The Visa Application Center for Spain in Cuba announced this Thursday that it will reassign the appointments of those who received emails allowing them to attend multiple days within the same week, after the influx of applicants exceeded its daily service capacity.
According to an official statement from the Consulate General of Spain in Havana, individuals who received those messages should discard them and await a new notification with a specific date and time.
The center will only serve those who have a specific appointment and whose names appear on its lists.
The measure affects applicants who had requested credentials through the previous appointment system of the Spanish Consulate.
To prioritize them, the new center sent them emails authorizing them to submit their visa applications on different days within the same week, without initially assigning them an individual appointment.
However, numerous interested parties arrived on the same day, which caused the capacity of the facilities to be exceeded.
In light of this situation, the authorities decided to replace open calls with individual appointments in order to better organize the receipt of applications.
The affected individuals will not lose their appointment. The center clarified that all the people who received one of those emails are already listed and will subsequently receive a specific date and time to attend.
New appointments will be assigned respecting the order in which the credentials were requested in the previous system of the Consulate General of Spain in Havana.
Therefore, those who received a message allowing them to appear over several days must wait for the new announcement and avoid coming with that email.
The instruction does not indiscriminately affect all previous appointments, but specifically those communications that did not establish a specific date and time.
The statement does not specify when the reassignment will conclude or how many people are affected. It also does not state that new credentials must be requested or that the process needs to be started over.
While waiting, interested parties should check the communications they receive by email, including the spam folder.
The Consulate General of Spain previously informed that notifications related to appointments at the new center are sent from the address info@spainvisa-cuba.com.
The Visa Application Center for Spain in Cuba is located at Avenida 31, between 18 and 14 streets, house 1419, Miramar, Playa municipality, Havana.
The office receives applications and the corresponding documentation, in addition to managing assistance for those interested and the delivery of passports. However, the decision to grant or deny visas remains the exclusive responsibility of the Consulate General of Spain.
The reassignment announced this Thursday is an adjustment in the organization of appointments and does not imply changes in the requirements to obtain visas or the general cancellation of previously assigned appointments.
The incident occurs a few weeks after the opening of the new center, which started operating on October 5 as part of the reorganization of Spanish consular services in Cuba.
On September 21, Spain announced the launch of a new appointment system for visas in Cuba, which gradually replaced the previous mechanism managed through the Bookitit platform.
The authorities clarified that those who already had appointments or had requested credentials would retain their applications and would be contacted via email.
Later, on October 5th, the opening of the center in Playa was marked by the first queues and uncertainties among applicants, some of whom had been waiting for months to process tourist, study, or family reunification visas.
The incorporation of the different categories of visas was carried out in a staggered manner: on October 5, applications for short stays began to be received, on October 12, national visas were added, and on October 19, those for family members of Spanish citizens and other Europeans were included.
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