During the Second International Migration Review Forum in New York, Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations, Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, took the stage to assert that Washington is leveraging the migration issue as a "tool of aggression and subversion" against Cuba.
The regime's argument at the UN becomes challenging to uphold when faced with the facts: Cuba is experiencing its largest migration wave in history, driven by economic hardship, widespread power outages, and political oppression, rather than actions by another state.
Soberón blamed the mass departure on the "extreme intensification of the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the U.S. Government against Cuba, including the current energy siege."
He further accused Washington of routinely breaching bilateral migration agreements, which he claims "encourages irregular and unsafe migration flows and benefits human trafficking networks."
What the diplomat failed to mention is that the Cuban regime's extractive economy feeds off the very exodus it claims to lament: the government controls migration processes in foreign currency, absorbs remittances through Freely Convertible Currency stores, and facilitated, along with ally Daniel Ortega, the migration route through Nicaragua that generated millions in airline ticket sales.
After Nicaragua granted visa-free entry to Cubans in November 2021, flights from Havana to Managua surged in cost to between $1,500 and $2,700 per trip, in a country where the average monthly salary equates to about $20.
This route continued to generate millions in revenue until at least November 2025, according to journalistic reports. Nicaragua only rescinded the visa-free policy for Cubans in February 2026, by which time over a million people had already left the island.
The statistics of this exodus robustly refute the regime's narrative. Since 2021, Cuba's population plummeted from 11.3 million to between 8.6 and 8.8 million, reminiscent of 1980s levels, signifying a reduction of nearly 18% of its total population. More than 860,000 Cubans arrived in the United States alone between 2021 and mid-2024.
In December 2022, a historic peak was reached with 42,637 Cubans crossing the U.S. southern border in just one month. The current exodus surpasses in scale and speed the Mariel boatlift (125,000 people in 1980) and the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis (35,000) combined.
This is not the first instance of the regime resorting to this argument in international forums. In 2022, amid the historic migration wave, Cuba was already advocating against the politicization of migration at multilateral organizations, and in 2025, it again blamed the U.S. for rising emigration using identical rhetoric.
While the regime presents new migration laws, enacted in 2024, at the UN as evidence of its commitment to "safe migration," Cuban emigration in 2025 reveals a global redistribution of the exodus that shows no signs of stopping: that year, 22,000 Cubans entered Uruguay, a record number, with 13,852 individuals receiving Uruguayan IDs for the first time.
Understanding Cuban Migration and U.S. Relations
What are the main factors driving the Cuban exodus?
The primary factors include severe economic crises, frequent power outages, and political repression within Cuba, rather than external policies from the United States.
How has the Cuban government benefited from migration?
The Cuban government profits from migration by controlling migration processes that require foreign currency, benefiting from remittances, and allowing costly migration routes like the one through Nicaragua.
How does the current Cuban migration compare to past migrations?
The current wave is larger and faster than both the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis, with significant impacts on Cuba’s population size.