WASHINGTON – The United States has announced that its embassy in Cuba is reopening visa and consular services, five years after the closure of service.
The services were discontinued after a wave of unexplained health incidents among diplomatic staff in 2017 shut the American presence in Havana besides sending shock waves across the diplomats across the world.
US and Cuba have had a tense relationship for decades but pressure is being mounted on the Biden administration to ease the legal pathways for Cubans; the service has been resumed from this Wednesday and experts are hailing the decision as a welcome step to mitigate the differences between the two countries.
“The United States is working to ensure safe, legal, and orderly migration of Cubans by expanding consular operations in Havana and restarting the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program (CFRP),” the embassy said in a statement last week.
As a practice in place, Cubans seeking to travel to the US had to submit visa requests in another country, typically Guyana.
The service resumption comes at a time when Cubans are migrating to the US in large numbers. According to American authorities, 39,000 Cubans entered the US illegally in 2021. In 2022, that number spiked to more than 326,000.
US Customs and Border Protection data implies that Cubans are now the second-largest nationality after Mexicans appearing on the border.
What Stopped Visa Issuance
It was during the Trump era in 2017 that the consular section of the embassy was closed, a year after diplomatic staff and their families fell ill with symptoms that could not be linked with any defined disease or environmental causes.
Some American observers opined that the mysterious symptoms were the result of microwave radiation or what they called sonic attacks, leading to what was branded at that time as ‘Havana syndrome’.
Investigations have been conducted but as of now nothing substantial has been proved in this regard.
