Haben Kubaner für einen anderen autoritären Staat geflohen?

Since 2021, an estimated 18 per cent of Cubans—as many as two million residents—have left the country. At least 850,000 Cubans are believed to have entered the U.S. in the past three years, with many settling in and around Miami. “Everyone was leaving,” a migrant told Jon Lee Anderson. “There was a feeling that you had to. It was like a fever.” But that was before Trump returned to office with a fiercely anti-immigrant agenda. “Now there is real fear,” the migrant said. “For decades, Cubans saw the United States as a kind of promised land—a place where they could be free of authoritarian rule, of the threat of punishment for criticizing the government, and of a judiciary that bowed to the interests of the ruling party,” Anderson writes. “These days, those who come to the U.S. can find that it feels distressingly like what they left behind.”

Florida has more than 1.6 million Cuban American residents, and 68 per cent of them voted for Trump. Hoping that he will aid their long quest to retake the island, they have embraced him with unusual enthusiasm. Yet Trump’s Cuban American supporters have had to make an uneasy accommodation. As part of the new Administration’s widely hyped crackdown on immigration, it removed protections for undocumented Cuban migrants—a community that has received special treatment since the Cold War. In the first half of this year, more than 4,000 Cuban immigrants were sent back to the island, and many others were handed off to Mexico; some 42,000 more have final deportation orders and are waiting to be removed.