More than 4 thousand Cubans acquire Spanish nationality in 2022

Some 4,780 Cubans residing in Spain acquired the nationality of that country, positioning itself at number 10.

He National Statistics Institute (INE) published the data corresponding to the previous year and these reflect the tendency for Cubans residing in Spain to continue being one of the groups that most request the Spanish nationality.

Although there is a slight downward trend, if the data between 2020 and 2022 are compared, figures are observed that have not been reached since 2015, when nationality was granted to a total of 5,596 Cubans.

In 2022, the two communities where the most Cubans were nationalized as Spanish were the Canary Islands and Madrid, with 1,242 and 1,066, each. Catalonia follows, with 649, and Valencia with 418.

Ceuta, Melilla and Extremadura are the territories where the fewest Cubans acquired Spanish nationality by residence, according to INE data.

By sex, in 2022, 2,147 are men and 2,633 are women.

The largest number of Spanish nationalities that has been granted to Cubans in the last 10 years was in

Although there is no official data that allows us to know what is the reason for the increase in the last three years of Cubans naturalized as Spanish, several factors can be deduced, among them the effects that the coronavirus pandemic had on the relationship with the Public Administration.

Since 2020, the Spanish government has promoted the use of digital platforms to carry out almost all types of management, which helps make administrative processes more agile and unclogs bureaucracy.

With the use of the digital certificate, residents in Spain are not obliged to do many procedures in person, and this has had an efficient impact on the citizenship application process, which until recently could take up to three years to wait, while Now there are cases that have a favorable resolution in about six months.

Likewise, the 2022 data may correspond to an important group of people who had resided in Spain for at least two years, since the current law establishes that period of time to nationalize those foreigners born in Latin America.

That is why there is a considerable increase in the number of Venezuelans who adopted Spanish nationality (7,695), since since 2019 the government of Pedro Sánchez granted them a residence for humanitarian reasons and since then they can count legal time to begin the administrative process. .

However, in the Latin American region, Colombia is the country that obtained the most nationalities in 2022, with 10,971 approved files.