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The Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, spoke yesterday at the Second International Review Forum on Migration, held in New York, to denounce that Washington is using the migration issue as an "instrument of aggression and subversion" against Cuba.
The speech of the regime before the UN is hard to maintain against the data: Cuba is experiencing the largest exodus in its history, driven by the economic crisis, widespread blackouts, and political repression, not by the policies of another state.
Soberón attributed the exodus to the "extreme escalation of the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States government against Cuba, including the current energy siege".
He also accused Washington of "systematically" failing to comply with bilateral migration agreements, which he claims "stimulates irregular and unsafe migration flows and favors networks dedicated to human trafficking."
What the diplomat omitted is that the extractive economy of the Cuban regime is sustained by the very exile he claims to lament: the State controls the immigration processes in foreign currency, absorbs the remittances from the diaspora through stores in freely convertible currency, and, along with its ally Daniel Ortega, allowed the migration route through Nicaragua that generated millions in airfare.
When Nicaragua granted visa-free entry to Cubans in November 2021, flights from Havana to Managua skyrocketed in price to between $1,500 and $2,700 per trip, in a country where the average salary is about $20 per month.
That route continued generating millions in revenue until at least November 2025, according to news reports. Nicaragua only eliminated visa-free travel for Cubans in February 2026, by which time the flow had emptied the island of more than a million people.
The figures of the exodus strongly contradict the regime's narrative. Since 2021, the Cuban population has decreased from 11.3 million to between 8.6 and 8.8 million inhabitants, levels reminiscent of the 1980s, which represents nearly 18% of the total population. Over 860,000 Cubans arrived in the United States between 2021 and mid-2024.
In December 2022, a historic record of 42,637 Cubans entering through the southern border of the U.S. was recorded in a single month. The current exodus surpasses both the Mariel boatlift (125,000 people in 1980) and the balseros crisis (35,000 in 1994) in both magnitude and speed when combined.
This is not the first time the regime has resorted to this argument in international forums. In 2022, amidst a historic exodus, Cuba was already advocating against the politicization of migration before multilateral organizations, and in 2025 it again blamed the U.S. for the increase in emigration using the same rhetoric.
While the regime presents new migration laws approved 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 their Uruguayan ID for the first time.
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