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The worst news has hit Jorgito Reina Llerena's home like a cold shower. After a long year of waiting, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) denied the humanitarian visa that this eight-year-old Cuban boy, who has leukemia, needs to leave Cuba, reunite with his father in Florida, and undergo a bone marrow transplant that is not available on the island.
It so happened that Jorgito's father, Jorge Pastor Reina Pallarols, went to the office of then-senator Marco Rubio in 2024, and the current Secretary of State of the United States and acting advisor to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) took steps to ensure that USCIS committed to prioritizing Jorgito's case.
Cuban authorities addressed Jorgito's diagnosis on state television as soon as CiberCuba made Marco Rubio's intervention public, but neither side has resolved the issue. Jorgito continues to live with cancer. He has not received a bone marrow transplant in Cuba, and after the program analyzing his case, they did not seek a way to facilitate it either.
This is despite the fact that in less than fifteen days, following Marco Rubio's intervention, the family received a response from Immigration that CiberCuba accessed. In it, they assured them that Jorgito's case had been deemed "priority" and was currently awaiting review by immigration authorities. In that notification, they clarified that this could not be interpreted as the humanitarian visa being approved immediately. It simply meant that the case would be analyzed as a priority.
The boy remains in Cuba without a humanitarian visa despite his father, a resident of the United States, opening an account and gathering donations on Give a Hand to cover the entire visa process and the boy's travel, after Nicklaus Children Hospital agreed to take on the bone marrow transplant he requires.
This has happened in the last year, but in 2023, the family received the denial of a tourist visa for the child. There is no way to take him out of Cuba to receive treatment in the United States, and the cancer is still there. Now, American authorities believe that with the evidence sent to USCIS, the child does not qualify for humanitarian parole.
The height of absurdity would be if the Ministry of Public Health of Cuba were to provide the family with a written letter stating that there is currently no treatment for the child on the Island, and that this evidence would not change USCIS's position either.
The boy continues to wait for the therapy that could save his life. Jorgito was diagnosed in January 2019 with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. From that point on, chemotherapy treatments began, along with efforts from Miami to send all the medications and even the medical equipment that the boy needs at every moment.
The little one suffers from immunodeficiency and experienced a relapse of cancer at the testicular level, which led to the removal of one of his testicles. From that moment on, he underwent biopsies, lumbar punctures, and more chemotherapy, but he relapsed again, this time in his second and only remaining testicle. The only solution, a year ago, was a bone marrow transplant.
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