with sanctions, people will come to your border in search of economic opportunity," former President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told the Times.

Rhodes was a key Obama figure in a policy of engagement with Cuba, which opened up tourism that Trump would later tamp down in a "maximum pressure" campaign of sanctions and limit the American dollars that could be sent to the island nation.

"Cuba is depopulating," Florida International University researcher Elaine Acosta González told the Times.

She added the population drain is "devastating" Cuba, and City University of New York anthropologist Katrin Hansing, currently living on the island, noted Cubans are fleeing to other countries in addition to America.

"This is the biggest quantitative and qualitative brain drain this country has ever had since the revolution," she told the Times. "It's the best and the brightest and the ones with the most energy."

An aging population, one of the hemisphere's oldest, will struggle to be supported by fleeing younger working-age Cubans, according to experts.

In the past year alone, there have been nearly 250,000 Cuban (more than 2% of the 11 million Cuban total population) who have migrated to the U.S. — mostly at Biden's open southern border, according to the Times.

Still, there are stories of those attempting to make the dangerous 90-mile trek from Cuba over the waters to Florida.

"Of course I am going to keep on throwing myself into the sea until I get there," Roger García Ordaz, fleeing the economic woes, told the Times. "Or if the sea wants to take my life, so be it."